Answer added in topic Literature.Lucas J Meeker, colgate alum, high honors in english '07, write... In rough chronological order:Homer's OdysseyBeowulf(insert favorite Greek tragedy here)The TainDante's Divine ComedyChaucer's Canterbury TalesSir Gawain and the Green KnightShakespeare's (insert favorite Shakespeare play here, I'd personally lean on R+J if it wasn't so widely misintepreted, but Hamlet totally works here too)Marlowe's Doctor FaustusJohn Donne's Songs and SonnetsIzaak Walton's The Compleat AnglerMilton's Paradise LostDefoe's Robinson CrusoeColeridge's Rime of the Ancient MarinerKeats' Ode on a Grecian UrnAusten's Pride and PrejudiceGeorge Eliot's Middlemarch(insert Bronte sister novel here)Conrad's Heart of DarknessYeats' Cathleen Ni HoulihanJoyce's Dubliners (yes, more "game changing" than Ulysses, in my opinion, but you could easily argue Ulysses without any fight from me whatsoever)T.S. Eliot's The WastelandPound's The CantosPirandello's Six Characters in Search of an AuthorFitzgerald's The Great GatsbyHemingway's The Sun Also RisesNabokav's LolitaDostoevsky's Crime and PunishmentPynchon's Gravity's RainbowDavid Foster Wallace's Infinite JestI'm aware that this list is long, and that I didn't provide specific reasons for each work and moreover that a lot of people's favorite authors are not on there. Including some of my own. What I tried to do with this list is make an efficient, lean list that offers the hallmark works of different periods of style, and where possible, the breakthrough works of a period and style that were also the hallmark works. The goal, in essence, was to provide a string of texts that get you from the Odyssey to Infinite Jest in a way that would explain how literature has evolved within the western/English tradition, even though some of these works are not English originally. In some cases, the specific work wasn't as important so much as a collection of works that symbolize a movement, like Greek tragedy, or any of the three excellent Bronte sister novels. Past the creation of the list, however, which I think is a good list of stepping stones through the evolution of English literature, I've bolded the works that were particularly important and emblematic of stylistic change and are true pillars of the canon, at least in my opinion (and as much as I hate the word "canon").See question on Quora