Spanning a comprehensive array of periods, cultures, and philosophies, '150 Classics You Should Read Before You Die' is an unparalleled anthology that immerses the reader in the vast ocean of world literature and thought. From the ethereal musings of the ancient Greeks to the sharp wit of the modernists, this collection showcases an eclectic and vibrant range of styles and themes. It includes seminal works that have shaped the cultural, social, and intellectual landscapes of their times, offering insights into human nature, society, and the complexities of the human condition. This anthology serves not only as a testament to the enduring power of literature but also as a guide to the soul of humanity across ages. The contributing authors and editors, being titans in their own right, reflect a mosaic of backgrounds, eras, and intellectual movements. Among them are luminaries such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, and James Joyce, whose works have transcended their immediate contexts to speak to universal human experiences. This collection stands at the crossroads of numerous literary movements, including Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism, weaving a rich tapestry that spans the gamut from the deepest introspections of individual characters to the broadest depictions of societal norms and transformations. It celebrates the diversity of thought and the shared human endeavor to understand and articulate our world. '150 Classics You Should Read Before You Die' is essential for anyone seeking to broaden their literary horizons and deepen their appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word. Offering a unique confluence of perspectives, styles, and voices, this anthology not only educates but also inspires a dialogue between the works it encompasses and the reader. It provides a singular opportunity to traverse time and space, to live myriad lives and voyages in the mind's eye, and to cultivate a deeper understanding of the complex tapestry of human experience. Readers will find in this collection a lifelong companion, a treasure trove of wisdom, beauty, and the sheer joy of literature.
150 Classics You Should Read Before You Die : Romeo and Juliet, Emma, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Tom Sawyer, Faust, Notre Dame de Paris, Dubliners, Odyssey
Authors:
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Stendhal
- Jules Verne
- Gustave Flaubert
- Lewis Carroll
- Charles Dickens
- Plato
- Honoré de Balzac
- Mark Twain
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Walt Whitman
- Oscar Wilde
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Edgar Allan Poe
- William Shakespeare
- George MacDonald
- Bram Stoker
- Charlotte Brontë
- Anne Brontë
- Emily Brontë
- Henry David Thoreau
- Jack London
- Henry James
- Louisa May Alcott
- Victor Hugo
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Joseph Conrad
- Jane Austen
- Herman Melville
- George Eliot
- Laurence Sterne
- Thomas Hardy
- Jonathan Swift
- Edith Wharton
- Daniel Defoe
- Henry Fielding
- Kenneth Grahame
- Marcel Proust
- Willa Cather
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Homer
- Gaston Leroux
- William Makepeace Thackeray
- Kate Chopin
- Apuleius
- John Milton
- Frederick Douglass
- John Keats
- James Joyce
- Ann Ward Radcliffe
- Kahlil Gibran
- H. G. Wells
- W. B. Yeats
- J. M. Barrie
- G. K. Chesterton
- T. S. Eliot
- L. M. Montgomery
- C. S. Lewis
- D. H. Lawrence
- E. M. Forster
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Marcus Aurelius
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Lewis Wallace
- Sir
- George Bernard Shaw
- Mary Shelley
- P. B. Shelley
- Elizabeth von Arnim
- Herman Hesse
- George Weedon Grossmith
- Willkie Collins
Format:
Duration:
- 38881 pages
Language:
English
Categories:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Meisterwerke der Poesie. Die zehn besten Gedichte und Balladen : Bibliothek der Klassiker
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
audiobookGoethe - Gesammelte Werke
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
bookGoethe - Gesammelte Werke
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
bookJohann Wolfgang von Goethe: Zum Schäkespears Tag : Eine Rede auf William Shakespeare
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
audiobookJohann Wolfgang von Goethe: Egmont : Ein Trauerspiel. Ungekürzt gelesen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
audiobookJohann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil : Ein Drama. Ungekürzt gelesen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
audiobookIphigenie auf Tauris
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
bookIphigenie auf Tauris
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
bookDie großen Liebes-Klassiker der Weltliteratur : Sturmhöhe, Stolz und Vorurteil, Die Elenden, Jane Eyre, Kameliendame, Anna Karenina, Das Feuer
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stendhal, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, Rudyard Kipling, George Sand, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Eugenie Marlitt, Leo Tolstoi, Elisabeth Bürstenbinder, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
bookGOETHE Ultimate Collection: 200+ Titles in One Edition : Novels, Tales, Plays, Essays, Autobiography and Letters: Wilhelm Meister, Faust, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Italian Journey…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
bookThe Elective Affinities
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
bookWorld's Greatest Classics in One Volume : Les Misérables, Hamlet, Jane Eyre, Ulysses, War and Peace, Art of War, Faust, Don Quixote, Bushido…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stendhal, Jules Verne, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, Henrik Ibsen, Charles Dickens, Plato, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rabindranath Tagore, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Walt Whitman, Niccolò Machiavelli, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Giovanni Boccaccio, Confucius, George MacDonald, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Henry David Thoreau, Weedon Grossmith, Jack London, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Victor Hugo, Arthur Conan Doyle, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, Edith Wharton, Benito Pérez Galdós, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Alexandre Dumas, Kalidasa, Kenneth Grahame, Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Homer, Gaston Leroux, Charles Baudelaire, Wilkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray, Voltaire, Kate Chopin, Apuleius, John Milton, Frederick Douglass, Laozi, John Keats, James Joyce, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Kahlil Gibran, Kakuzo Okakura, Soseki Natsume, Princess Der Ling, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Barrie, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, L. M. Montgomery, C. S. Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, H. P. Lovecraft, Marcus Aurelius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Wallace, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Sir, George Bernard Shaw, Miguel de Cervantes, Mary Shelley, Cao Xueqin, Emile Zola, Válmíki, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, P. B. Shelley, Elizabeth von Arnim, Herman Hesse, Dante, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Sun Tzu, Inazo Nitobé
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- 1934 books
Jules Verne
Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a prolific French author whose writing about various innovations and technological advancements laid much of the foundation of modern science fiction. Verne’s love of travel and adventure, including his time spent sailing the seas, inspired several of his short stories and novels.
Read more - 538 books
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist who is counted among the greatest Western novelists, known especially for his first published novel Madame Bovary, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style, best exemplified by his endless search for le mot juste ("the precise word"). He was born in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, in the Haute-Normandie Region of France.
Read more - 546 books
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, and photographer. He is especially remembered for bringing to life the beloved and long-revered tale of Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
Read more - 2051 books
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.
Read more - 1582 books
Mark Twain
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, left school at age 12. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher, which furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity and the perfect grasp of local customs and speech manifested in his writing. It wasn't until The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that he was recognized by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce. Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Twain grew more and more cynical and pessimistic. Though his fame continued to widen--Yale and Oxford awarded him honorary degrees--he spent his last years in gloom and desperation, but he lives on in American letters as "the Lincoln of our literature."
Read more - 303 books
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an American abolitionist and author of more than 20 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was a realistic account of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom.
Read more - 155 books
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), arguably one of America's most influential and innovative poets, was born into a working-class family in West Hills, New York, and grew up in Brooklyn. His Leaves of Grass, from which "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" comes, is considered one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry. While most other major writers of his time enjoyed a highly structured, classical education at private institutions, Whitman forged his own rough and informal curriculum, and his brief stint at teaching suggests that Whitman employed what were then progressive techniques -- encouraging students to think aloud rather than simply recite, and involving his students in educational games.
Read more - 1096 books
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 and died on the 30th November 1900. He was an Irish playwright, poet, and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest.
Read more - 988 books
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850, changing his second name to ‘Louis’ at the age of eighteen. He has always been loved and admired by countless readers and critics for ‘the excitement, the fierce joy, the delight in strangeness, the pleasure in deep and dark adventures’ found in his classic stories and, without doubt, he created some of the most horribly unforgettable characters in literature and, above all, Mr. Edward Hyde.
Read more - 435 books
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was a prolific and popular nineteenth century American writer who wrote historical fiction of frontier and Native American life. He is best remembered for the Leatherstocking Tales, one of which was The Last of the Mohicans.
Read more - 1686 books
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, and critic. Best known for his macabre prose work, including the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his writing has influenced literature in the United States and around the world.
Read more - 1916 books
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest playwright the world has seen. He produced an amount of work; 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and 5 poems. He died on 23rd April 1616, aged 52, and was buried in the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.
Read more - 592 books
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker was born November 8, 1847, in Dublin, Ireland. Stoker was a sickly child who was frequently bedridden; his mother entertained him by telling frightening stories and fables during his bouts of illness. Stoker studied math at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 1867. He worked as a civil servant, freelance journalist, drama critic, editor and, most notably, as manager of the Lyceum Theatre. Although best known for Dracula, Stoker wrote eighteen other books, including Under the Sunset, The Snake’s Pass, The Jewel of Seven Stars, The Lady of the Shroud, and The Lair of the White Worm. He died in 1912 at the age of sixty-four.
Read more - 554 books
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sister authors. Her novels are considered masterpieces of English literature – the most famous of which is Jane Eyre.
Read more - 207 books
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë (1820–1849) was an English novelist and poet, best known for her novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Read more - 441 books
Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights. The novel’s violence and passion shocked the Victorian public and led to the belief that it was written by a man. Although Emily died young (at the age of 30), her sole complete work is now considered a masterpiece of English literature.
Read more - 251 books
Henry David Thoreau
American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, best-known for his autobiographical story of life in the woods, WALDEN (1854). Thoreau became one of the leading personalities in New England Transcendentalism. He wrote tirelessly but earned from his books and journalism little. Thoreau's CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (1849) influenced Gandhi in his passive resistance campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr., and at one time the politics of the British Labour Party. Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, which was center of his life, although he spent several years in his childhood in the neighboring towns and later elsewhere. He died of tuberculosis, and he is buried in his family's plot near the graves of his friends Hawthorne, Alcott, Emerson, and Channing on Author's Ridge in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Read more - 1402 books
Jack London
Jack London (1876–1916) was a prolific American novelist and short story writer. His most notable works include White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and The Sea-Wolf. He was born in San Francisco, California.
Read more - 906 books
Henry James
Henry James (1843–1916) was an American writer, highly regarded as one of the key proponents of literary realism, as well as for his contributions to literary criticism. His writing centres on the clash and overlap between Europe and America, and is regarded as his most notable work.
Read more - 592 books
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She is best known for Little Women (1868), which is loosely based on her own life and proved to be one of the most popular children’s books ever written. Three sequels followed: Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo’s Boys (1886). Alcott was the daughter of the famous transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and was friend of Emerson and Thoreau. In addition to writing, she worked as a teacher, governess, and Civil War nurse, as well as being an advocate of abolition, women’s rights, and temperance. She died in 1888 and is buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.
Read more - 747 books
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo, a major leader of the French Romantic Movement, was one of the most influential figures in nineteenth-century literature. By the age of thirty, he had established himself as a master in every domain of literature--drama, fiction, and lyric poetry. Hugo's private life was as unconventional and exuberant as his literary creations. At twenty, he married after a long, idealistic courtship; but later in life was infamous for his scandalous escapades. In 1851, he was exiled for his passionate opposition to Napoleon III. Hugo's rich, emotional novels, Notre Dame de Paris and Les Miserables, have made him one of the most widely read authors of all time.
Read more - 1902 books
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician. He is the creator of the Sherlock Holmes character, writing his debut appearance in A Study in Scarlet. Doyle wrote notable books in the fantasy and science fiction genres, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels.
Read more - 355 books
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was born in Manchester, England, but moved to America as a teenager. A gifted writer from childhood, Burnett took to writing as a means of supporting her family, creating stories for Lady’s Book, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines. Though she began writing novels for adults, she gained lasting success writing for children. She is best known for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1855–1856), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).
Read more - 909 books
Joseph Conrad
Polish-born Joseph Conrad is regarded as a highly influential author, and his works are seen as a precursor to modernist literature. His often tragic insight into the human condition in novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent is unrivalled by his contemporaries.
Read more - 1145 books
Jane Austen
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—which observe and critique the British gentry of the late eighteenth century. Her mastery of wit, irony, and social commentary made her a beloved and acclaimed author in her lifetime, a distinction she still enjoys today around the world.
Read more - 516 books
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York City. After his father's death he left school for a series of clerical jobs before going to sea as a young man of nineteen. At twenty-one he shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet and began a series of adventures in the South Seas that would last for three years and form the basis for his first two novels, Typee and Omoo. Although these two novels sold well and gained for Melville a measure of fame, nineteenth-century readers were puzzled by the experiments with form that he began with his third novel, Mardi, and continued brilliantly in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. During his later years spent working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville published only poems, compiled in a collection entitled Battle-Pieces, and died in 1891 with Billy Budd, Sailor, now considered a classic, still unpublished.
Read more - 397 books
George Eliot
George Eliot, born as Mary Ann Evans in 1819, grew up in England, quickly learning about the Victorian culture around her despite the country¿s increasing growth of industrialism. Eliot did exceptionally well at the boarding schools she attended as a child. Her road to success was being paved. At the age of seventeen her mother died, leaving her to manage the household with the help of her sister. Yet Eliot would become much more than a homemaker. Soon she began writing for the Westminster Review, eventually rising to the rank of assistant editor. It was here where she met the already married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived until his death. It was this relationship which helped her rise in the ranks of the literary community, eventually becoming a famous author. Eliot’s move to London in 1849 marked a new beginning for her promising career, quickly improving her circle of literary friends. Soon she was disowned by her family when they realized she was living in sin with Lewes, whom she regarded as her true, if not legal, husband. Eliot would also leave her church, deciding that she didn’t believe in the faith any longer. Despite her rejection by her family and others for these matters, Eliot would soon gain acceptance as one of the foremost (and highest paid) novelists of her time. Silas Marner was published in 1861 under the penname of George Eliot, when she was forty-two years of age.
Read more - 560 books
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorchester, Dorset. He enrolled as a student in King’s College, London, but never felt at ease there, seeing himself as socially inferior. This preoccupation with society, particularly the declining rural society, featured heavily in Hardy’s novels, with many of his stories set in the fictional county of Wessex. Since his death in 1928, Hardy has been recognised as a significant poet, influencing The Movement poets in the 1950s and 1960s.
Read more - 381 books
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was born of English descent in Dublin, Ireland in 1667. He went to school at Trinity College in Ireland, before moving to England at the age of 22. After a short stint in the Anglican Church, he began his career as a writer, satirizing religious, political, and educational institutions. He wrote in defense of the Irish people, especially in his A Modest Proposal, which made him a champion of his people. His most famous work is Gulliver’s Travels which was published anonymously in 1726.
Read more - 399 books
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.
Read more - 637 books
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe was born at the beginning of a period of history known as the English Restoration, so-named because it was when King Charles II restored the monarchy to England following the English Civil War and the brief dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. Defoe’s contemporaries included Isaac Newton and Samuel Pepys.
Read more - 185 books
Kenneth Grahame
Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) was a Scottish writer, most famous for one of the all-time classics of children’s literature, The Wind in the Willows, as well as for The Reluctant Dragon.
Read more - 343 books
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was one of the handful of indisputably great writers of this century. Troubled by ill-health throughout his life, he largely withdrew from society in 1907, to work on his incomparable 16-volume novel ‘In Search of Lost Time’. He lived long enough to see the publication of its first volumes, and to experience its universal reception as a work of genius.
Read more - 291 books
Willa Cather
Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence in Grand Manan, New Brunswick.
Read more - 817 books
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and biographer. His work centres on his New England home and often features moral allegories with Puritan inspiration, with themes revolving around inherent good and evil. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism.
Read more - 510 books
Gaston Leroux
Gaston Leroux was a French journalist and playwright. Born in Paris in 1868, he abandoned a law career to become a court reporter and theater critic; as an international correspondent, he witnessed and covered the 1905 Russian Revolution. Two years later, Leroux left journalism to focus on writing fiction. He authored dozens of novels and short stories, and is considered one of the preeminent French writers of detective fiction. His most famous work, The Phantom of the Opera, was originally serialized in 1909 and 1910. He died in 1927.
Read more - 165 books
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin grew up studying piano and reading Austen, Dickens, Goethe, and the Brontes. After birthing six children in twelve years, she became serious about writing and began to publish stories in Vogue and Atlantic Monthly. Chopin is known for her masterpiece, The Awakening, in addition to her novel, At Fault, and two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie.
Read more - 236 books
John Milton
John Milton is a famous English poet and intellectual known for his epic, Paradise Lost.
Read more - 177 books
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was born into a family of slavery in early America. Douglass attributes his road to freedom as beginning with his being sent from the Maryland plantation of his birth to live in Baltimore as a young boy. There, he learned to read and, more importantly, learned the power of literacy. In early adolescence, he was returned to farm work, suffered abuse at the hands of cruel overseers, and witnessed abuse visited on fellow slaves. He shared his knowledge of reading with a secret "Sunday school" of 40 fellow slaves during his last years of bondage. In his early 20's, he ran away to the North and found refuge among New England abolitionists.
Read more - 177 books
John Keats
John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.
Read more - 343 books
James Joyce
James Joyce (1882–1941) is best known for his experimental use of language and his exploration of new literary methods. His subtle yet frank portrayal of human nature, coupled with his mastery of language, made him one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. Joyce’s use of “stream-of-consciousness” reveals the flow of impressions, half thoughts, associations, hesitations, impulses, as well as the rational thoughts of his characters. The main strength of his masterpiece novel, Ulysses (1922) lies in the depth of character portrayed using this technique. Joyce’s other major works include Dubliners, a collection of short stories that portray his native city, a semi-autobiographical novel called A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939).
Read more - 150 books
Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) was a Lebanese-American poet and artist. Born in the town of Bsharri, Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman Empire), he immigrated to the United States in 1895 and is best known for The Prophet, his book of prose poetry.
Read more - 1000 books
H. G. Wells
English author H. G. Wells is best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics, and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. He was born on September 21, 1866, and died on August 13, 1946.
Read more - 226 books
J. M. Barrie
J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan.
Read more - 68 books
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot, (1888-1965) recast 20th century English poetry with a whole new vocabulary of technique, giving voice to a bold, vibrantly original Modernist style. In addition to his poetry, his body of work includes many landmark critical essays, as well as plays such as and . In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Read more - 158 books
L. M. Montgomery
Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874–April 24, 1942) publicly known as L.M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908. Anne of Green Gables was an immediate success. The central character, Anne, an orphaned girl, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. The first novel was followed by a series of sequels. Montgomery went on to publish twenty novels as well as 500 short stories and poems. Because many of the novels were set on Prince Edward Island, Canada and the Canadian province became literary landmarks. She was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935.
Read more - 165 books
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a fellow and tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954 when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.
Read more - 291 books
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert (D. H.) Lawrence was a prolific English novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, literary critic and painter. His most notable works include Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers and Women in Love.
Read more - 575 books
H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction.
Read more - 214 books
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD. Born to an upper-class Roman family in 121, Aurelius was adopted by his uncle, the emperor Antoninus Pius, in 138. Aurelius studied Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and law, and was especially influenced by the Stoic thinker Epictetus. After Pius’s death, Aurelius succeeded the throne alongside his adoptive brother, Lucius Verus. His reign was marked by plague, numerous military conflicts, and the deaths of friends and family—including Lucius Verus in 169. Despite these struggles, the Empire flourished under Marcus’s rule as the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an era from 27 to 180 of relative peace and prosperity for the Roman Empire. Aurelius wrote his Meditations as spiritual exercises never intended for publication, and died at fifty-eight while on campaign against the Germanic tribes.
Read more - 131 books
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin in 1856, was essentially shy, yet created the persona of G.B.S., the showman, controversialist, satirist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into the English language: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities. After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Commonsense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews which were collected into several volumes: Music In London 1890-1894 (3 vols., 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols., 1931). He wrote five novels and some shorter fiction including The Black Girl in Search of God and some Lesser Tales and Cashel Byron's Profession. He conducted a strong attack on the London theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British theatre. His many plays fall into several categories: 'Plays Pleasant'; 'Plays Unpleasant'; comedies, chronicle-plays, 'metabiological Pentateuch' (Back to Methuselah, a series of plays) and 'political extravaganzas'. Shaw died in 1950.
Read more - 530 books
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was born to well-known parents: author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin. When Mary was sixteen, she met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devotee of her father’s teachings. In 1816, the two of them travelled to Geneva to stay with Lord Byron. One evening, while they shared ghost stories, Lord Byron proposed that they each write a ghost story of their own. Frankenstein was Mary’s contribution. Other works of hers include Mathilda, The Last Man, and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.
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