This is not, by any means, a comprehensive list, but one that covers a wide range of genres, styles, and approaches to writing craft. Some of these books will be familiar to you, others will be wholly new; all have something to offer serious young writers eager to place themselves within a long and glorious literary tradition.
Books on Craft
The Craft of Poetry
- Fussell, Paul: Poetic Meter, Poetic Form
- Gudding, Gabriel “Dung in an Age of Empire: An Defense of A Defense of Poetry”; online essay
- Hirsch, Edward: How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry
- Hirschfield, Jane: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
- Howe, Susan: The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, My Emily Dickinson
- Koch, Kenneth: Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry
- Longenbach, James: The Resistance to Poetry
- Oliver, Mary: Rules for the Dance
- Pound, Ezra: The ABC of Reading
- Padgett, Ron, ed.: Handbook of Poetic Forms
- Shapiro, Alan: The Last Happy Occasion
- Shelley, Percy B.: In Defense of Poetry
- Rich, Adrienne: What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
- Zukofsky, Louis: A Test of Poetry
Prose Craft
- Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
- Bernays, Anne. and Pamela Painter. What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers.
- Burroway: Writing Fiction
- Dillard, Annie: The Writing Life
- Gardner, John: The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist
- Gerard, Philip: Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life
- Heilbrun, Carolyn: Writing a Woman’s Life
- Hills, Rust: Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular
- Johnston, Bret Anthony: Naming the World
- King, Stephen: On Writing
- Kundera, Milan: The Art of the Novel
- Lamott, Anne: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
- Lott, Brett: Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of a Writer’s Life
- Mamet, David: Writing in Restaurants
- O’Connor, Flannery: Mystery and Manners
- Stern, Jerome: Making Shapely Fiction
- Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own
- Yeats, W.B.: Essays and Introductions
Poetry
- Ashbery, John: Selected Poems (Penguin Poets)
- Becker, Robin: The Horse Fair
- Bernstein, Charles: My Way: Speeches and Poems
- Bishop, Elizabeth: Poems, Prose and Letters (LOA edition)
- Dickinson, Emily: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, (ed. by R. V. Franklin)
- Eady, Cornelius: Brutal Imagination
- Estrada, Álvaro: María Sabina: Her Life and Chants
- Fulton, Alice: Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems
- Gay, Ross: Against Which
- Gilbert, Jack: The Great Fires, Refusing Heaven
- Ginsberg, Allen: Howl
- Gluck, Louise: The Wild Iris, The Seven Ages
- Groff, David: The Theory of Devolution
- Hacker, Marilyn: Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
- Hall, Donald: Without
- Hoagland, Tony: What Narcissus Means to Me
- Jabes, Edmond: From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabes Reader
- Jordan, A. Van: Quantum Lyrics: Poems
- Justice, Donald: Collected Poems
- Kenyon, Jane: Otherwise
- Koch, Kenneth: Selected Poems: American Poets Project
- Komunyakaa, Yusef: Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems
- Levertov, Denise: Selected Poems
- Levine, Philip: New Selected Poems
- Levis, Larry: The Selected Levis
- Lorde, Audre: The Selected Poems of Audre Lorde
- Matthews, Sebastian: We Generous
- Matthews, William: Search Party: Selected Poems
- Merwin, W.S.: Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target, The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment
- Nelson, Marilyn: The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems
- Olds, Sharon: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems
- Oliver, Mary: Thirst, Red Bird, or any collection
- Parker, Alan Michael: Elephants and Butterflies
- Pound, Ezra: The Cantos
- Rich, Adrienne: The Dream of a Common Language
- Roethke, Theodore: Any poetry collection
- Rosal, Patrick: Uprock, Headspin, Scramble and Dive, My American Kundiman
- Shelley, Percy B.: Poetical Works
- Simic, Charles: Sixty Poems
- Spahr, Juliana: Response
- Spicer, Jack: The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
- Stern, Gerald: This Time: New and Selected Poems
- Stevens, Wallace: Collected Poems
- Stewart, Susan: Columbarium
- Thomas, Dylan: Collected Poems
- Trethewey, Natasha: Bellocq’s Ophelia
- Voigt, Ellen Bryant: Messenger: New and Selected Poems
- Weiner, Hannah: Little Books, Indians
- Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass, Poetry and Prose, Library of America College Edition
- Williams, C.K.: Collected Poems
- Wilner, Eleanor: Reversing the Spell
- Winters, Anne: The Displaced of Capital
- Wright, Charles: The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980 – 1990
- Yeats, W.B. Yeats: Collected Poems
Plays, Drama
- Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Goat: Or Who is Sylvia?
- Durang, Christopher: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, The Marriage of Bette and Boo
- Fuller, Charles: A Soldier’s Play
- Guare, John: Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves
- Hansberry, Lorraine: A Raisin in the Sun
- Hellman, Lillian: Little Foxes, The Children’s Hour
- Henley, Beth: Crimes of the Heart
- Howe, Tina: Coastal Disturbances, Painting Churches
- Hwang, David Henry: M Butterfly
- Inge, William: Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba
- Kushner, Tony: Angels in America
- Mamet, David: American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross
- McDonough, Martin: The Pillowman, The Beauty Queen of Leenane
- McNally, Terrence: Master Class, Love! Valour! Compassion!
- Miller, Arthur: The Crucible, Death of a Salesman
- Norman, Marsha: ‘night, Mother
- O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Morning Becomes Electra
- Parks, Suzan-Lori: Topdog/Underdog
- Pinter, Harold: Betrayal, The Homecoming
- Shange, Ntozake: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf
- Shepard, Sam: True West, Buried Child
- Stoppard, Tom: The Real Thing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties
- Strindberg, August: Miss Julie
- Vogel, Paula: How I Learned to Drive
- Wasserstein, Wendy: Uncommon Women, The Heidi Chronicles
- Williams, Tennessee: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke
- Wilson, August: Fences, Ma Rainey’s Fat Bottom, The Piano Lesson
- Wilson, Doug: I Am My Own Wife
Short Fiction
- Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio
- Barrett, Andrea: Servants of the Map
- Barthelme, Donald: any of his short story collections
- Bausch, Richard: The Stories of Richard Bausch
- Bloom, Amy: Come to Me
- Boyle, T.C.: T.C. Boyle Stories
- Butler, Robert Olen: A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain
- Buzatti, Dino: Restless Nights
- Bynum, Sarah Shun-lien: Madeleine is Sleeping
- Carver, Raymond: Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
- Colwin, Laurie: The Lone Pilgrim,
- Diaz, Junot: Drown
- Dinasen, Isak: Winter Tales
- Gurganus, Alan: White People
- Haslett, Adam: You Are Not A Stranger Here
- Hempl, Amy: Reasons to Live
- Hijuelos, Oscar: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
- Jen, Gish: Who’s Irish?
- Jin, Ha: The Bridegroom
- Johnston, Bret Anthony: Corpus Christi
- Joyce, James: The Dubliners
- Lahiri, Jhumpa: Interpreter of Maladies
- Link, Kelly: Magic for Beginners
- Malamud, Bernard: The Magic Barrel
- Millhauser, Steven: In the Penny Arcade
- McPherson, James Alan: Elbow Room
- Moore, Lorrie: Like Life, Birds of America, Self-Help
- Munro, Alice: Runaway, or any of her short story collections
- O’Brien, Tim: The Things They Carried
- O’Connor, Flannery: A Good Man is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge
- Richter, Stacey: My Date with Satan
- Saunders, George: Civil War Land in Bad Repair
- Smiley, Jane: The Age of Grief
- Trevor, William: After Rain
- Welty, Eudora: A Curtain of Green, Collected Stories
Memoir, Essays & Other Creative Non-fiction
- Allison, Dorothy: Bastard Out of Carolina
- Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time
- Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
- Beard, Jo Ann: Boys of My Youth
- Brown, Claude: Manchild in the Promised Land
- Burroway, Janet: Writing Fiction
- Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood
- Daum, Megan: My Misspent Youth
- Dericotte, Toi: The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey
- Didion, Joan: The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking
- Dillard, Annie: The Writing Life, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Dinasen, Isak: Out of Africa
- Eggers, Dave: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Fadiman, Anne: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
- Fraser, Joelle: Territory of Men
- Grealy, Lucy: Autobiography of a Face
- Guibert, Herve: Ghost Image
- Lewis, C.S.: Surprised by Joy
- Markham, Beryl: West with the Night
- Nabokov, Vladimir: Speak, Memory
- O’Connor, Flannery: The Habit of Being
- Patchett, Ann: Truth and Beauty
- Roethke, Theodore: Straw for the Fire
- Sanders, Scott Russell: A Private History of Awe
- Scalapino : Zither & Autobiography
- Sedaris, David: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked
- Sontag, Susan: Against Interpretation, Illness as Metaphor
- Thomas, Lewis: Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail
- Thompson, Hunter S.: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
- Vowell, Sarah: Partly Cloudy Patriot
- Walls, Jeannette: The Glass Castle
- Williams, Terry Tempest: Refuge
- Wolff, Tobias: This Boy’s Life
- Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own
- Wright, Richard: Black Boy
- Yeats, W.B.: Autobiographies
Novels
- Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin
- Bechard, D.Y.: Vandal Love
- Bloom, Amy: Away
- Byatt, A.S.: Possession
- Cain, James M.: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce
- Cary, Joyce: The Horse’s Mouth
- Chabon, Michael: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys
- Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
- Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians
- Colwin, Laurie: Happy All the Time
- Crace, Jim: Being Dead
- Cunningham, Michael: The Hours, A Home at the End of the World
- Dalton, John: Heaven Lake
- Danticat, Edwidge: The Farming of Bones
- DeLillo, Don: Mao II, White Noise, Underworld
- Diaz, Junot: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- Doctorow, E.L.: Ragtime, The March
- Early, Tony: Jim the Boy
- Eugenides, Jeffrey: Middlesex, The Virgin Suicides
- Faulks, Sebastian: Birdsong
- Flagg, Fannie: Fried Green Tomatoes
- Flaubert, Gustav: Madame Bovary
- Gibbons, Kaye: Ellen Foster
- Gordimer, Nadine: The House Gun, July’s People, The Conservationist, Get a Life
- Gruen, Sarah: Water For Chocolate
- Hagedorn, Jessica: The Dogeaters
- Haruf, Kent: Plainsong
- Hosseini, Khaled: The Kite Runner
- Hulme, Keri: The Bone People
- Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes were Watching God
- Jones, Edward P.: The Known World
- Kundera, Milan: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unforgettable Lightness of Being
- Kennedy, William: Ironweed (or any of the Albany Trilogy)
- Kingsolver, Barbara: The Poisonwood Bible
- Lahiri, Jhumpa: The Namesake
- Livesey, Margot: Eva Moves the Furniture, Criminals, The House on Fortune Street
- McCarthy, Cormac: The Road, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men
- McDermott, Alice: Charming Billy, That Night
- McEwan, Ian: Atonement, The Child in Time, Enduring Love
- Miller, Henry: Tropic of Cancer
- Millhauser, Steven: Martin Dressler
- Min, Katherine: Secondhand World
- Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green
- Morrison, Toni: Beloved, Song of Solomon
- Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
- Oates, Joyce Carol: Them
- O’Brien, Flann: At-Swim-Two-Birds
- Ondaatje, Michael: The English Patient
- O’Neill, Joseph: Netherland
- Patchett, Ann: Bel Canto, The Magician’s Assistant
- Petersen, Per: Out Stealing Horses
- Robinson, Marilyn: Housekeeping, Gilead
- Russo, Richard: Empire Falls
- Salter, James: A Sport and a Pastime
- Saramago, Jose: Blindness
- Saterstrom, Selah: The Pink Institution
- Schutt, Christine: Florida
- Sebold, W.G.: Austerlitz
- Sharpe, Matthew: The Sleeping Father
- Shields, Carol: The Stone Diaries
- Smith, Lee: Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History
- Spencer, Scott: A Ship Made of Paper
- Stegner, Wallace: Angle of Repose
- Stephens, James: The Crock of Gold
- Strout, Elizabeth: Amy and Isabelle
- Styron, William: Sophie’s Choice
- Tan, Amy: The Kitchen God’s Wife
- Trevor, William: Any of his books
- Truong, Monique: The Book of Salt
- Updike, John: The Centaur, Rabbit Run
- Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse Five
- Walker, Alice: The Color Purple
- Warren, Robert Penn: All the King’s Men
- West, Nathaniel: The Day of the Locust, Miss Lonelyhearts
- Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
- Yates, Richard: Revolutionary Road