Classics

The Grapes of Wrath

Classics

Staff Writer

Author: John Steinbeck, a 20th-century American writer This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the Nobel Laureate author describes a crucial period in the history of the United States of America – the Great Depression. It follows the farming family of the Joads, as they leave their native Oklahoma following a severe drought, and travel to California […]

The Good Earth

Classics

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Author: Pearl S. Buck, a 20th-century American writer The masterpiece of the American Nobel Laureate author who introduced the Far East to the West, this rags-to-riches story of a Chinese farmer depicting the relationship between man and mother earth won numerous awards including the Pulitzer. The trials of protagonist Wang Lung resonated with the Americans […]

The Fall of the House of Usher

Classics, Gothic horror

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Author: Edgar Allan Poe, a 19th-century American writer, poet, and editor. A mid-nineteenth-century American classic, supernatural horror pervades this narrative. Roderick Usher, the scion of the renowned House of Usher, writes to his childhood friend, the first person narrator, to visit. The story starts as the friend journeys on horseback on a gloomy and overcast […]

The Diary of a Young Girl

Classics, Autobiography

Staff Writer

Author: Anne Frank, a German-Dutch diarist. A true and historically important account by a teenage victim of the Holocaust, Anne’s diary published over the years in several edited versions, continues to fascinate readers. Anne has a flair for writing, but her monologues to ‘Dear Kitty’, as she addresses her diary, should not be judged by […]

The Catcher in the Rye

Classics, Coming-of-age novel

Staff Writer

Author: J.D. Salinger, a 20th-century American author. This twentieth-century coming-of-age novel has been criticized for its irreverent language, but its empathetic and accurate use of that language by the teenaged first-person narrator and protagonist to explore adolescent angst has made it one of the most influential novels in American literary history. The use of hyperbole […]

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Classics, Children's literature

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Author: Mark Twain, a 19th-century American writer, humorist, and publisher. The protagonist of this delightful and insightful adventure is the orphan Tom, a mischievous but intelligent boy living with his mother’s sister Aunt Polly, younger half-brother Sidney, and cousin Mary in St. Petersburg village by the Mississippi. Sid and Mary are obedient and compliant in […]

Frankenstein

Classics, Gothic novel

Staff Writer

Author: Mary Shelley, a 19th-century English novelist Rarely has a novel captured the popular imagination and inspired innumerable adaptations and references across time and space as Shelley’s Frankenstein. Written in early nineteenth-century England, its theme is the human fascination with the mystery of life, and man’s tendency to play God, unable to control its consequences. […]

Pride and Prejudice

Classics

Staff Writer

Author: Jane Austen, an English novelist of the late eighteenth century. Published anonymously in early nineteenth century England, Austen’s second novel is different from contemporary didactic and moralizing writing, describing ordinary concerns of middle-class people. The famous opening lines claim as a universal truth that a gentleman with fortune must be looking for a wife. […]

Paradise Lost

Classics

Staff Writer

Author: John Milton, a 17th-century English poet and intellectual. Written in unrhymed verse in the seventeenth century, this epic describes the fall of Man from God’s grace through the machinations of the evil Satan. Satan and the angels he led in rebellion against their creator were defeated by God, and they are now fallen from […]

Oliver Twist

Classics

Staff Writer

Author: Charles Dickens, an English writer of the Victorian Era The touching story of an orphan in early nineteenth-century England, this novel critiques the conditions of the poor and helpless in the ‘workhouses’ of the time, and highlights the plight of orphans and paupers. However, despite all the hardship and misery it depicts, the novel […]

Of Mice and Men

Classics

Staff Writer

Author: John Steinbeck, a 20th-century American writer The heart-rending story of the friendship between two ranch hands during the Great Depression in California, this controversial novel exploring loneliness and shattered dreams has been criticized for coarse language, violence, and allegedly promoting euthanasia, but praised for its humanity and realism. George Milton is a small and […]

Oedipus Rex

Classics, Ancient tragedy

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Author: Sophocles, an ancient Greek tragedian King Oedipus, the 5th century B.C.E. Greek play by Sophocles, narrates the tragic tale of Oedipus, drawing on legends and myths of ancient Greece. Though the plot of the story was known to all at the time of writing, the intensely evocative play was a tremendous success, and indeed […]

Nineteen Eighty-four

Classics, Dystopian

Staff Writer

Author: George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was a 20th-century English novelist. Set in London, in Airstrip One province of Oceania, one of three superstates in the fictitious year 1984, this novel describes the annihilation of individual belief and freedom by the state, represented by the Party and its leader Big Brother. The […]

Moby-Dick or The Whale

Classics, sea story

Staff Writer

Author: Herman Melville, a 19th-century American novelist of the American Renaissance period This unique novel written in mid-nineteenth century America has since captured the world’s imagination with its fascinating descriptions of whales and the whaling industry of the time, and particularly the obsession of one whale-ship captain with an albino monster of a whale – […]

Madame Bovary

Classics

Staff Writer

Author: Gustave Flaubert, a 19th-century French novelist. Flaubert’s debut novel and masterpiece, this mid-nineteenth century French fiction is a scandalous account of a provincial doctor’s wife engaging in adulterous affairs. Charles Bovary, a mediocre student forced to study medicine by his mother, attains the qualification on his second attempt through diligent hard work. His parents […]

Lord of the Flies

Classics, Allegorical novel

Staff Writer

Author: William Golding, a 20th-century British novelist, playwright, and poet Golding takes the format of popular island adventures, particularly that of Ballantyne’s Victorian novel Coral Island, and paints a stark picture of human nature which is profoundly disturbing, — perhaps more so because the backdrop is lush bountiful nature, and the characters innocent schoolboys. Even […]

Lord Jim

Classics, Modernism

Staff Writer

Author: Joseph Conrad, a late 19th century & early 20th century Polish-British writer An extraordinary story of a man’s lifelong quest for redemption and restoration of his honor, the narrative alternates between past and present and has two different voices, — that of the author, and of Marlow, a participant in the protagonist’s life. Tuan […]

King Lear

Classics, Tragedy

Staff Writer

Author: William Shakespeare, a 16th century English playwright, poet and actor Lear, king of Britain, distributes his kingdom among his daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. When he asks his daughters to proclaim their love for him, Cordelia says she loves him as a daughter, obeying and honoring him, and will love her husband when married. […]

Jane Eyre

Classics, romance

Staff Writer

Author: Charlotte Brontë, a nineteenth-century English novelist and poet. Jane Eyre is both the first-person narrator and the spirited protagonist of this nineteenth-century iconic novel. It is the story of Jane’s trials and tribulations as a young orphan living with her aunt Sarah Reed and her children, and later at Lowood School. When she grows […]

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Classics, Autobiography

Staff Writer

Author: Maya Angelou, a twentieth-century American writer, poet, and civil rights activist. The first of Maya Angelou’s seven-part autobiography, this coming-of-age story of literary brilliance describes Maya dealing with rape and racism. The life of the black community in America in the mid-twentieth century comes alive through the child Maya’s eyes. Marguerite Johnson aged three, […]

Howards End

Classics, Turn of the century England

Staff Writer

Author: E.M. Forster, a British writer of the twentieth century. This is a tale of three families in the early twentieth century, — the Schlegels of German extraction, the English Wilcoxes, and the lower-class Basts. The affluent and cultured Schlegel siblings had previously met the commercially successful Wilcoxes traveling in Europe. Margaret, the oldest of […]

Fahrenheit 451

Classics, Dystopian

Staff Writer

Author: Ray Bradbury, a 20th-century American author, and screenwriter. The story envisions an apocalyptic future, a favorite theme with Bradbury, where books are burnt to obliterate knowledge, literature, and philosophy, in the twenty-fourth century. It takes its name from the temperature of the fires started by the protagonist Guy Montag and his fellow firemen, whose […]

Emma

Classics, Comedy of Manners, Realistic satirical comedy

Staff Writer

Author: Jane Austen, an English novelist of the late eighteenth century. The protagonist of this delightful early-nineteenth-century English novel from the queen of comedy of manners is the spoiled but adorable twenty-one-year-old Emma Woodhouse. Though it has often drawn criticism for an absence of plot, it has been adapted frequently for stage, television, and film. […]

Don Quixote

Classics

Staff Writer

Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, an eminent Spanish novelist of the 16th and 17th centuries. An epic satire by a Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare, this is a pioneering novel with ordinary people as principal players, instead of royalty or mythical beings. Only in the second part written much later, do a duke and a duchess […]

Doctor Faustus

Classics, Tragedy

Staff Writer

Author: Christopher Marlowe, an English poet and playwright of the 16th century. This immensely popular Elizabethan play drawing on existing German fables, which first staged the concept of selling one’s soul to the devil, is available in two versions: ‘A text’ printed in 1604, and ‘B text’ in 1616, with considerable debate among scholars regarding […]

The Divine Comedy

Classics, Narrative Poem

Staff Writer

Author: Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher from Florence in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Dante lifted the Tuscan dialect, – the foundation of modern standard Italian, to the sublime heights of Virgil’s Latin or Homer’s Greek, with the glorious poetry of La Divina Commedia. In early Western literature, the reverse […]

David Copperfield

Classics, Dickens

Staff Writer

Author: Charles Dickens, an English writer of the Victorian Era. The story is written in first-person narrative by the protagonist David, beginning with his childhood and continuing with the events of his life up to the point of writing as an adult. David’s earliest memories are of his mother, the young widow Clara, bringing up […]

Catch-22

Classics, Absurdist fiction

Staff Writer

Author: Joseph Heller, a twentieth-century American novelist. A war novel unlike any other ever written, this darkly comic satire of convoluted logic used in wartime by people undertaking Sisyphean tasks, moves back and forth in time, describing almost at random the ludicrousness of the people and events. The title of the bitterly funny story has […]

Candide

Classics, Philosophical satire

Staff Writer

Author: Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet, a French writer, historian, and philosopher of the 18th century. Written famously in three days using a pseudonym anticipating the subsequent ban in several countries, this mid-eighteenth-century French satire spares nobody. It ridicules everything from philosophies to governments to religions. It paints grotesque stereotypes of characters and situations […]

Brave New World

Classics, Dystopian Fiction

Staff Writer

Author: Aldous Huxley, an English writer and philosopher of the 20th century. One of the most enduring portraits of a dystopic future often compared with Orwell’s ‘1984’, Huxley’s world differs from the Orwellian in one important respect identified by Huxley. In Orwell’s 1948 masterpiece ‘1984’, desirable behavior is enforced in the totalitarian state by severe […]

Anna Karenina

Classics, Realist Novel

Staff Writer

Author: Leo Tolstoy or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, was a Russian Novelist (active 1847 – 1910) who was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Indisputably one of the greatest novels ever written in any language, this story delves into the psyche of the central characters elucidating the thinking behind actions and decisions. […]

Animal Farm

Classics, Political Satire

Staff Writer

Author: George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist of the early 20th century. A brilliant allegory of Russian socialism under Stalin, this novel written in mid-twentieth century England, portrays animal protagonists of Jones’s Manor Farm. Old Major, the Middle White boar, calls a meeting. He believes animal life is miserable since […]

All Quiet on the Western Front

Classics, War novel

Staff Writer

Author: Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. Written in Germany by a World War I veteran, this novel strips away the idealism, glory, heroism and patriotism of war, exposing the stark reality and horror underneath. The first person narrator Paul Bäumer volunteers for the army after high school with fellow-students Kemmerich, […]

Aeneid

Classics, Epic Poem

Staff Writer

Author: Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period) This epic poem follows Aeneas, – a hero of Greco-Roman mythology, who appears in Homer’s epic – Iliad. Written over twelve years during the rule of Augustus Caesar, it describes how the Trojan Aeneas followed his destiny to Italy, conquered the Latins, […]

A Tale of Two Cities

Classics, Charles Dickens

Staff Writer

The opening sentence of this mid-nineteenth century historical novel written in England is one the most famous first lines in literature. Set in the background of the French Revolution in Paris and London, the first sentence alludes to this ‘best of times’ and ‘worst of times’, the ‘age of wisdom’ and the ‘age of foolishness’. […]

Demystifying the Classics !