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Literature Classics Books
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By George Orwell, 1949
ISBN 0451524934
Orwell's final novel, 1984, is the story of one man's struggle against the ubiquitous, menacing state power ("Big Brother") that tries to dictate nearly every aspect of human life. The novel is a classic in anti-utopian fiction, and a trenchant political satire that remains as relevant today as...
- To Kill a Mockingbird
By Harper Lee, 1960
ISBN 0060935464
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously...
- Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare, 1597
ISBN 0743477111
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young "star-cross'd lovers" whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet and Macbeth, is one of his...
- Hamlet
By William Shakespeare, 1601
ISBN 074347712X
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father, the King, and then...
- The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
ISBN 0140620184
Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything; but one thing will always be out of his reach. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character.
- The Odyssey
By Homer, 8th Century BC
ISBN 0140268863
If The Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then The Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus's reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan...
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
By Mark Twain, 1876
ISBN 1934941638
The imaginative and mischievous twelve-year-old boy named Thomas Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly, his half-brother, Sid, also known as Sidney, and cousin Mary, in the Mississippi River town of St Petersburg, Missouri. After playing hooky from school on Friday and dirtying his clothes in a fight...
- The Catcher in the Rye
By J.D. Salinger, 1951
ISBN 0316769177
Originally published for adults, The Catcher in the Rye has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, sexuality, alienation, and rebellion. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major languages. The novel's protagonist and antihero...
- Brave New World
By Aldous Huxley, 1932
ISBN 0060850523
Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future--where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations...
- Frankenstein
By Mary Shelley, 1818
ISBN 0743487583
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, generally known as Frankenstein, is a novel written by Mary Shelley. The title of the novel refers to a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who learns how to create life and creates a being in the likeness of man, but larger than average and more powerful...
- Lord of the Flies
By William Golding, 1954
ISBN 9780399501487
Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both...
- The Iliad
By Homer, 8th Century BC
ISBN 0140447946
One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode of the Trojan War. At its center is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his conflict with his leader Agamemnon. Interwoven in the tragic sequence of events are...
- Othello
By William Shakespeare, 1603
ISBN 0743482824
The play opens with Roderigo, a rich and dissolute gentleman, complaining to Iago, a high-ranking soldier, that Iago has not told him about the secret marriage between Desdemona, the daughter of a Senator named Brabantio, and Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army. He is upset by this...
- Of Mice and Men
By John Steinbeck, 1937
ISBN 0142000671
Of Mice and Men is a novella written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California. Based on Steinbeck's own experiences as a bindlestiff in...
- The Invisible Man
By H.G. Wells, 1897
ISBN 0451528522
The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H.G. Wells published in 1897. Wells' novel was originally serialised in Pearson's Magazine in 1897, and published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who theorises that if a person's refractive index is...
- Gulliver's Travels
By Jonathan Swift, 1726
ISBN 0451531132
Read by children as an adventure story and by adults as a devastating satire of society, Gulliver and his four journeys make for a fascinating blend of travelogue, realism, symbolism, and fantastic voyage -- all with a serious philosophical intent.
- The Grapes of Wrath
By John Steinbeck, 1939
ISBN 0143039431
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their Oklahoma home by...
- The Canterbury Tales
By Geoffrey Chaucer, 2005
ISBN 014042234X
One of the greatest and most ambitious works in English literature, The Canterbury Tales depicts a storytelling competition between pilgrims drawn from all ranks of society. The tales are as various as the pilgrims themselves, encompassing comedy, pathos, tragedy, and cynicism.
- The Metamorphosis
By Franz Kafka, 2006
ISBN 1600964222
The Metamorphosis, first published in 1915, is the most famous of Kafka's works, along with The Trial and The Castle. The story begins when a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Curiously, his condition does not arouse surprise in his family...
- Don Quixote
By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 1605
ISBN 0142437239
Don Quixote, fully titled The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, is a novel written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes created a fictional origin for the story by inventing a Moorish chronicler for Don Quixote named Cide Hamete Benengeli. Published in two volumes a decade...
- The Old Man and the Sea
By Ernest Hemingway, 1952
ISBN 9780743237307
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
- The Divine Comedy
By Dante Alighieri, 1321
ISBN 0393044726
This single volume, blank verse translation of The Divine Comedy includes an introduction, maps of Dante's Italy, Hell, Purgatory, Geocentric Universe, and political panorama of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, diagrams and notes providing the reader with invaluable guidance. Described...
- Lolita
By Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
ISBN 0679410430
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's...
- King Lear
By William Shakespeare, 1608
ISBN 019832054X
King Lear descends into madness after wrongly distributing his estate on the strength of flattery. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king. It has been widely adapted for stage and screen, with the part of Lear played by many of the world's most...
- Crime and Punishment
By Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
ISBN 0553211757
A desperate young man plans the perfect crime -- the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law -- if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the...
- Death of a Salesman
By Arthur Miller, 1996
ISBN 0140247734
The tragedy of a typical American--a salesman who at the age of sixty-three is faced with what he cannot face; defeat and disillusionment.
- On the Road
By Jack Kerouac, 1999
ISBN 0140283293
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2006
ISBN 0060883286
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that...
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
By Ernest Hemingway, 1940
ISBN 0684830485
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades...
- A Farewell To Arms
By Ernest Hemingway, 1929
ISBN 0684801469
The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the...
- War and Peace
By Leo Tolstoy, 1869
ISBN 1400079985
War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is considered one of the most celebrated works of fiction. It is regarded as Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other famous work Anna Karenina (1873 - 1877). War and...
- Anna Karenina
By Leo Tolstoy, 1873
ISBN 0143035002
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century...
- Heart of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad, 2007
ISBN 1599869500
Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his advanture to a group of men onboard an anchored ship.
- East of Eden
By John Steinbeck, 1952
ISBN 0670033049
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families -- the Trasks and the Hamiltons -- whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
- The Idiot
By Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1868
ISBN 0553213520
Dostoyevsky wanted to create a portrait of a "good man" in Prince Myshkin, a Christlike figure who is the heir to a large fortune and whose simple goodness has a profound impact on those around him. Myshkin's saintly impulses occasionally backfire, as when the prostitute Natasha, believing he loves...
- The Fountainhead
By Ayn Rand, 2005
ISBN 0452286751
The Fountainhead--containing Ayn Rand's daringly original literary vision with the seeds of her groundbreaking philosophy, Objectivism--won immediate worldwide acclaim. This instant classic is the story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his...
- Dubliners
By James Joyce, 2000
ISBN 0742631265
In "Dubliners", completed when Joyce was only 25, the author produced a definitive group portrait. The book is rooted in an accurate apprehension of the detail of Dublin life. The author also wrote "Ulysses" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".
- The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison, 1970
ISBN 0307278441
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.
