You Gotta Know

You Gotta Know These Works of Literature

The following table lists the 100 most-frequently referenced works of literature in NAQT questions as of November 1, 2007. While you really gotta know their authors, these are also some of the works about which more substantive questions are written, so teams should be prepared for questions on their characters, plots, settings, and circumstances of creation. The Bible was excluded from this list because its total would swamp the other work.

This is an update of an earlier You Gotta Know article.

Rank	Title	Genre	Creator	Date	Freq.
1	Hamlet	Drama	William Shakespeare	1601	292
2	Oedipus Rex	Drama	Sophocles	430 BC	196
3	Macbeth	Drama	William Shakespeare	1606	182
4	King Lear	Drama	William Shakespeare	1605	156
5	Othello	Drama	William Shakespeare	1622	156
6	The Tempest	Drama	William Shakespeare	1611	145
7	Moby-Dick	Novel	Herman Melville	1851	139
8	The Great Gatsby	Novel	F(rancis) Scott (Key) Fitzgerald	1925	138
9	Don Quixote	Novel	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra	1605	137
10	Jane Eyre	Novel	Charlotte Brontë	1847	128
11	Iliad	Poem	Homer	8th century BC	125
12	Pride and Prejudice	Novel	Jane Austen	1813	123
13	1984	Novel	George Orwell	1948	122
14	Ulysses	Novel	James (Augustine Aloysius) Joyce	1922	121
15	Romeo and Juliet	Drama	William Shakespeare	1594	121
16	The Merchant of Venice	Drama	William Shakespeare	1596	119
17	Paradise Lost	Poem	John Milton	1667	119
18	The Canterbury Tales	Poem	Geoffrey Chaucer	1387	117
19	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Novel	Mark Twain	1884	116
20	The Scarlet Letter	Novel	Nathaniel Hawthorne	1850	115
21	A Streetcar Named Desire	Drama	Tennessee Williams	1947	114
22	Our Town	Drama	Thornton (Niven) Wilder	1938	113
23	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Novel	Mark Twain	1876	111
24	The Divine Comedy	Poem	Dante (Alighieri)	1314	111
25	Crime and Punishment	Novel	Fyodor (Mikhaylovich) Dostoyevsky	1866	109
26	The Red Badge of Courage	Novel	Stephen Crane	1895	108
27	Candide	Novel	Voltaire	1759	107
28	Billy Budd: Foretopman	Novel	Herman Melville	1891	106
29	Les Misérables	Novel	Victor(-Marie) Hugo	1862	105
30	Anna Karenina	Novel	Leo Tolstoy	1877	105
31	A Midsummer Night's Dream	Drama	William Shakespeare	1595	105
32	Pygmalion	Drama	George Bernard Shaw	1912	103
33	Julius Caesar	Drama	William Shakespeare	1599	103
34	War and Peace	Novel	Leo Tolstoy	1865	101
35	The Three Musketeers	Novel	Alexandre Dumas (père)	1844	100
36	A Farewell to Arms	Novel	Ernest (Miller) Hemingway	1929	100
37	Vanity Fair	Novel	William Makepeace Thackeray	1848	100
38	To Kill a Mockingbird	Novel	(Nelle) Harper Lee	1960	99
39	For Whom the Bell Tolls	Novel	Ernest (Miller) Hemingway	1940	99
40	The Grapes of Wrath	Novel	John (Ernst) Steinbeck	1939	98
41	Lolita	Novel	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	98
42	A Tale of Two Cities	Novel	Charles (John Huffam) Dickens	1859	98
43	Little Women	Novel	Louisa May Alcott	1868	97
44	As You Like It	Drama	William Shakespeare	1599	97
45	The Waste Land	Poem	T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot	1922	95
46	Aeneid	Poem	Virgil	19 BC	95
47	Odyssey	Poem	Homer	8th century BC	94
48	Heart of Darkness	Novella	Joseph Conrad	1902	94
49	Pilgrim's Progress	Novel	John Bunyan	1678	94
50	David Copperfield	Novel	Charles (John Huffam) Dickens	1850	94
51	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Novel	Gabriel García Márquez	1967	93
52	Antigone	Drama	Sophocles	441 BC	92
53	Faust	Poem	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	1808	92
54	The Count of Monte Cristo	Novel	Alexandre Dumas (père)	1845	91
55	A Doll's House	Drama	Henrik (Johan) Ibsen	1879	90
56	Robinson Crusoe	Novel	Daniel Defoe	1719	88
57	Animal Farm	Novel	George Orwell	1945	87
58	The Call of the Wild	Novel	Jack London	1903	87
59	Much Ado about Nothing	Drama	William Shakespeare	1598	87
60	The Glass Menagerie	Drama	Tennessee Williams	1945	86
61	The Crucible	Drama	Arthur Miller	1953	86
62	Brave New World	Novel	Aldous (Leonard) Huxley	1932	85
63	Beowulf	Poem	unknown	8th century	85
64	The Sun Also Rises	Novel	Ernest (Miller) Hemingway	1926	83
65	The Jungle	Novel	Upton (Beall) Sinclair	1906	83
66	Twelfth Night	Drama	William Shakespeare	1623	83
67	Great Expectations	Novel	Charles (John Huffam) Dickens	1861	82
68	The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	Poem	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	1797	82
69	Oliver Twist	Novel	Charles (John Huffam) Dickens	1838	81
70	Uncle Tom's Cabin	Novel	Harriet Beecher Stowe	1852	81
71	Rip van Winkle	Short Story	Washington Irving	1818	79
72	The Catcher in the Rye	Novel	J(erome) D(avid) Salinger	1951	77
73	Waiting for Godot	Drama	Samuel (Barclay) Beckett	1952	77
74	Death of a Salesman	Drama	Arthur Miller	1949	77
75	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	Children's	Lewis Carroll	1865	76
76	Long Day's Journey Into Night	Drama	Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill	1956	75
77	All the King's Men	Novel	Robert Penn Warren	1946	75
78	Things Fall Apart	Novel	(Albert) Chinua(lumogu) Achebe	1958	75
79	Slaughterhouse Five	Novel	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.	1969	75
80	The Charge of the Light Brigade	Poem	Alfred, Lord Tennyson	1854	74
81	The Merry Wives of Windsor	Drama	William Shakespeare	1600	74
82	The Importance of Being Earnest	Drama	Oscar (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) Wilde	1895	73
83	The Magic Mountain	Novel	(Paul) Thomas Mann	1924	73
84	Invisible Man	Novel	Ralph (Waldo) Ellison	1952	72
85	The Taming of the Shrew	Drama	William Shakespeare	1593	72
86	Eugene Onegin	Poem	Aleksandr (Sergeyevich) Pushkin	1833	72
87	Sense and Sensibility	Novel	Jane Austen	1811	72
88	The Brothers Karamazov	Novel	Fyodor (Mikhaylovich) Dostoyevsky	1880	72
89	Inferno	Poem	Dante (Alighieri)	c. 1310-1314	71
90	The Stranger	Novel	Albert Camus	1946	71
91	Catch-22	Novel	Joseph Heller	1961	70
92	A Raisin in the Sun	Drama	Lorraine Hansberry	1959	70
93	Wuthering Heights	Novel	Emily Brontë	1847	69
94	The Sound and the Fury	Novel	William (Cuthbert) Faulkner	1929	69
95	Oresteia	Series	Aeschylus	c. 458 BC	69
96	Decameron	Poem	Giovanni Boccaccio	1353	69
97	The Raven	Poem	Edgar Allan Poe	1845	69
98	Ivanhoe	Novel	Sir Walter Scott	1820	68
99	The House of the Seven Gables	Novel	Nathaniel Hawthorne	1851	68
100	My Ántonia	Novel	Willa (Sibert) Cather	1918	68

NAQT has complete lists of the works of literature, non-fiction, art, and music that have been mentioned in its questions, sorted by frequency, available for purchase by coaches or teams for use as study guides.

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