Drama book series in reading order

by Tennessee Williams

by Boris Pasternak

William Shakespeare

49 books• 5 series

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor, born around 23 April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616. Shakespeare is widely ranked as the greatest writer in English and the leading dramatist in the world, and is called England's national poet and the Bard of Avon. The surviving works, collaborations included, number about 39 plays, 154 sonnets and 3 long narrative poems. The plays exist in every major living language and are staged more often than those of any other playwright. The catalogue sorts the plays into Comedy Plays, Tragedy Plays and History Plays, with titles such as King John, Richard II, Henry V, The Tempest and The Comedy of Errors.

George Bernard Shaw

71 books

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic and political activist, born 26 July 1856 in Dublin and died 2 November 1950. Shaw wrote more than sixty plays, Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923) among them, working in both contemporary satire and historical allegory, and the Nobel Prize in Literature came to him in 1925. Socialism runs through the non-dramatic work, including Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889). The listing holds 71 items from My Dear Dorothea (1878) onward.

Tom Stoppard

43 books• 2 series

Tom Stoppard (3 July 1937 to 29 November 2025), born Tomáš Sträussler, was a British playwright and screenwriter who wrote for stage, film, radio and television. Human rights, censorship and political freedom run through Stoppard's work. As a playwright of the Royal National Theatre, Stoppard was among the most internationally performed dramatists of that generation, and critics set the plays beside Shakespeare and Shaw. Stoppard was knighted in 1997 and received the Order of Merit in 2000. The catalogue lists 43 books from Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) to Penelope (2022), with Coast of Utopia as a series.

Tennessee Williams

67 books• 2 series

Tennessee Williams was the pen name of Thomas Lanier Williams III (26 March 1911 to 25 February 1983), an American playwright and screenwriter. Williams is considered, with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, one of the three foremost American playwrights of the 20th century. After a first play in 1930, Williams gained wide attention in 1944 with The Glass Menagerie, followed by A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) and The Night of the Iguana (1961). The catalogue holds 67 books, from Candles to the Sun (1936) through Battle of Angels (1940) and 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays (1945). Subjects include American drama and short stories.

Terry Pratchett

148 books• 18 series

Terry Pratchett (28 April 1948 to 12 March 2015) was an English author, humorist and satirist. Discworld, a run of 41 comic fantasy novels published from 1983 to 2015, is the work most associated with Pratchett, together with Good Omens (1990), written with Neil Gaiman. The Carpet People (1971) was the first Pratchett novel, and The Colour of Magic (1983) opened Discworld. The Shepherd's Crown, the last Discworld novel, came out in August 2015, five months after Pratchett's death. The catalogue also lists the Long Earth, Bromeliad Trilogy and Johnny Maxwell series, with The Discworld Bestiary dated 2026.

Arthur Miller

38 books• 1 series

Arthur Miller, born Arthur Asher Miller, was an American playwright and essayist who lived from October 17, 1915 to February 10, 2005. The best-known Miller plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955), and Death of a Salesman is regarded as one of the finest American plays of the 20th century. Miller also wrote screenplays such as The Misfits (1961). During the late 1940s to early 1960s Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and married Marilyn Monroe. The catalogue lists 38 Miller titles, opening with The Man Who Had All the Luck (1940).

Thornton Wilder

41 books

Thornton Wilder wrote plays and novels and took three Pulitzer Prizes: one for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), two for the plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth. A U.S. National Book Award followed for the novel The Eighth Day. The catalogue begins with The Cabala (1926) and holds 41 entries, one-act collections such as The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act among them, with reissues carrying the listing to 2020. Wilder lived from 1897 to 1975.

Tariq Ali

62 books• 2 series

Tariq Ali, born 21 October 1943, is a Pakistani-British political activist, writer, journalist, filmmaker and public intellectual. Ali sits on the editorial committees of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso and writes for The Guardian, CounterPunch and the London Review of Books. Ali studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford. The catalogue lists 62 books from The Thoughts of Chairman Harold (1967) to The Neck and the Sword (2026), including Class Struggle in Bangladesh (1971) and Leon Trotsky (1980), and the Islam Quintet series. Subjects include politics and government, socialism, communism, revolutionaries and drama.

Karen Kingsbury is an American Christian novelist, born in Fairfax, Virginia, on June 8, 1963. Kingsbury worked as a sports writer for the Los Angeles Times and later wrote for the Los Angeles Daily News. Missy's Murder (1991), Kingsbury's first book, grew out of a murder story covered as a reporter in Los Angeles. Kingsbury is a #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist. The catalogue holds 115 titles, running to The Christmas Ring (2025), and the series include Firstborn, Sunrise, Above the Line, Bailey Flanigan, Red Gloves and Forever Faithful. Christian fiction and family life recur among the subjects.

Wole Soyinka

30 books• 1 series

Wole Soyinka - Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, born 13 July 1934 - is a Nigerian writer, playwright and poet. His output runs to three novels, ten short story collections, seven poetry collections, twenty-five plays and five memoirs, plus two translated works and many articles for newspapers and periodicals. The 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Soyinka for a wide cultural perspective and poetic overtones in fashioning the drama of existence. Born into an Anglican Yoruba family in Ake, Abeokuta, he took a preparatory education at Government College, Ibadan, and went on to University College Ibadan. The catalogue lists 30 titles from A Dance of the Forests (1963) to Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021).

Graham Greene

80 books• 3 series

Graham Greene (Henry Graham Greene, 2 October 1904 to 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and journalist. Greene gained an early reputation for two kinds of book: serious Catholic novels and thrillers, which Greene called entertainments. Across 67 years of writing, including more than 25 novels, the work examined the conflicting moral and political questions of the modern world. The catalogue begins with Babbling April (1925), then The Man Within (1929), Stamboul Train (1932), It's a Battlefield (1934) and A Gun for Sale (1936). Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Subjects include travel, drama, England and Catholics.

Sebastian Barry, born 1955, is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet who served as Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2018 to 2021 and became a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2024. A Long Long Way (2005) made the Booker Prize shortlist. The Secret Scripture (2008) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Costa Book of the Year and was also Booker shortlisted, and On Canaan's Side (2011) was longlisted. The 30 catalogued books run from Macker's Garden (1982) to The Newer World (2026), with McNulty Family and Days Without End as series.

J.M. Barrie

43 books• 3 series

Sir James Matthew Barrie, born in 1860 and died in 1937, was a British novelist and playwright, born and educated in Scotland before moving to London. There Barrie met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who prompted him to invent a baby boy having magical adventures in Kensington Gardens, first in the 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird and then in the 1904 West End fairy play Peter Pan, about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy in Neverland. The Thrums books and Sentimental Tommy account for much of the rest; 43 catalogued titles run from Better Dead (1887) onward.

J.B. Priestley worked across novels, plays, criticism and travel writing. The early books are literary criticism: Figures In Modern Literature (1924), The English Comic Characters (1925) and a study of George Meredith (1926), before the fiction arrives with Adam In Moonshine (1927) and Benighted (1927). Drama, theatre, English literature and travel run through the subjects. The listing holds 81 titles dated 1922 to 1978, at a median of 197 pages, and the run reads as complete.

Tracy Letts

8 books• 1 series

Tracy Shane Letts, born 4 July 1965, is an American playwright, actor, screenwriter and podcaster. The 8 catalogued titles are plays, running from Killer Joe (1999) to The Minutes (2021), with Bug (2005), Man from Nebraska (2005), August: Osage County (2008), Superior Donuts (2010), Mary Page Marlowe (2017) and Linda Vista (2018) between. August: Osage County took the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2008. Letts has acted with the Steppenwolf Theatre since 1988, and took the 2013 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Subjects record American drama, families, marriage, and parents and adult children.

Jon Fosse

25 books• 3 series

Jon Olav Fosse, born 29 September 1959, is a Norwegian author, translator and playwright. The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Fosse for innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unsayable. Fosse's writing has been translated into over fifty languages, and no Norwegian playwright since Henrik Ibsen has been performed more. This listing holds 25 titles in English translation, from Nightsongs (1997) to Vaim (2025), taking in The Girl on the Sofa (2002), Aliss at the Fire (2004), the collections Plays One to Plays Five, and I Am The Wind (2011). Septology and Trilogien are the series recorded under Fosse's name.

Ben Elton is a British comedian and writer whose 22 catalogued books run from Bachelor Boys (1984) to What Have I Done? (2025). The novels turn satirical, comic, dystopian and criminal by turns: Stark (1989), Gridlock (1991), This Other Eden (1993), Popcorn (1996), Blast from the Past (1998) and Inconceivable (1999) among them, with plays including Gasping (1990) and Silly Cow (1998) beside them. Elton co-wrote the sitcoms The Young Ones, Blackadder and Mr. Bean, and wrote Filthy, Rich & Catflap, The Thin Blue Line and Upstart Crow alone. Left-wing political satire marked his stand-up during the alternative comedy movement of the 1980s. Elton was born in 1959, and had sixteen novels and an autobiography in print as of 2025.

Arnold Bennett

100 books• 3 series

Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was an English novelist who completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories and 13 plays, plus a daily journal running past a million words. The Five Towns and Clayhanger Family books take the pottery district as their ground, with town life, manners and conduct as the material. Bennett wrote for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. The listing holds 100 titles from A Man from the North (1898) onward.

T.S. Eliot

86 books• 2 series

T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot, 26 September 1888 to 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright and a leading figure of modernist poetry in English. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, into a Boston Brahmin family, Eliot moved to England in 1914 at 25 and settled, worked and married there. Eliot received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. The catalogue lists 86 books, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) through The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Waste Land (1922) to Volume 9 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot (2021).

Molière

34 books

Molière was the stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a French playwright, actor and poet baptised on 15 January 1622 and dead on 17 February 1673. Comedies, farces, tragicomedies and comédie-ballets make up the surviving work: 34 titles here, from The Flying Doctor (1645) through The Affected Young Ladies (1659) to The Hypochondriac in 1673. The plays exist in every major living language and are staged at the Comédie-Française more often than any other playwright's. French is sometimes named the language of Molière for that reason.

Drew Hayden Taylor, born 1 July 1962, is an Indigenous Canadian playwright, author and journalist. Drama makes up much of the catalogue, from Toronto at Dreamers Rock (1990) through Bootlegger Blues, Someday, Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth and alterNatives. Humour runs alongside it, in the Funny You Don't Look Like One essay series on being of mixed Ojibwe and white descent. 31 titles span 1990 to On Thin Ice in 2026.

Mark Dunn is an American author and playwright, born on July 12, 1956. Dunn studied film at Memphis State University and screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin, then moved to New York in 1987 and worked at the New York Public Library. Belles and Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain have each seen more than 150 productions. Dunn was playwright-in-residence at the New Jersey Repertory Company. The catalogue holds 25 titles from Belles (1989) to The Puzzle With The Piazza (2022), including Ella Minnow Pea (2001).

Adrian Mole, the teenage diarist, is Sue Townsend's creation. Townsend (1946-2014) was an English humorist whose work took in novels, plays and journalism. Writing privately from age 14, Townsend made a name in theatre first, and Adrian Mole debuted on radio. In the 1980s the Mole books outsold every other work of fiction in Britain, and the series grew to 9 diary-form books, starting with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982). The Queen and I (1992) began a second series.

Paul Rudnick, born 29 December 1957, is an American playwright, novelist, screenwriter and essayist. Rudnick plays have been staged on and off Broadway, and the Rudnick screenplays include Sister Act, Addams Family Values, In & Out and Jeffrey. Under the pen name Libby Gelman-Waxner, Rudnick also wrote film criticism. The catalogue lists 19 books from Social Disease (1986) through I Hate Hamlet (1991) and Jeffrey (1994) to The Tuxedo Society, dated 2026.