The "acorn booklet" (aka "Course Description"), produced by The College Board, lists numerous authors to demonstrate the depth and breadth of texts AP students should be reading. Since 2000, my students have been collecting information on some of these authors via author study projects. The following links will take you to highlights from their searches.
|
Autobiographers & Diarists |
Biographers & History Writers | Critics | Essayists & Fiction Writers | Journalists | Political Writers |
Science & Nature Writers |
| Maya Angelou | Walter Jackson Bate | Paula Gunn Allen | Joseph Addison | Roger Angell | Hannah Arendt | Edward Abbey |
| James Boswell | James Boswell | Gloria Anzaldua | James Agee | Maureen Dowd | Simone de Beauvoir | Wendell Berry |
| Judith Ortiz Cofer | Thomas Carlyle | Michael Arlen | Margaret Atwood | Elizabeth Drew | William F. Buckley | Jacob Bronowski |
| Charles Dana | Winston Churchill | Matthew Arnold | Francis Bacon | Nora Ephron | Jean de Crevecoeur | Rachel Carson |
| Thomas DeQuincy | Vine Deloria, Jr. | Kenneth Clark | James Baldwin | M. F. K. Fisher | W.E.B. DuBois | Charles Darwin |
| Frederick Douglass | Leon Edel | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | G. K. Chesterton | Frances Fitzgerald | Margaret Fuller | Annie Dilliard |
| Benjamin Franklin | Richard Ellmann | Arlene Croce | Joan Didion | Janet Flanner (Genet) | John Kenneth Galbraith | Gretel Ehrlich |
| Lillian Helman | Shelby Foote | Ralph Waldo Emerson | Ralph Waldo Emerson | Ellen Goodman | Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Loren Eiseley |
| Helen Keller | John Hope Franklin | Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Paul Fussell | David Halberstam | Thomas Hobbes | Stephen Jay Gould |
| Maxine Hong Kingston | Antonia Fraser | William Hazlitt | Mavis Gallant | Andy Logan | Thomas Jefferson | Evelyn Fox Keller |
| T.E.Lawrence | Edward Gibbon | bell hooks | Nadine Gordimer | John McPhee | George Kennan | Barry Lopez |
| John Henry Newman | Richard Homes | Samuel Johnson | Edward Hoagland | H.L. Mencken | Martin Luther King, Jr. | Peter Mattiessen |
| Samuel Pepys | Gerda Lerner | Pauline Kael | Zora Neale Hurston | Jan Morris | Lewis H. Lapham | Margaret Mead |
| Richard Rodriguez | Thomas Macaulay | Joyce Carol Oates | Jamaica Kincaid | David Remnick | John Locke | John Muir |
| Richard Wright | Samuel Eliot Morison | Walter Pater | Charles Lamb | Red Smith | Niccolo Machiavelli | David Quammen |
| Malcolm X | Francis Parkman | John Ruskin | Norman Mailer | Lincoln Steffens | John Stuart Mill | Carl Sagan |
| Anzia Yezierska | Arnold Rampersad | George Santayana | Nancy Mairs | Paul Theroux | John Milton | Lewis Thomas |
| Simon Schama | George Bernard Shaw | Mary McCarthy | Calvin Trillin | Thomas More | Jonathan Weiner | |
| Arthur M. Schlesinger | Susan Sontag | N. Scott Momaday | Tom Wolfe | Thomas Paine | ||
| Ronald Takaki | Cornel West | Montaigne | Olive Schreiner | |||
| George Trevelyan | Oscar Wilde | V.S. Naipaul | Jonathan Swift | |||
| Barbara Tuchman | Edmund Wilson | Tillie Olsen | Alexis de Tocqueville | |||
| George Orwell | Gore Vidal | |||||
| Cynthia Ozick | George Will | |||||
| Ishmael Reed | Garry Wills | |||||
| Adrienne Rich | Mary Wollstonecraft | |||||
| Mordecai Richler | ||||||
| Sharman Apt Russell | ||||||
| Scott Russell Sanders | ||||||
| Richard Selzer | ||||||
| Richard Steele | ||||||
| Shelby Steele | ||||||
| Henry David Thoreau | ||||||
| John Updike | ||||||
| Alice Walker | ||||||
| Eudora Welty | ||||||
| E.B. White | ||||||
| Terry Tempest Williams | ||||||
| Virginia Woolf | ||||||
