Full Text of English-Lit Classic Books in Fx Co, circa 1962
By David Swink, FCTA
6/16/2021
When this writer graduated from Fairfax County Public Schools in 1962, he had been required to read and discuss the following classic books in English-Lit classes. (Is this still a requirement in FCPS?) These works teach us life’s lessons and provide valuable perspective from human history in Western civilization.
- Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1944)
- Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1867)
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)
- Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maughn (1915)
- The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane (1894)
- The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
- Silas Marner, George Eliot (1861)
- A Tale Of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens(1859)
And in 2021’s state of dystopian wokeness, one should add:
- 1984, by George Orwell (1948)
- Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1932)
- Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (1953)
- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayne Rand (1957)
These are by no means a complete list of recommended classics, but it will do for a start. Your wisdom will be greatly enhanced after having consumed (with sometimes considerable effort) these classic reads.
The links to the works above are to local site-independent plain-text copies of those works posted elsewhere. Those original postings are hot-linked in the title of FCTA’s copy, so you can choose which version you like better. (FCTA’s local copies are also quite readable as ‘View Source’ monospaced text.) Each local HTML book contains a hot-linked table of contents, so you can see your reading progress ‘bookmarked’ by the previously-read purple chapter links.
Source: http://www.fcta.org/books/
