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When one of the books he was having to read last year had bad language in it, I commented to his teacher. She has to pick material from the AP English website. She can't pick her own material (not that she would make different choices).

Not true.

At the College Board Web site you can download the description for AP English Lit. It specifically states, "There is no recommended or required reading list for the AP English Literature and Composition course. The following authors are provided simply to suggest the range and quality of reading expected in the course. Teachers may select authors from the names below or may choose others of comparable quality and complexity."

Here are SOME of the authors in the list; some modern authors are also listed.

Poetry: William Blake; Robert Browning; Geoffrey Chaucer; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Emily Dickinson; T. S. Eliot; Robert Frost; John Milton; Edgar Allan Poe; Alexander Pope; William Shakespeare; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Walt Whitman; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats

Drama: Aeschylus; Samuel Beckett; Anton Chekhov; Oliver Goldsmith; Henrik Ibsen; Ben Jonson; Molière; Eugene O’Neill; Harold Pinter; William Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Sophocles; Oscar Wilde; Tennessee Williams.

Fiction (Novel and Short Story: Jane Austen; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Joseph Conrad; Stephen Crane; Charles Dickens; George Eliot; William Faulkner; Henry Fielding; F. Scott Fitzgerald; E. M. Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; Herman Melville; Jonathan Swift; Leo Tolstoy; Mark Twain.

Expository Prose: Ralph Waldo Emerson; Samuel Johnson; H. L. Mencken; John Stuart Mill; George Orwell; Henry David Thoreau.