Three stages of linear causal model building procedures (conceptual, main theory, and auxiliary theory) were used to examine the cultural and personality resources of individuals and their school-related skills as determinants of achievement in mother tongue literature. A path analytic approach was used to test a popular model of literature achievement among a subsample of Swedish 14-year-olds. A pooling procedure was used for controlling the influence of sex and the amount of effort expended on school work. Analysis showed that both the cultural resources of the student's home and his verbal ability, as mediated by his level of reading comprehension, account for most of the explained variance in the model. Some conventional beliefs regarding achievement in literature were not supported by the analysis. Thus, variables such as reading speed, the hours spent reading for pleasure, and literary attitudes had negligible effects and were omitted from the final revised form of the model. The final form was composed of policy variables potentially manipulatable by within-school teaching strategies. (Author/HOD)