The Bedford Reader is a college composition textbook published by the Bedford/St. Martin's publishing company. It is edited by X. J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy, and Jane E. Aaron. It is widely used in freshman composition courses at colleges across the United States. The eleventh edition of the book is composed of over seventy essays, one short story, and one poem. It is divided into eleven sections by the various methods of development: narration, description, example, comparison and contrast, analysis, process analysis, classification, cause and effect, definition, argument and persuasion, along with a section on mixing the methods. The fourteenth edition is the latest edition so far, published in 2019.

Famous works and authors

Numerous essays and stories by noted authors are included in The Bedford Reader. These include: The text quickly became a standard in college composition courses across the country. Because of the diversity of works and authors, The Bedford Reader has become popular among Advanced Placement English teachers, specifically those teaching to the AP English Language and Composition test.