NEH Children's Classics

Here's their list for grades 9-12:

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.
Agee, James. A Death in the Family.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Anonymous. Beowulf.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice.
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain.
The Bible.
Bolt, Robert. A Man for All Seasons.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Buck, Pearl. The Good Earth.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger.
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.
Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone.
Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim.
Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage.
Dante. The Divine Comedy.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations.
Dickinson, Emily. Poems.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment.
Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Eliot, T.S. Murder in the Cathedral.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
Galsworthy, John. The Forsyte Saga.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies.
Graves, Robert. I, Claudius.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter.
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Henry, O. Stories ("The Gift of the Magi," "The Ransom of Red Chief," etc.).
Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf.
Homer. The Iliad.
---. The Odyssey.
Hughes, Langston. Poems.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll's House.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial.
Keats, John. Poems.
Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage.
Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon.
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers.
Lawrence, Jerome and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt.
Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley.
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain.
Marlowe, Christopher. Dr. Faustus.
Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage.
McCullers, Carson. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible.
Monsarrat, Nicholas. The Cruel Sea.
O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood.
O'Neill, Eugene. Long Day's Journey into Night.
Orwell, George. 1984.
---. Animal Farm.
Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Short stories.
Potok, Chaim. The Chosen.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front.
Rostand, Edmond. Cyrano de Bergerac.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln.
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Nine Tailors.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
---. King Lear.
---. Much Ado About Nothing.
---. Sonnets.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School for Scandal.
Shute, Nevil. A Town Like Alice.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina.
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers.
Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run.
Valladares, Armando. Against All Hope.
Virgil. The Aeneid.
Voltaire. Candide.
Warren, Robert Penn. All the King's Men.
Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust.
Welty, Eudora. Collected Short Stories.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence.
White, T.H. The Once and Future King.
Wiesel, Elie. Night.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Wilder, Thornton. Our Town.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire.
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse.
Wouk, Herman. The Caine Mutiny.
Wright, Richard. Native Son.

That's a list that's hard to argue with. I'd like to see them flagged for the earlier and later years or maybe for less and more mature readers, but there's gold in them thar hills.

I've linked to an online text where I could find a legal copy.

HT: MereComments