Whatever your worldview may be, the fact remains that if you're in my class, you're currently living in the West - not just the Western US, but the cultural region known collectively as the West, encompassing Western Europe as well as North America.

Western culture, like all its counterparts, has stories, traditions, and texts that have influenced its development in a variety of ways.  American culture has been based primarily on that development and still refers most frequently to Western literary and cultural traditions. 

The list of literary works those traditions encompass is entirely too long to include on this website; if the topic interests you, I suggest taking a look at the book Cultural Literacy, by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.  However, I have tried to list (without benefit of reference material - just off the top of my head) the literature I believe you will see alluded to most frequently in the course of simply being part of American culture.  If you know of a text you think should be on the list, email me!

Early Literature

from The Bible:

     OT: Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, I and II Samuel, Job, the Poetic & Wisdom

                   writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon)

     NT: the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), Acts (specifically, Pentecost and the

                   conversion of Paul

Mythology - Greek and Roman

Pre-, Mid- and Post-Renaissance Literature

The Divine Comedy (Dante Aligheri)

Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

Paradise Lost (John Milton)

American Literature (no particular order)

Moby Dick

Catcher in the Rye

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Scarlet Letter

The Great Gatsby

Of Mice and Men

To Kill a Mockingbird

American History

The Declaration of Independence

The Preamble to the Constitution

The Emancipation Proclamation

the speeches of Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you're considering taking the AP English literature class and test next year (and you should be!), consider this list.  It's about 5 years old, but it lists all the suggested books from the AP literature free response question since its inception, in order by the number of times it has appeared on the test.  The percentage that follows the book title indicates how frequently that title has appeared as a suggested novel.  Ask me if you don't get it.  :)