Ever since the ancient Romans imposed their language on neighboring barbarians, the teaching of Latin has been inseparable from cultural politics. In the Middle Ages, Latin was the preserve of the Church, whose leaders believed that the language was inherently holier than the vernacular, and who used Latin as a means of establishing a distance between priests and their parishioners. In the Renaissance, the classics were seen as a beneficial source of eternal, universal truths—"From Cicero I’ve learned to be myself," an Italian humanist announced—and such a belief persisted well into the nineteenth century. The argument for the improving qualities of Latin is still made by the American Classical League, which points to studies showing that schoolchildren who have studied Latin achieve higher standardized test scores than their non- Latinist peers.

The 60 Most-Recommended Novels and Short Stories
1. Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice (BR, 1813) / 2. Baldwin, James, Go Tell It on the Mountain (AM, 1953) / 3. Bellow, Saul, Seize the Day (AM, 1956) / 4. Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (BR, 1847) / 5. Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights (BR, 1847) / 6. Camus, Albert, The Stranger (FR, 1942) / 7. Carroll, Lewis, Alice’ s Adventures in Wonderland (BR, 1865) / 8. Cather, Willa, My Antonia (AM, 1918) / 9. Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote (SP, 1605, 1607) / 10. Chopin, Kate, The Awakening (AM, 1899) / 11. Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (BR, i902 ) / 12. Crane, Stephen, The Red Badge of Courage (AM, 1895) / 13. Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe (BR, 1719) / 14. Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations (BR, 1860～61)/ 15. Dostoevski, Feodor, Crime and Punishment (RU, 1866) / 16. Eliot, George, The Mill on the Floss (BR, 1860) / 17. Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (AM, 1947) / 18. Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury (AM, 1929) / 19. Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones (Br, 1749) / 20. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (AM, 1925) / 21. Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary (FR, 1857) / 22. Forster, E. M., A Passage to India (BR, 1924) / 23. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (CO, 1967) / 24. Golding, William, Lord of the Flies (BR, 1954) / 25. Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the D’ Urbervilles (BR, 1891) / 26. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter (AM, 1850) / 27. Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms (AM, 1929) / 28. Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God (AM, 1937) / 29. Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (BR, 1932) / 30. James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw (AM, 1898) / 31. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (IR, 1916) / 32. Kafka, Franz, The Trial (CZ, 1925) / 33. Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers (BR, 1913) / 34. Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt (AM, 1922) / 35. Malamud, Bernard, The Assistant (AM, 1957) / 36. Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice (GE, 1912) / 37. Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (AM, 1851) / 38. Morrison, Toni, Sula (AM, 1973) / 39. O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (AM, 1955) / 40. Olsen, Tillie, Tell Me a Riddle (AM, 1956～60) / 41. Orwell, George, Animal Farm (BR, 1945) / 42. Paton, Alan, Cry, the Beloved Country (SA, 1948 ) / 43. Poe, Edgar Allan, Great Tales and Poems (AM, 1839-45) / 44. Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye (AM, 1951)/ 45. Scott, Sir Walter, Ivanhoe (BR, 1820) / 46. Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (BR, 1818) / 47. Stelnbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath (AM, 1939) / 48. Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’ s Travels (BR, 1726) / 49. Thackeray, William Makepeaee, Vanity Fair (BR, 1847～48) / 50. Tolstoy , Leo , War and Peace (RU, 1865~69) / 51. Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Sons (RU, 1862) / 52. Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (AM, 1886) / 53. Updike, John, Rabbit, Run (AM, 1961) / 54. Voltaire, Candide (FR, 1759) / 55. Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse Five (AM, 1969) / 56. Walker, Alice, The Color Purple (AM, 1982) / 57. Welty, Eudora, Thirteen Stories (AM, 1956) / 58.Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence (AM, 1920) /59. Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse (BR, 1927) /60. Wright, Richard, Native Son (AM, 1940)