AP English Literature

Most Frequently Cited on the AP English Literature Exam

4 min readjuly 11, 2024

Most Frequently Cited 1970-2015*

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28 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

23 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

20 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

18 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

18 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

17 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevski

17 King Lear by William Shakespeare

15 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

15 Moby Dick by Herman Melville

14 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

14 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

14 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zorah Neale Hurston

14 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

13 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

13 The Awakening by Kate Chopin

13 Beloved by Toni Morrison

12 Billy Budd by Herman Melville

12 Light in August by William Faulkner

11 Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

11 The Color Purple by Alice Walker

11 Othello by William Shakespeare

10 Antigone by Sophocles

10 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

10 The Crucible by Arthur Miller

10 The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

10 Native Son by Richard Wright

10 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

10 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

9 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

9 Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

9 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

9 A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

9 Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

9 A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

9 Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

8 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

8 Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

8 Candide by Voltaire

8 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

8 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

8 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

8 The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

8 Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

8 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

8 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

8 Sula by Toni Morrison

8 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

7 A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen

7 All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

7 Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton

7 Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

7 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

7 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

7 Medea by Euripides

7 The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

7 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

7 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

7 The Tempest by William Shakespeare

7 Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

7 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

7 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

6 Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

6 An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

6 Equus by Peter Shaffer

6 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

6 Hamlet by William Shakespeare

6 Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

6 Macbeth by William Shakespeare

6  Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

6 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

6 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

6 Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot

6 Obasan by Joy Kogawa

6 The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

6 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

5 Bleak House by Charles Dickens

5 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

5 The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chkhov

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

5 Middlemarchy by George Eliot

Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw

5 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

5 A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

5 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

5 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

5 Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor


Shakespeare (All Plays) Total = 89

Anthony and CleopatraAs You Like ItHamletHenry IV, Parts I and IIHenry VJulius Caesar 17 King LearMacbethMerchant of VeniceA Midsummer Night's DreamMuch Ado About Nothing 11 OthelloRichard IIIRomeo and JulietThe TempestTwelfth NightWinter’s Tale


Classical Greek & Roman Literature = 35

The Aeneid by Virgil 10 Antigone by Sophocles 1 The Eumenides by Aeschylus 2 The Iliad by Homer 1 Lysistrata by Aristophanes 7 Medea by Euripides 5 The Odyssey by Homer 8 Oedipus Rex by Sophocles 1 The Orestia by Aeschylus


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