9th Grade — Ancient and Classical Literature

Bulfinch's Mythology and Ovid's Metamorphoses. A 9th grader cannot read Western literature seriously without first knowing the mythological vocabulary every later writer assumes she has. Bulfinch is the standard one-volume entry; Ovid's poetry adds the rhythm and irony.

• Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The foundational works of the Western tradition, and the books every later epic — Aeneid , Paradise Lost , Ulysses — is in conversation with. Reading Homer in 9th grade changes the way the student reads everything that follows.
• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone. The defining works of Greek tragedy, and the model every Western tragedy since has either followed or argued with.
• Plato, selected dialogues. The student meets the Socratic method directly — argument, counter-argument, and the discipline of following a thought to its conclusion.
• Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil rewriting Homer for a different empire and a different idea of what a hero is. Without Virgil, Milton cannot be read with full depth in 10th grade.
• Shakespeare, one major play. Shakespeare is read in every year of the curriculum. In 9th, students meet him for the first time in a play whose plot is accessible enough that the language itself can become the focus.
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. A 19th-century American voice in conversation with the ancient tradition the rest of the year covers — and a model of clear, urgent prose.

10th Grade — Medieval and British Literature

• Beowulf. The oldest surviving long poem in English. The starting point for any serious study of how the language itself developed.
• Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (selected tales). Middle English in its first fully literary form, and a study in how character is built through voice.
• Shakespeare's darkest plays. Macbeth is the centerpiece in 10th. Students read it slowly enough to track the rhetorical and psychological architecture of the play, not just its plot.
• Milton's Paradise Lost. The towering English epic, and a deliberate response to Virgil and Homer. Reading Milton without first reading the classical epics produces a flattened reading; the curriculum's chronological order makes the conversation visible.
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. The birth of the modern novel, and a Romantic-era inheritance of the Miltonic question about creation and responsibility.
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. The perfection of social comedy, and a study in how irony and free indirect discourse build character without authorial commentary.
• The Romantic poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron. Selected poems, read for what each poet does that the others do not.
• Charles Dickens, one full novel. Usually Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities , depending on student fit. Dickens trains a student to track long, complex narratives across hundreds of pages.

11th Grade — American Literature

The 11th grade reading list moves chronologically through the American canon. Students read the Puritan inheritance (Edwards), the founding voices (Franklin, Paine, Jefferson), the American Renaissance (Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Lincoln), the realists and modernists (Twain, Fitzgerald), and the great American poets (Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Hughes). The selection is a centuries-long argument about what America is, what it should be, and whether it can ever live up to its own ideals. By the end of the year, a student can place any major American writer inside that argument, and can write a sustained literary or rhetorical analysis of how that writer participates in it.

12th Grade — Modern and World Literature

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. The first major work of literary modernism in English, and a stress test of the student's ability to interpret a text that resists easy interpretation.
• George Orwell, selected essays and Animal Farm or 1984. Twentieth-century rhetorical mastery and the politics of language.
• Shakespeare, a final play. Usually one of the late tragedies — King Lear or Hamlet — read with the full benefit of the four years that came before it.
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway or selected essays. Stream-of-consciousness modernism and the modern essay at its most demanding.
• The modernist poets — Eliot, Yeats, Auden, and others. Selected poems read against the Romantic poets of 10th to make the formal break visible.
• Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and selected stories. The 20th-century absurdist tradition.

The year ends with a four-year capstone essay drawing on at least five texts spanning at least three of the four years. By the time the student writes it, she has read the canon, and she has been writing essays under timed conditions for four full years. The capstone is not an unfamiliar assignment. It is the culmination of work she has been doing every week.