Some years ago the National Endowment for the Humanities polled educators, businessman, politicians and journalists for the books they felt high school students should read (or should have read). The leading works are listed with the percentage of responses for each.
71 Macbeth, Hamlet — Shakespeare
50 Declaration, Constitution, Gettysburg Address
49 Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
48 Bible
28 Iliad, Odyssey — Homer
26 Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
21 The Republic — Plato
19 Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
17 Scarlet Letter — Hawthorne
17 Oedipus — Sophocles
13 Moby Dick — Herman Melville
13 1984 — George Orwell
13 Walden — Henry David Thoreau
12 Collected Poems — Robert Frost
11 Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman
9 Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
9 Canterbury Tales — Chaucer
9 Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx
9 Politics — Aristotle
7 Collected Poems — Emily Dickinson
7 Crime and Punishment — Dostoevsky
7 Collected Works — William Faulkner
7 Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
7 Democracy in America — de Tocqueville
6 Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
6 Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 The Prince — Niccolo Michiavelli
6 Paradise Lost — John Milton
5 War and Peace — Tolstoy
5 Aeneid — Virgil