Some Recommended Socratic Seminar Texts

Martin Luther King, Jr. I Have a Dream (Speech)

Heywood Broun The Fifty-First Dragon(Short Story)
Joanne Greenburg Certain Distant Suns (Short Story)
Apollo I: For the First Manned Moon Orbit (Poem)
Bambi, chapter VIII (Excerpt)
W. H. Auden Musée des Beaux Arts (Poem)
Sherwood Anderson Hands (Short Story)
Milton Meltzer They That Take the Sword (True Story)
George Bird Grinnell Scarface (Short Story, Legend)
Georgia B. Adams Winter's Birthday Gifts (Poem)
Ralph Waldo Emerson We Are Never Old (Poem)
Render Unto Caesar, the Things That Are
Caesar's...And Unto Thyself? (Essay)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Harrison Bergeron (Short Story)
Yani Paintings at age 5-6 “Pull Harder”(from Gifted Children, E. Winner)
Nadia Sketch at age 5.5 “Horse” (from Gifted Children, E. Winner)
Holbein painting: The French Ambassadors
Johnnie Lee Gray painting: Backbone of the South
Margaret and Luther (Gutierrez) Santa Clara polychrome pottery: Owl
Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?
To Bob Dylan (Short Story)
Isabelle Huggins End of the Empire from You Never Know (Short Story)
Budd Schulberg The Wonderful Lousy Poem (Essay)
Maxine Hong Kingston Silence (Short Story)
Richard Wright The Man Who Killed a Shadow (Short Story)
Cynthia Ozick SHE Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body (Essay)
John Allen Paulos Fractals (Essay)
Gary Soto Blackmail (Short Story)
Ray Bradbury All Summer in a Day (Short Story)
Luis Valdez Los Venidos (The Sellouts) (Short Play)
Bruce Coville Am I Blue? (Short Story)
Gingher Camouflage (From Teen Angel) (Excerpt)
Isaac Asimov The Fun They Had (Short Story)
Emily Dickinson The Wind's Visit (Poem)
Portia Nelson Autobiography in Five Short Chapters (Poem)
Gone Fishin' (From Athletic Shorts) (Short Story)
Mark Mathabane The Road to Alexandra (Short Story)
Bob Schultheis Bone Games (Excerpt)
Nadine Gordimer "The farm children play together..." (Excerpt from A Day in the
Country)
"We stood patiently waiting..." (Excerpt from Roll of Thunder Hear
My Cry)
Dana Stabenow Prologue and Epilogue (Legend, Excerpt from Blood
Will Tell)
Nadine Gordimer A Chip of Glass Ruby (Short Story)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Declaration of War Against Japan (Speech)
Gish Jen Who's Irish? An American Education (Essay)
Don Marquis a spider and a fly, chapter viii (Excerpt from archy and
mehitabel)
S. Elizabeth Bird Constructing the Indian 1830's-1990's (Excerpt from Dressing in
Feathers)
Shirley Jackson The Lottery (Short Story)
Marie G. Lee An Education (Short Story)
Alice Walker Never Offer Your Heart to Someone Who Eats Hearts (Poem)
Pablo Neruda Ode to the Americas
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper (Short Story)
Jamaica Kincaid Girl (Short Story)
Charles Krauthammer So Sorry? An Apology For Slavery Says Too Much and Too Little
(Editorial Essay) use with Ray essay below
John Ray Slavery: America Should Apologize (Editorial Essay use with
Krauthammer essay above
Helen Buckley The Little Boy (Poem)
Mario Bencastro A Clown's Story (Short Story)
Franz Kafka A Hunger Artist (Short Story)
Ralph Waldo Emerson Blight (Poem)
Women's Novels - For Lenore (Essay)
Thucydides Chapter 23 (Excerpt from The Peloponnesian Wars)
Art Spiegelman A Jew in Rostock (Excerpt in comic book style from Maus)
Langston Hughes I, Too, Sing America (Poem)
"Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as
fear...(Poem)
Abraham Lincoln The Emancipation Proclamation (Speech)
U. S. Constitution The Bill of Rights
Robert browning My Last Duchess (Poem)
Gary Soto Oranges (Poem)
Rodolfo Gonzales I Am Joaquín (Poem)
The Cancer March (Poem)
George Harrison (The Beatles) Piggies (Poem)
The Third Floor Bedroom (art)
The Other Giving Tree (Short Story)
Virginia Woolf Shakespeare's Sister (Essay)
Spencer Holst The Zebra Storyteller (Short Story/Essay)
Hammurabi The Code of Hammurabi (Law)
C. K. Williams The World's Greatest Tricycle Rider (Poem)
Alice Walker After the Shrink (Short Poem)
Alice Walker At First (Poem)
Mekeel McBride Loneliness (Poem)
Ursula K. LeGuin The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (Short Story)
Sandra Cisneros The Monkey Garden (Short Story)
Edgar Allen Poe The Oval Portrait (Short Story)
Maya Angelou On the Pulse of Morning (Poem)
Wuther Crue Ordeal by Cheque (series of checks allude to story)
Jorge Luis Borges Death and the Compass (Short Story)
On Societies as Organisms (Essay/Excerpt from the Lives of a Cell)
Annie Dillard From Living Like Weasels (Essay)
Ishmael Reed Grizzly (Poem)
Tadeusz Borowski Silence (Short Story)
Charles Darwin From The Origin of Species (Excerpt)
Pledge of Allegiance 1892 edition and 1954 edition (Pledges)
JMH Canaries (Letter)
Jane Bendetson I Am More Than Hands (Essay)
Peter Gray & David Chanoff When Play is Learning: A School Designed for Self-Directed
Education (Essay)
Lao-tzu Tao Te Ching (Poem)
 My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn (Short Story)
Art Spiegelman "Tell me more about 1941 and 1942..." (Excerpt from Maus) Short
Story in comic book form
Machiavelli Chapter XVIII Concerning the Way in Which Princes Should Keep
Faith (Excerpt from The Prince)
Confucius Rules of Conduct
Karl Marx The German Ideology (Excerpt)
Marguarite Yourcenar How Wang-Fo Was Saved (Short Story)
Lorine Niedecker Paen to Place (Poem)
Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried (Short Story)
Axioms, or Three Laws of Motion (Physics Laws)
Oliver Byrne Excerpt from The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid using
colored diagrams and symbols
James Baldwin A Talk to Teachers (Essay)
John Skoyles History (Poem)
Jorge Luis Borges Borges and Myself (Short Story)
Pablo Neruda A Few Things Explained (Poem)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Charge of the Light Brigade (Poem)
Jorge Luis Borges The Circular Ruins
Andrea Maruniak (grade 5) The Autumn Lady (Poem)
Fredric Brown Pattern (Short Story)
JohnCollier "Allen Austin is in love with Diana..."The Chaser (Excerpt from The
Chaser)
Christopher Logue War Music: An Account of Books 16-19 of Homer's Iliad (Poem)
Amy Tan "The old woman remembered a swan..." (Excerpt from The Joy
Luck Club)
Douglas Hofstadter The Prisoner's Dilemma Computer Tournaments and the Evolution
of Cooperation (Excerpt)
U.S. Court of Appeals Martinez vs Santa Clara Pueblo (Court decisions)
Guy Davenport Pyrrhon of Elis (Short Story)
Simon Singh Hilbert's Hotel (Excerpts from Fermat's Enigma, Math Essay
Alan Lightman Einstein's Dreams (Essays on Time)
Kathleen Cushman Conversations in Classrooms: Who are Seminars For? (Essay)
Dennis Gray Putting Minds to Work: How to Use the Seminar Approach in the
Classroom (Essay)