May I then claim to be the only person on the board who knows what "required" means?

Of course we know what required means, but required and personal invariably conflict. It's against human nature to conform to all standards. Rules are made to be broken.

But if we want authors that would be absolutely required, I need only to delve into my last two years of high school English (American Lit. and British Lit.) and decide on the 10 that were considered the most fundamentally important for the formation of a proper English education. Here's probably the most likely list and their most important works:

Chaucer (Canterbury Tales)
Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, sonnets)
Donne (Holy Sonnet 10, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Meditation 17)
Coleridge (Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Shelley (Frankenstein)
Poe (The Raven, other creepy stories)
Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath)
Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984)
Miller (The Crucible)

And we probably still won't agree.