The books most assigned in American high schools 2025

Ask Americans which books they were made to read at school and the same titles come back every time: The Great Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird. There is no national survey, but the ranking above, built from the vocabulary lists that thousands of teachers created on Vocabulary.com in 2025, matches the Common Core exemplars and a 1989 survey from the State University of New York at Albany so closely that the American school canon can fairly be called settled: it is the mid-century American novel and play, Shakespeare's four school plays, Orwell and Golding, with Homer, Beowulf and Frankenstein for the older grades and The Outsiders, The Giver and The Hunger Games for the younger.

Nearly every book in the top ten is a first edition people actually find at home. The Great Gatsby (Scribner's, 1925) is the prize, worth six figures in its first-issue jacket; To Kill a Mockingbird (Lippincott, 1960) in its first-state jacket is a five-figure book; Of Mice and Men (Covici-Friede, 1937), Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine, 1953), Lord of the Flies (Faber, 1954) and Animal Farm (Secker and Warburg, 1945) are four-figure firsts that turn up on ordinary shelves and in charity shops. Night, which Elie Wiesel published in French with Les Éditions de Minuit in 1958 before Hill and Wang's English edition of 1960, and The Outsiders (Viking, 1967, published when S. E. Hinton was eighteen) are the sleepers.

The copy you were handed in ninth grade is a classroom paperback worth a few dollars. Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources, the points that mark a first printing are listed, and a value band appears once we hold recorded sales of that printing.