If someone asked you to list ten important works in the humanities that all students should read while in high school, how would you respond?

Once upon a time, William J. Bennett (the Secretary of Education during the Reagan administration) did pose the question. He informally surveyed several hundred "teachers, businessmen, lawyers, parents, journalists, and college professors" around the United States.

The list that follows is a compilation of the 30 most frequently mentioned works, in order of rank. (I have tried to provide links to e-texts when possible. Many thanks to Project Gutenberg and university servers!)

• the works of William Shakespeare (especially Macbeth and Hamlet);
  
• American historical documents (especially the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address);
  
• Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;
  
• the Bible;
  
• Homer's Odyssey and Iliad;
  
• Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities;
  
• Plato's The Republic;
  
• John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath;
  
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter;
  
• Sophocles's Oedipus Rex;
  
• Herman Melville's Moby Dick (zipped file; 591 kb), George Orwell's 1984, and Henry David Thoreau's Walden (tied);
  
• Robert Frost's poems;
  
• Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass;
  
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby;
  
• Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales;
  
• Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto;
  
• Aristotle's Politics;
  
• Emily Dickinson's poems, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and the works of William Faulkner (tied);
  
• J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (tied);
  
• Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and poems, and Nicolo Machiavelli's The Prince (tied);
• John Milton's Paradise Lost; and
  
• Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Virgil's Aeneid (tied).