500 AP English Language Questions to know by test day
CHAPTER 1. Autobiographers and Diarists
Passage 1a: Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Passage 1b: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Passage 1c: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Passage 1d: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Passage 1e: Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
CHAPTER 2. Biographers and History Writers
Passage 2a: James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
Passage 2b: Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
Passage 2c: Winston Churchill, The Approaching Conflict
Passage 2d: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Hallam’s History
Passage 2e: George Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay
CHAPTER 3. Critics
Passage 3a: Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Current Time
Passage 3b: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Shakespeare; or, the Poet
Passage 3c: William Hazlitt, On Poetry in General
Passage 3d: Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance
Passage 3e: John Ruskin, Of the Pathetic Fallacy
CHAPTER 4. Essayists and Fiction Writers
Passage 4a: Joseph Addison, True and False Humour
Passage 4b: Francis Bacon, Of Marriage and Single Life
Passage 4c: G. K. Chesterton, A Defence of Baby-Worship
Passage 4d: Charles Lamb, The Two Races of Men
Passage 4e: Michel de Montaigne, Of the Punishment of Cowardice
CHAPTER 5. Journalists and Science and Nature Writers
Passage 5a: Margaret Fuller, At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe
Passage 5b: H. L. Mencken, Europe After 8:15
Passage 5c: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Passage 5d: Thomas Henry Huxley, Science and Culture
Passage 5e: Charles Lyell, The Student’s Elements of Geology
CHAPTER 6. Political Writers
Passage 6a: Thomas Jefferson, Sixth State of the Union Address
Passage 6b: John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
Passage 6c: Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Passage 6d: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1
Passage 6e: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication on the Rights of Woman
CHAPTER 7. 16th and 17th Centuries
Passage 7a: Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Passage 7b: Thomas More, Utopia
Passage 7c: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Passage 7d: John Milton, Areopagitica
Passage 7e: Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys
CHAPTER 8. 18th Century
Passage 8a: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Passage 8b: Samuel Johnson, Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language
Passage 8c: John Locke, Second Treatise on Government
Passage 8d: Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Passage 8e: Richard Steele, The Tatler
CHAPTER 9. 19th Century
Passage 9a: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Passage 9b: John Henry Newman, Private Judgment
Passage 9c: Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life
Passage 9d: Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Passage 9e: Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
CHAPTER 10. 20th Century
Passage 10a: Willa Cather, On the Art of Fiction
Passage 10b: W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Passage 10c: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture