before printing press

• The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
• Oedipus the King by Sophocles
• The Divine Comedy by Dante, Italian writer (1307-1321)
• The Decameron by Italian writer Boccacio (1313-75)

The Renaissance

William Shakespeare, British (1564-1616)

• Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish

The Age of Reason

• Common Sense (1776) by Thomas Paine

The Romantic Period

Jane Austen, English (1775-1817)

• Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, British

The Victorian Period

Fyodor Dostoiévski, Russian (1821-1881)

Emily Dickinson, American writer (1830-1886)

• Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte, British
• Wuthering Heights (1848) by Emily Bronte, British
• Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, American
• Les Miserables (1862) by Victor Hugo, French
• Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert, French
• Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott, American
• Middlemarch (1872) by George Eliot (a.k.a. Marian Evans), British
• Anna Karenina (1873) by Liev Tolstói

L. M. Montgomery, Canadian (1874-1942)

The Modern Period

Virgínia Woolf, British (1882-1941)

• The trial (1925) by Kafka
• The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald,
• Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell, British
• The Stranger (1946) by Albert Camus, French

Post Modernism

Haruki Murakami, japanese (1949-)

• The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D.Salinger, American
• Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison, American
• Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding, British
• The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath, American
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) by Maya Angelou, American
• The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison, American
• The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker