Texas required reading list for high school 2033

Texas is the first American state to write a required literary canon into its administrative code. Rule 19 TAC 110.70, adopted by the State Board of Education and published in the Texas Register on 28 August 2026, names two anchor works for each of English I to IV, down to the edition and ISBN a district must use, and pairs each with shorter companion texts: Bible passages, poems by Shelley, Millay and Eliot, Lincoln's Lyceum Address and others. The draft circulated in January 2026 was much longer, with five anchors a year, and many of the books it named (Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, Night, The Odyssey, Frankenstein, Walden) did not survive into the adopted rule.

The eight anchors that did are a strong collecting shelf. Animal Farm (Secker and Warburg, 1945) and Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine, 1953) are the twentieth-century firsts most often found at home; The Scarlet Letter (Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850, 2,500 copies) is the American rare-book entry; Great Expectations (Chapman and Hall, 1861, three volumes) and Pride and Prejudice (Egerton, 1813) are five-figure British firsts; and Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Dante's Inferno belong to the age of quartos, folios and incunabula, so their collectable editions are much later ones.

A Texas classroom copy is, by design, a modern edition with a specified ISBN and worth nothing to a collector. Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources, its points are listed, and a value band appears once we hold recorded sales of that printing.