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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 – […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

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’. […]