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Classic novels Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird will be banned from British classrooms because Michael Gove thinks teenagers should study works by British writers.

The Tory education secretary says award-winning novels by John Steinbeck and Harper Lee, along with other US classics including Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, should be dropped from new English literature GCSEs.

Three-quarters of the books on the government-directed GCSEs, which will be unveiled this week, are by British authors and most are pre-20th century, the Sunday Times reported.

"Of Mice and Men, which Michael Gove really dislikes, will not be included. It was studied by 90% of teenagers taking English literature GCSE in the past," said OCR, one of Britain's biggest exam boards. "Michael Gove said that was a really disappointing statistic."

The exam board added: "In the new syllabus 70-80% of the books are from the English canon."

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University professors have warned that teenagers will be turned off studying English literature by the new exams.

The move has been blasted by teachers and literature experts, who have likened Mr Gove's reading list to 'something out of the 1940s'.

Furious Bethan Marshall, senior lecturer in English at King's College, London, and chairwoman of the National Association for the Teaching of English, told the newspaper: "Kids will be put off doing A-level literature by this. Many teenagers will think that being made to read Dickens aged 16 is just tedious. This will just grind children down."

The exam boards had to follow strict guidelines from the Department for Education when drawing up the new literature GCSE. Teenagers will also not be able to undertake coursework and will face exams at the end of two years.

From 2015, teenagers taking the OCR English literature exam will have to study a pre-20th-century novel by a British author such as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, poetry by the Romantics, and a Shakespeare play. The new GCSE syllabus drawn up by Edexcel, another exam board, is believed to be similar.

Pupils will still be able to study one or two modern works, but these too are by British writers. Willy Russell's play Educating Rita is understood to be on one exam board's syllabus.