50 Timeless Masterpieces (Volume 1) : Essential Classics for a Rich Literary Journey

E-artnow invites readers on an enriching literary journey through a carefully curated selection of essential classics. This volume presents a diverse array of masterpieces that have shaped the landscape of literature and captivated the imaginations of generations:

Iliad & Odyssey (Homer)

Art of War (Sun Tzu)

The Republic (Plato)

The Divine Comedy (Dante)

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)

Paradise Lost (John Milton)

Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)

Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen)

Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol)

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)

Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)

Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle)

The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)

The Time Machine (H. G. Wells)

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling)

Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum)

Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)

The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)

The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

Ulysses (James Joyce)

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

The Screwtape Letters (C. S. Lewis)

The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)

Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)

On the Road (Jack Kerouac)

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

The Awakening (Kate Chopin)

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)

Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)

The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)

The Stranger (Albert Camus)

Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)

More by Homer

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194 books
Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu (544 B.C.–496 B.C.) was an ancient Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty, who has had a significant impact on Chinese and Asian history and culture, both as an author of The Art of War as well as through legend.
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219 books
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes (September 29, 1547 – April 22, 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel, Don Quixote, was considered the first modern European novel and is a classic of Western literature.
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210 books
John Milton
John Milton is a famous English poet and intellectual known for his epic, Paradise Lost.
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658 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.
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1351 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.
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516 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.
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580 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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1623 books
Alexandre Dumas
Alexander Dumas (1802–1870), author of more than ninety plays and many novels, was well known in Parisian society and was a contemporary of Victor Hugo. After the success of The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas dumped his entire fortune into his own Chateau de Monte Cristo-and was then forced to flee to Belgium to escape his creditors. He died penniless but optimistic.
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2615 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.
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803 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.
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864 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.
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545 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.
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919 books
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy grew up in Russia, raised by a elderly aunt and educated by French tutors while studying at Kazen University before giving up on his education and volunteering for military duty. When writing his greatest works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy drew upon his diaries for material. At eighty-two, while away from home, he suffered from declining health and died in Astapovo, Riazan in 1910.
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597 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.
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1761 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."
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1459 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.
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2924 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.
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1760 books
H. G. Wells
H.G. Wells is considered by many to be the father of science fiction. He was the author of numerous classics such as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and many more.
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970 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.
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1083 books
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. One of the most revered writers in recent history, many of his works are deemed classic literature. To this day, he maintains an avid following and reputation as one of the greatest storytellers of the past two centuries. In 1907, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1936, but his stories live on—even eighty years after his passing.
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861 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.
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719 books
L. Frank Baum
Lyman Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, on May 15, 1856. Over the course of his life, Baum raised fancy poultry, sold fireworks, managed an opera house, opened a department store, and an edited a newspaper before finally turning to writing. In 1900, he published his best known book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Eventually he wrote fifty-five novels, including thirteen Oz books, plus four “lost” novels, eighty-three short stories, more than two hundred poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings. Baum died on May 6, 1919. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California.
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32 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.
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821 books
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, where he lived until his death in 1924. Widely esteemed as one of the twentieth century's most important writers, he is the author of the novels The Trial and The Castle.
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433 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).
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769 books
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.
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134 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.
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141 books
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.
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28 books
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. She wrote four novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountains, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948) as well as The Life of Herod the Great, which she was still writing when she died; two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Every Tongue Got to Confess, 2001); a work of anthropological research, (Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); an international bestselling ethnographic work (Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” 2018); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1928. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida.
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31 books
Margaret Mitchell
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) was an American author and journalist. As a former newspaper reporter, she began Gone with the Wind in 1926. Only two people—the author and her husband—saw the manuscript before it reached the publisher. Gone with the Wind was awarded the National Book Award in 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, and is one of the most bestselling novels of all time.
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26 books
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.
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63 books
Thomas Mann
German essayist, cultural critic, and novelist, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Among his most famous works are Buddenbrooks, published when he was just twenty-six, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus.
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23 books
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. During World War II, he joined the Resistance movement in Paris, then became editor-in-chief of the newspaper Combat during the Liberation. A novelist, playwright, and essayist, he is most famous for his novels The Stranger and The Plague. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
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331 books
George Orwell
George Orwell, the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, was born in Bengal, India, in 1903. He was educated at Eton, became a policeman in Burma but suffered and studied poverty. His great works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are a product of his hatred of totalitarianism. His legacy of writing and political thought is much admired today.
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50 Timeless Masterpieces (Volume 1) : Essential Classics for a Rich Literary Journey

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The Iliad & The Odyssey : Homer's Epic Masterpieces of War, Heroism, and Myth

Homer, Zenith Horizon Publishing

The Odyssey :

Homer

The Iliad and Odyssey : Epic Masterpieces by Homer

Homer, Zenith Golden Quill

The Epic Poems Anthology : The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, and More Timeless Masterpieces

Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Zenith Evergreen Literary Co

The Iliad & The Odyssey : The Definitive Edition of Ancient Greece's Epic Masterpieces

Homer, Zenith Evergreen Literary Co

The Epic Poems Anthology

Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Zenith Crescent Moon Press

The Iliad and Odyssey : The Timeless Tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey

Homer, Zenith Crescent Moon Press

Ancient Greek Poetry. The Collected Works of Homer, Hesiod and Sappho : The Odyssey, Works and Days, Lyric Poetry

Homer, Hesiod, Sappho

The Homeric Hymns

Homer

10 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die, Vol.5 : The Odyssey, The Republic, Meditations, The Divine Comedy, Faust and others

Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Niccolo Machiavelli, Dante Alighieri, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy

HOMER: The Iliad & the Odyssey

Homer

The Iliad

Homer

Sun Tzu

Miguel de Cervantes

John Milton

Daniel Defoe

Jane Austen

Emily Brontë

Mary Shelley

Alexandre Dumas

Charles Dickens

Victor Hugo

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Gustave Flaubert

Leo Tolstoy

Herman Melville

Mark Twain

Robert Louis Stevenson

Arthur Conan Doyle

H. G. Wells

Joseph Conrad

Rudyard Kipling

Louisa May Alcott

L. Frank Baum

T. S. Eliot

Franz Kafka

James Joyce

Virginia Woolf

C.S. Lewis

Ernest Hemingway

Zora Neale Hurston

Margaret Mitchell

Sylvia Plath

Thomas Mann

Albert Camus

George Orwell