# What is the best novel every American reads in high school?

> The American syllabus barely changes: the same dozen novels, handed out at fifteen, argued about forever. Decide which one earned the assignment.

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-novel-every-american-reads-in-high-school*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **To Kill a Mockingbird** — score 1000/1000
   Harper Lee's 1960 novel of a Depression-era rape trial seen through a lawyer's young daughter.
2. **Beloved** — score 949/1000
   Toni Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer winner about an escaped enslaved woman haunted by the daughter she killed.
3. **The Great Gatsby** — score 754/1000
   Fitzgerald's Jazz Age tragedy, the most assigned novel in American high schools after Shakespeare.
4. **Their Eyes Were Watching God** — score 639/1000
   Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel following a Black woman through three marriages in Florida.
5. **Fahrenheit 451** — score 511/1000
   Bradbury's 1953 novel about a fireman whose job is burning books until he starts reading one.
6. **Of Mice and Men** — score 511/1000
   Steinbeck's 1937 novella about two migrant ranch hands and a plan that never had a chance.
7. **The Scarlet Letter** — score 511/1000
   Hawthorne's 1850 novel of a Puritan woman sentenced to wear the mark of her adultery.
8. **The Catcher in the Rye** — score 511/1000
   Salinger's 1951 novel of a boy expelled from prep school and loose in Manhattan for three days.
9. **The Old Man and the Sea** — score 443/1000
   Hemingway's novella of an old fisherman's three-day fight with a marlin, short enough to finish in a week of class.
10. **Lord of the Flies** — score 443/1000
   Golding's 1954 novel of shipwrecked schoolboys inventing their own government, then their own violence.
11. **A Separate Peace** — score 365/1000
   John Knowles's 1959 novel of friendship and one shove on a tree branch at a New England prep school.
12. **Frankenstein** — score 365/1000
   Mary Shelley's 1818 novel about a student who assembles a living creature and then abandons it.
13. **1984** — score 365/1000
   Orwell's 1949 dystopia of surveillance, rewritten history, and a language built to shrink thought.
14. **Animal Farm** — score 275/1000
   Orwell's 1945 fable of farm animals whose revolution hardens into the regime it replaced.
15. **The Grapes of Wrath** — score 275/1000
   Steinbeck's 1939 novel of a tenant-farming family driven from Oklahoma to California.
16. **Slaughterhouse-Five** — score 170/1000
   Vonnegut's 1969 novel of a soldier who survives Dresden and comes unstuck in time.
17. **Brave New World** — score 170/1000
   Huxley's 1932 dystopia where citizens are engineered, entertained, and sedated into contentment.
18. **Adventures of Huckleberry Finn** — score 46/1000
   Twain's 1884 novel of a boy and an escaping enslaved man rafting down the Mississippi.

Tags: usa, books, classics, fiction, school