To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men are among the US literary classics to be dropped by a GCSE exam board after the education secretary called for more British works to be studied.
Neither book is on OCR's draft GCSE English Literature syllabus in England.
Michael Gove's overhaul has also seen Arthur Miller's The Crucible left out.
The Department for Education said its document about new content for the subject published in December "doesn't ban any authors, books or genres".
Labour said the changes were "ideological" and "backward-looking".
'Particular dislike'
The new GCSE course content will include at least one play by William Shakespeare, a selection of work by the Romantic poets, a 19th Century novel, a selection of poetry since 1850 and a 20th Century novel or drama.
OCR said the decision to drop the works by the US authors was because of the DfE's desire for the exam to be more "more focused on tradition" and there were fewer opportunities to include them in the new syllabus.
Announcing his reforms last year, Mr Gove also said the new exam questions would be more rigorous and designed to ensure that pupils had read the whole book.
Students might study a novel by actress Meera Syal
Mr Gove, who studied English at Oxford University, has in the past highlighted his concern that pupils were reading Of Mice and Men in particular.
Paul Dodd, OCR's head of GCSE and A-Level reform, said Mr Gove "had a particular dislike for Of Mice and Men and was disappointed that more than 90% of candidates were studying it".
Steinbeck's six-chapter novella written in 1937 about displaced ranch workers during the Great Depression and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird have become a mainstay of GCSE exams.
Some academics have pointed out the reason schools opt to study the works is because they are accessible to students across a range of abilities.
But OCR and the other exam boards have had to follow new DfE guidelines when drawing up their syllabuses for teaching from 2015.
OCR's draft syllabus is about to be presented to exams regulator Ofqual for accreditation.
About three-quarters of the books on it are from the "canon of English literature" and most are pre-20th Century.
Pupils will still be able to study modern work by British authors.
Anita and Me, Meera Syal's 1996 story of a British Punjabi girl in the Midlands, and Dennis Kelly's 2007 play about bullying, DNA, are understood to be among the most recent works included in the draft syllabus.
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