Welcome to the 
School House Books 
Public Recommended List of Novels with
Open Question Essay Prompts and Links

When planning your teaching unit for a particular novel, click on the name of the playwright,
find the information provived here, and use what fits to enhance your lesson plans.
Chinua Achebe
Dante Alighieri 
Louisa May Alcott
Margaret Atwood
Rudolfo Anaya
Jane Austen
Honore de Balzac
Saul Bellow
Beowolf
Anne Bronte
Emily Bronte
CharlotteBronte
Albert Camus
Lan Cao
Willa Cather
Miguel de Cervantes
Sandra Cisneros
Kate Chopin
Joseph Conrad
Stephan Crane
Robertson Davies
Daniel DeFoe
CharlesDickens
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Theodore Drieser
George Eliot
Ralph Ellison
William Faulkner
Henry Fielding
F. Scott Fitzgerald
GustaveFlaubert
FordMaddoxFord
Ralph Ellison
Richard Ford
E. M. Forster
Ernest J. Gaines
William Golding
Nadine Gordimer
Graham Greene
David Guterson
Thomas Hardy
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
Herman Hesse
Victor Hugo
Zora Neal Hurston
Aldous Huxley
Iris Murdoch
Kazuo Ishiguro
Henry James
Sarah Orne Jewett
James Weldon Johnson
James Joyce
HermanMelville
Franz Kafka
Ken Kesey
M. E. Kerr
Maxine Hong Kingston
Barbara Kingsolver
John Knowles
Joy Kogawa
Par F. Lagerkvist
Margaret Laurence
D. H. Lawrence
Chang-Rae Lee
Ursula K. LeGuin
Sinclair Lewis
Hugh MacLennan
Norman Mailer
Bernard Malamud
Paul Marshall
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Bobbie Ann Mason
W. Somerset Maugham
Cormac McCarthy
Carson McCullers
Herman Melville
N. Scott Momaday
Toni Morrison
Bharati Mukherjee
Iris Murdoch
VladimirNabokov
V. S. Naipaul
Gloria Naylor
Tim O'Brien
Flannery O'Connor
John Okada
Tillie Olsen
Michael Ondaatje
George Orwell
Cynthia Ozick
Alan Paton
Muriel Spark
William Thackery
Richard Wright
  Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales  Lesson Plans
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Tim O' Brien
Tim O"Brien's Home Page
Writing Vietnam: President's Lecture, 21 April 1999
Another Tim O'Brien Web Page
Questions about The Things They Carried
Reader's Companion to The Things They Carried
A Web Quest
Teacher CyberGuide
Menu of Class Notes
History, Questions, Notes

E. Annie Proulx
The Shipping News

Ayn Rand
Anthem
Set in a future that has lost much knowledge about technology and shuns individuality, a man and a woman break free from the bonds of conformity.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Creative Suggestions

J. D. Salinger Lesson Plans for The Catcher in the Rye

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Biography
Frankenstein
The classic story of man playing god and toying with the laws of nature.
Found Poem - Using Frankenstein to create a found Poem
Composition Simulated Search Activity
Notes for Frankenstein
Novel Analysis
Frankenstein Theme assignment
Knowledge Map
Frankenstein Resources on-line

Walter Scott
Biography
Ivanhoe
Follows the Saxon Knight, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, during his conquest of Normandy.

Upton Sinclair
Biography
Damaged Goods
A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" about sexual imorality, by Eugene Brieux
The Jungle
A gripping, gritty expose of the meat-packing industry in turn-of-the-century Chicago.

John Steinbeck
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
The Grapes of Wrath Study Site
Poems to Go With Grapes of Wrath

Jonathan Swift  Gulliver's Travels  Essay Prompt on a Literary Element:  Critique Roland Barthes has said, "Literature is the question minus the answer."  Choose a novel or play and, considering Barthes' observation, write an essay in which you analyze a central question the work raises and the extent to which it offers any answers.  Explain how the author's treatment of this question affects your understanding of the work as a whole.  Avoid mere plot summary.
 

Leo Tolstoy 
The Emperor's Three Questions

Biography
Anna Karenina
The story of an unhappily married woman who begins a downhill spiral after engaging in several affairs, one of which takes her away from her beloved son forever.
Father Sergius
The story of a young man whose past comes back to haunt him and his search for redemption.
Master and Man
A landowner and servant confront their relationship with one another as they travel through a snowstorm.
War and Peace
The story of two families who become intertwined during the Napoleonic 

Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Tom Sawyer, Detective
Tom Sawyer Abroad
The Bridge-Builders
Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven
A humorous look at a heaven where almost everyone gets in and has their dreams fulfilled -- until those dreams conflict with each other.
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg
A Horse's Tale
The Prince and the Pauper
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Is Shakespeare Dead?
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
A Yankee gets carried back to the time of King Arthur. Contrasts democracy with a feudal monarchy.

Robert Penn Warren  All the King's Men
Essay Prompt on a Literary Element:  Critique Roland Barthes has said, "Literature is the question minus the answer."  Choose a novel or play and, considering Barthes' observation, write an essay in which you analyze a central question the work raises and the extent to which it offers any answers.  Explain how the author's treatment of this question affects your understanding of the work as a whole.  Avoid mere plot summary.
Eudora Welty  (1909-2001)
The Ponder Heart
Mississippi Writer's Page on Eudora Welty
The Clarion Ledger-Mississippi News about Welty

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Biography
The Age of Innocence
A story of the upper classes of Old New York, where everybody has to play the accepted role to be welcome.
Bunner Sisters

Ethan Frome
Outline of Key Convepts in Ethan Frome
Lesson Plans and Further Reading Suggestions
Classic Notes
Movie Review with Liam Neeson

Summer
The Glimpses of the Moon
The Touchstone

Virginia Woolf

Orlando
Essay Prompt on a Literary Element:  Critique Roland Barthes has said, "Literature is the question minus the answer."  Choose a novel or play and, considering Barthes' observation, write an essay in which you analyze a central question the work raises and the extent to which it offers any answers.  Explain how the author's treatment of this question affects your understanding of the work as a whole.  Avoid mere plot summary.
A Room of One's Own  Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse 
The Waves

Richard Wright
Native Son Study Questions
 
 

 


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