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Massachusetts English Objectives: Appendix A: Suggested Authors, Illustrators, and Works Reflecting Our Common Literary and Cultural Heritage

Children's Literature Recommendations (Massachusetts

Grades PreK–2:

For reading, listening, and viewing:

Mother Goose nursery rhymes

Aesop's fables

Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories

Selected Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales

Selected French fairy tales

The Bible as literature:

Tales including Jonah and the whale, Daniel and the lion's den, Noah and the Ark, Moses and the burning bush, the story of Ruth, David and Goliath

Picture book authors and illustrators:

Edward Ardizzone

Ludwig Bemelmans

Margaret Wise Brown

John Burningham

Virginia Lee Burton

Randolph Caldecott

Edgar Parin and Ingri D'Aulaire

Wanda Gág

Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

Kate Greenaway

Shirley Hughes

Crockett Johnson

Ruth Kraus

Robert Lawson

Munro Leaf

Robert McCloskey

A. A. Milne

William Pène du Bois

Beatrix Potter

Alice and Martin Provensen

H. A. and Margaret Rey

Maurice Sendak

Vera Williams

Poets:

John Ciardi

Rachel Field

David McCord

A. A. Milne

Laura Richards

In addition to the PreK-2 list, for reading, listening, and viewing:

Traditional literature:

Greek, Roman, or Norse myths

Myths and legends of indigenous peoples of North America

American folktales and legends

Stories about King Arthur and Robin Hood

The Bible as literature:

Tales listed above and: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, David and Jonathan,

the Prodigal Son, the visit of the Magi, well-known psalms (e.g., 23, 24, 46, 92, 121, and 150)

American authors and illustrators:

L. Frank Baum

Beverly Cleary

Elizabeth Coatsworth

Mary Mapes Dodge

Elizabeth Enright

Eleanor Estes

Jean George

Sterling North

Howard Pyle

Carl Sandburg

George Selden

Louis Slobodkin

E. B. White

Laura Ingalls Wilder

British authors:

Frances Burnett

Lewis Carroll

Kenneth Grahame

Dick King-Smith

Edith Nesbit

Mary Norton

Margery Sharp

Robert Louis Stevenson

P. L. Travers

Poets:

Stephen Vincent and Rosemarie Carr Benét

Lewis Carroll

John Ciardi

Rachel Field

Robert Frost

Langston Hughes

Edward Lear

Myra Cohn Livingston

David McCord

A.A. Milne

Laura Richards

In addition to the PreK–4 Selections:

Traditional literature:

Grimm's fairy tales

French fairy tales

Tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling

Aesop's fables

Greek, Roman, or Norse myths

Myths and legends of indigenous peoples of North America

American folktales, myths, and legends

Asian and African folktales and legends

Stories about King Arthur, Robin Hood, Beowulf and Grendel, St. George and the Dragon

The Bible as literature :

Old Testament: Genesis, Ten Commandments, Psalms and Proverbs

New Testament: Sermon on the Mount, Parables

American authors or illustrators:

Louisa May Alcott

Lloyd Alexander

Natalie Babbitt

L. Frank Baum

Nathaniel Benchley

Carol Ryrie Brink

Elizabeth Coatsworth

Esther Forbes

Paula Fox

Jean George

Virginia Hamilton

Bret Harte

Washington Irving

Jack London

L. M. Montgomery (Canadian)

Sterling North

Scott O'Dell

Edgar Allan Poe

Howard Pyle

Ellen Raskin

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Elizabeth Speare

Booth Tarkington

James Thurber

Mark Twain

E. B. White

Laura Ingalls Wilder

N. C. Wyeth

British and European authors or illustrators:

James Barrie

Lucy Boston

Frances Burnett

Lewis Carroll

Carlo Collodi

Daniel Defoe

Charles Dickens

Arthur Conan Doyle

Leon Garfield

Kenneth Grahame

C. S. Lewis

George MacDonald

Edith Nesbit

Mary Norton

Philippa Pearce

Arthur Rackham

Anna Sewell

William Shakespeare

Johanna Spyri

Robert Louis Stevenson

Jonathan Swift

J. R. R. Tolkien

T. H. White

Poets:

Stephen Vincent and Rosemarie Carr Benét

Lewis Carroll

John Ciardi

Rachel Field

Robert Frost

Langston Hughes

Edward Lear

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

David McCord

Ogden Nash

In addition to the 5–8 Selections:

Traditional and Classical literature:

A higher level rereading of Greek mythology

Substantial selections from epic poetry: Homer's Odyssey and Iliad; Virgil's Aeneid

Classical Greek drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides)

The Bible as literature:

Genesis, Ten Commandments, selected psalms and proverbs, Job, Sermon on the Mount, selected parables

American Literature

Historical documents of literary and philosophical significance:

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address

The Declaration of Independence

Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” or his “I Have a Dream” speech

John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech

William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Lecture

Important writers of the 18th and 19th centuries:

James Fenimore Cooper

Stephen Crane

Emily Dickinson

Frederick Douglass

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Benjamin Franklin

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Henry James

Thomas Jefferson

Herman Melville

Edgar Allan Poe

Henry David Thoreau

Mark Twain

Phillis Wheatley

Walt Whitman

Important writers of the first half of the 20th century:

Henry Adams

James Baldwin

Arna Bontemps

Willa Cather

Kate Chopin

Countee Cullen

Ralph Ellison

William Faulkner

Jessie Fauset

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Charlotte Gilman

Ernest Hemingway

O. Henry

Langston Hughes

Zora Neale Hurston

Sarah Orne Jewett

James Weldon Johnson

Flannery O'Connor

Gertrude Stein

John Steinbeck

James Thurber

Jean Toomer

Booker T. Washington

Edith Wharton

Richard Wright

In addition to the PreK–8 Selections:

Playwrights:

Lorraine Hansberry

Lillian Hellman

Arthur Miller

Eugene O'Neill

Thornton Wilder

Tennessee Williams

August Wilson

Poets:

Elizabeth Bishop

e e cummings

Robert Frost

T. S. Eliot

Robinson Jeffers

Amy Lowell

Robert Lowell

Edgar Lee Masters

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Marianne Moore

Sylvia Plath

Ezra Pound

John Crowe Ransom

Edward Arlington Robinson

Theodore Roethke

Wallace Stevens

Alan Tate

Sara Teasdale

William Carlos Williams

Immigrant experience:

Works about the European, South and East Asian, Caribbean , Central American, and South American immigrant experience (Ole Rolvaag, Younghill Kang, Abraham Cahan), the experiences of Native Americans, and slave narratives (Harriet Jacobs).

British and European Literature

Poetry:

Selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Epic poetry: Dante and John Milton

Sonnets: William Shakespeare, John Milton, Edmund Spenser

Metaphysical poetry: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell

Romantic poets: William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth

Victorian poetry: Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Twentieth Century: W. H. Auden, A. E. Housman, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats

Drama:

William Shakespeare

Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde

Essays:

British essays:

Joseph Addison

Sir Francis Bacon

Samuel Johnson in “The Rambler”

Charles Lamb

George Orwell

Leonard Woolf

Enlightenment Essays:

Voltaire

Diderot and other Encyclopédistes

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Fiction:

Selections from an early novel:

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews

Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield

Selections from John Bunyan's allegory, Pilgrim's Progress

Satire, or mock epic, verse or prose: Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift

19th century novels:

Jane Austen

Emily Brontë

Joseph Conrad

Charles Dickens

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

George Eliot

Thomas Hardy

Victor Hugo

Mary Shelley

Leo Tolstoy

20th century novels:

Albert Camus

André Gide

James Joyce

Franz Kafka

D. H. Lawrence

Jean Paul Sartre

Virginia Woolf

Page created August 23, 2008. Anne Pemberton. Updated Friday, October 29, 2010 . AP.

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