7 pages
The Raven
A man loses a woman and a bird will not stop reminding him. Read it out loud: there is an internal rhyme in the first and third line of every stanza, and it disappears if you read it silently.
Collection · All four years
The high school reading list, free to download
- 31
- books to download
- 8
- we cannot serve yet
- 1000–1925
- 925 years apart
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If a book was assigned to you and it was published in 1930 or earlier, it is almost certainly free, and it is almost certainly here. Every entry shows its page count and an estimated reading time, because when the essay is due Monday that is the number that matters.
The first section holds everything you could finish tonight — seven books under a hundred pages, two of them under ten. After that the sections are grouped, and each one is sorted shortest first inside itself.
The last section is the one nobody else gives you straight: eight assigned books that are **not** free and have no legal free download for a reader in the United States, with the year each one stops being copyrighted.
How this list was built
This page does not claim to know which books American schools assign most. Nobody publishes a reliable national list — the Common Core exemplars are not usable as one and several states have repealed the standards outright — so any site telling you these are «the most commonly assigned» is guessing.
What can be stated and checked is everything else: whether a book is in the public domain in the United States, how many pages this edition runs to, roughly how long it takes to read, and for the ones still in copyright, the year they stop being. Those are the four things a student actually needs.
Freshman year has a shorter list of its own, on its own page. This one covers all four.
If it is due Monday
Seven books under a hundred pages
Everything here can be finished in an evening, and two of them in the time it takes to make dinner. The Raven is seven pages. If you have left it late, start at the top.
9 pages
The Masque of the Red Death
A prince seals himself and a thousand friends inside an abbey while a plague devastates the country outside. Seven rooms, seven colours, and a clock that stops the party every hour.
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect and his first worry is that he has missed his train. The family's reaction is the actual subject, and the whole thing takes about ninety minutes.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Two men both pretend to be called Ernest and both get caught. A farce built almost entirely out of one-line jokes, and it reads faster than its sixty-seven pages suggest.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Structurally a detective story: a lawyer works towards a fact the reader has known since before opening the book. Set most often for essays on duality, which is what it is built to be about.
93 pages
Heart of Darkness
A journey up a river to collect a man who has stopped pretending. Short, difficult, and still the book that writing about colonialism in English keeps arguing with.
Ethan Frome
A winter, a farm, a marriage and a sledge. Wharton frames it so you meet the wreckage first and spend the rest of the book watching it become inevitable.
The five Shakespeare plays
The ones that turn up in English classrooms year after year. All five run between a hundred and two hundred and twenty pages, which is shorter than most of the novels below.
The Tempest
A magician on an island with a daughter, a spirit and a slave, and the events unfold in roughly the time it takes to perform them. One of the last plays he wrote alone.
The shortest tragedy
Macbeth
A man is told he will be king and spends five acts making it true and regretting it. The shortest and fastest of the tragedies, which is one reason it is so often a student's first Shakespeare.
Romeo and Juliet
The Prologue tells you both of them die, in the first fourteen lines, before you have met either. Everything after that is watching the machinery close.
Othello
Iago destroys five lives with hints and a handkerchief and never says why. He offers motives in the first two acts and drops all of them; his last line is a refusal to explain.
The longest play
Hamlet
The longest play Shakespeare wrote, and the one with over fifty film versions since 1900. If the essay question is about delay, the answer is that he gets the chance in Act Three and takes it in Act Five.
In translation, and mostly much older
Four books written in Old English, Italian, Russian and French. One of them is the longest thing on this page by a factor of three.
Beowulf
A hall, a monster, the monster's mother, and fifty years later a dragon. Written in Old English by a poet nobody can name, and surviving in one manuscript copied around the year 1000.
Dante's Inferno
The first third of the Divine Comedy, and the only third most people read. Nine circles, arranged so that the punishment always rhymes with the sin.
Crime and Punishment
A student murders a pawnbroker before page ninety and the remaining four hundred and seventy are about what that does to him. There is no mystery about who did it, which is the design.
The longest thing here
Les Misérables
It stops for a whole book on the Battle of Waterloo and six chapters on the Paris sewers, and Hugo thought those were the point. If it has been assigned whole, start now.
The American shelf
Seven novels that between them cover Puritan New England, slavery, the Civil War, the Mississippi, a whaling ship and the Jazz Age. This is the part of the list that is really a history syllabus.
140 pages
The Great Gatsby
Gatsby built a fortune and a persona to win back a woman he knew for a month in 1917. Nick tells you it is a love story while the book keeps showing you it is about money.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Episodes rather than a plot: the fence, the graveyard, the island, the cave. Read it before Huckleberry Finn, which is a different and much harder book.
The Scarlet Letter
A woman is made to wear a letter A and refuses for the whole book to name the father. It opens with a long essay about a customs house, which is where the narrator claims to have found the letter.
Read the note first
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Twain gives Huck a moral education that runs exactly opposite to his society's, and the book's racial language is why it is both assigned and removed from syllabuses — it was the fifth most challenged book in the United States in the nineties.
Little Women
Four sisters and very little money while their father is away at the war. Alcott's publisher asked her for a book for girls, she did not want to write one, and this is what came out.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century and one of the most argued-with since, for the same reasons. Read it alongside what Baldwin wrote about it in 1949.
664 pages
Moby Dick
A whale, a captain, and chapters of whale science scattered from a third of the way in that most readers skip and most teachers ask about. The first line is the most famous thing in it.
The British novel
Eight, from two hundred pages to nine hundred and twenty
If you were assigned one of these, the page count is the assignment. Sorted shortest first so you can see what you are in for.
Treasure Island
Most of the pirate furniture in English that is not from a film comes from here: the map with the cross, the black spot, the one-legged man with the parrot.
Begun at eighteen
Frankenstein
The monster is articulate, reads Milton and argues its case for six chapters. Shelley started it at eighteen on a wet holiday, and built it as three narrators nested inside each other.
Read past the film
Wuthering Heights
The 1939 film covers sixteen of the thirty-four chapters and drops the second generation entirely, which is where Emily Brontë's argument actually lands. Two narrators, and neither is reliable.
Pride and Prejudice
Five sisters, no sons, and an estate that will pass to a cousin. The romance works because Austen puts the economics of it on the first page and never lets you forget them.
A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens with a structure, which is unusual: two cities, two men who look alike, and a guillotine named in the first chapter. Shorter and tighter than most of him.
Read the note first
Oliver Twist
An orphan falls in with a gang of child thieves. Fagin is one of the most influential villains in English fiction and one of the most openly antisemitic — Dickens cut the epithet from the last fifteen chapters after a Jewish reader, Eliza Davis, wrote to him in 1863.
Jane Eyre
Jane agrees to marry Rochester and learns at the altar that his wife is alive upstairs. The romance survives because she leaves, which is the part essays usually miss.
926 pages
David Copperfield
The one Dickens said was his favourite, and the closest to his own life. Long, and set less often than the others here, but the one to read if you liked them.
The ones that are not free
And the year seven of them will be
These turn up on American reading lists year after year and none of them is legally available as a free download in the United States. If a site offers you one, it is not a legal copy. A library card is free and will get you all eight today. The dates are worked out from the year of publication rather than typed in by hand.
Unlocks January 2033
Of Mice and Men
Two ranch hands and a plan for a small farm. It has been near the top of the American Library Association's challenged-books lists for decades and on reading lists for just as long.
Unlocks January 2041
Animal Farm
Short enough to read in one sitting, which is part of why it gets set so often. Orwell called it a fairy story on the title page.
Unlocks January 2045
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell finished it on Jura, already seriously ill, and died seven months after publication.
Unlocks January 2047
The Catcher in the Rye
One film was made from a Salinger story, in 1949; he hated it and never allowed another. There is no film of this one, and there is no free copy.
Unlocks January 2049
Fahrenheit 451
A novel about burning books, which is the joke every teacher makes and every student then has to go and buy.
Unlocks January 2050
Lord of the Flies
Golding wrote it as an answer to a Victorian adventure story in which shipwrecked boys behave impeccably.
Unlocks January 2056
To Kill a Mockingbird
A fixture of American reading lists for sixty years, and the one people most often expect to find here. It will not be free until the 2050s.
Not in our library
The Giver
Published in 1993, so its American copyright runs for the author's lifetime plus seventy years. This is the one with no date anyone can give you.