Steven Knoerr

Mr. Knoerr teaches literature at the high school level in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. He teaches Senior Preparatory English at Valeo Academy, a private institution dedicated to deep learning of great books through a reading-writing-talking methodology. This means Mr. Knoerr digs into the ideas, history, and symbolism with his students. In particular, Valeo is known for their yearly Shakespeare Festival. Mr. Knoerr teaches and prepares students to perform the sonnets and plays of Shakespeare on stage and understand what the roles they perform in front of audiences.

Mr. Knoerr’s particular love of nuanced and complex literature has made him an ideal addition to LiteratureTutor.com. He brings passion and knowledge to every discussion, and is known throughout his school as a student favorite. As such, his enthusiasm is infectious, drawing in students to work hard to understand better writing.

Mr. Knoerr’s former students come back from college and tell him they are well prepared for college writing assignments. Their training in research and composition makes them able to capably write long essays.

Authors he loves teaching include those you see below, but his expertise and enthusiasm reaches far beyond. If you’ve read Til We Have Faces, by C. S. Lewis, you’ll have a friend for life.

Mr. Knoerr is available to tutor in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and online.

ANCIENT

• Beowulf and other Old English texts (modern English translation)
• The Clouds, Lysistrata, Aristophanes
• “The Dream of the Rood,” unknown
• The Iliad, Homer
• The Odyssey, Homer
• Metamorphoses, Ovid (English translation)
• Metamorphoses or The Golden Asse, Lucius Apuleius (English Translation)

BRITISH

• The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
• Dubliners, James Joyce
• Emma, Jane Austen
• Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
• The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
• A Man for All Seasons, Bolt
• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
• Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
• Paradise Lost, John Milton
• The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde
• The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw
• Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Dafoe
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
• The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
• Shakespeare (plays and sonnets)
• Silas Marner, George Eliot
• The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien
• Sir Gawain and the Green Night
• The Space Trilogy, C. S. Lewis
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Story of English, Robert McCrum
• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
• The Unbearable Bassington, SAKI (H. H. Munro)
• The Quiet American, Graham Greene
• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
• Til We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis

AMERICAN

• The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
• My Ántonia, Willa Cather
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• The Crucible, Arthur Miller
• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
• The Giver, Lois Lowry
• The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• The Invisible Man, Ellison
• The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
• The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
• The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Rabbit, Run, John Updike
• Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow
• Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
• Short stories, Flannery O’Connor
• The Sea Wolf, Jack London

RUSSIAN and Other

• Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
• The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Candide, Voltaire
• The Cherry Orchard, Checkov
• Complete Fiction, Robertson Davies
• The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
• Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
• The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
• Short Stories, Franz Kafka
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

DYSTOPIAS

• 1984, George Orwell
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Let tutor Steven Knoerr help your student today. Contact us.

Work Experience

Mr. Knoerr shares his enthusiasm for beautiful writing, insightful thinking, and great storytelling. His background includes working in the publishing industry as an editor and proofreader for many years.

2012 – Present

Valeo Academy

2019 – Present

Literature Tutor

2021

Book: The Crypt of the Magi: A Benny and Gus Ghoul Story (The Ember Years)

Qualifications & Certifications