Harvard's Classics Collection: Complete 71 Volumes : The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction - The Classic Literature & The Greatest Works of Fiction from Antics to Modern Age

Harvard's Classics Collection: Complete 71 Volumes stands as a monumental anthology encompassing a vast range of influential literary works that have shaped Western thought and culture. Cueing from classical antiquity to the threshold of the modern era, this collection astutely merges genres, philosophical discourse, dramatic narratives, and lyrical poetry to sketch the evolution of human intellect and aesthetics over millennia. Its robust selection brings together the elemental compositions of ancient tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides with the enlightened prose of the Renaissance and the keen insights of the Enlightenment philosophers, displaying a deliberate assembly that highlights humanism's pervasive reach and the ongoing dialogue between the past and present intellectual epochs. The anthology benefits immensely from the illustrious backgrounds of its authors—figures who not only penned foundational texts but also actively participated in the construction of intellectual frameworks across various epochs. Bringing together dramatists, philosophers, poets, and scientists such as Shakespeare, Dante, Plato, Darwin, and Kant, the collection offers a nuanced perspective on influential historical and cultural movements, from ancient philosophies to the scientific revolutions and literary reawakenings. The diversity in authorship and thought underscores a rich tapestry of human inquiry and the collective urge towards understanding and expressing the human condition. For the discerning reader, Harvard's Classics Collection provides an unparalleled journey through the corridors of human thought and expression. Each volume serves as a gateway to the multitude of voices, styles, and themes that have defined and redefined our cultural and intellectual landscapes. This anthology not only educates but also inspires a deeper appreciation for the complexities and breadth of human achievements. It is an essential resource for scholars, educators, and anyone with a keen interest in the legacy of human thought and its relevance to contemporary discussions and understandings.

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193 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.
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227 books
John Milton
John Milton is a famous English poet and intellectual known for his epic, Paradise Lost.
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151 books
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was a founding father of the United States of America. He was a printer, publisher, author, inventor, scientist, and diplomat. Franklin is known for signing and drafting the Declaration of Independence, representing America during the American Revolution, and making significant contributions to science.
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141 books
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading proponent of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. He was ordained as a Unitarian minister at Harvard Divinity School but served for only three years before developing his own spiritual philosophy based on individualism and intuition. His essay Nature is arguably his best-known work and was both groundbreaking and highly controversial when it was first published. Emerson also wrote poetry and lectured widely across the US.
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142 books
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) love of natural history led him to the Beagle. Twenty years after his voyage, his landmark work On the Origin of Species sparked immediate controversy and has continued to do so for 150 years. David Quammen is an acclaimed natural history writer and the author of The Song of the Dodo and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, in addition to nearly a dozen other books.
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177 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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71 books
Wilhelm Grimm
With his brother Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm collected and published Germanic and European folk and fairy tales during the early to mid 19th century. Some of the world’s most classic and beloved stories have been published by them, including “Rumplestiltskin,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and many more.
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628 books
Hans Christian Andersen
One of the most prolific and beloved writers of all time, Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen is best known for his fairy tales. Born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805, Andersen published his first story at 17. In all, he wrote more than 150 stories before his death in 1875.
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74 books
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is regarded by critics as one of the finest lyric poets in the English language.
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36 books
George Gordon Byron
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), commonly known as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement.
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187 books
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri, born in Florence in 1265, became one of the leading lyric poets in Italy as a young man. He was exiled for political reasons, and in the last fifteen years of his life composed The Divine Comedy, of which the Inferno is the most-read part today.
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270 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.
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491 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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119 books
David Hume
David Hume is a widely recognized Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, and essayist. His most known works are A Treatise of Human Nature, concerning the Principles of Morals, and Enquiries concerning Human Understanding.
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111 books
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
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751 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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193 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.
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139 books
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and is known as one of the foremost thinkers of Enlightenment. He is widely recognized for his contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.
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33 books
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau was a writer, composer, and philosopher that is widely recognized for his contributions to political philosophy. His most known writings are Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract.
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51 books
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy. An Englishman, Hobbes was heavily influenced by his country's civil war and wrote his preeminent work, Leviathan, about the relationship between the individual and the government during that period. Hobbes was a scholar, phauthoilosopher, and the author of several works on political and religious philosophy.
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33 books
Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory was an English writer and the author of Le Morte d'Arthur.
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75 books
Niccolo Machiavelli
Niccolo Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy at a time when the country was in political upheaval. Italy was divided between four dominant city-states, and each of these was continually at the mercy of the stronger foreign governments of Europe. Since 1434 the wealthy Medici family ruled Florence. A reform movement, begun in 1494, temporarily interrupted their rule in which the young Machiavelli became an important diplomat. When the Medici family regained power in 1512 with the help of Spanish troops, Machiavelli was tortured and removed from public life. For the next 10 years he devoted himself to writing history, political philosophy, and even plays. He ultimately gained favor with the Medici family and was called back to public duty for the last two years of his life.
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1461 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.
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30 books
Thomas Dekker
Thomas Dekker is a Dutch former professional cyclist whose talent on the bike quickly took him to the top of the sport. He raced for The Netherlands in the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, won two Dutch National Time Trial Championships, and captured victories in the 2006 Tirreno-Adriatico and the 2007 Tour of Romandie. He rode for the Dutch Rabobank superteam and then Silence-Lotto before a retroactively tested sample returned positive for EPO. In 2009, Dekker was suspended for two years for the drug violation, and it was later confirmed during Operaction Puerto that Dekker was among the clients of Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. After his suspension, Dekker joined the American Garmin Development Team and rode for Garmin-Barracuda from 2012-2014. Dekker claims to have ridden clean for Jonathan Vaughters and he became a popular rider in the American peloton. He retired after an attempt on the World Hour Record in 2015.
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953 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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505 books
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott was born in Scotland in 1771 and achieved international fame with his work. In 1813 he was offered the position of Poet Laureate, but turned it down. Scott mainly wrote poetry before trying his hand at novels. His first novel, Waverley, was published anonymously, as were many novels that he wrote later, despite the fact that his identity became widely known.
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348 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.
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699 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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501 books
Washington Irving
Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century.
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1175 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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876 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.
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516 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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677 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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290 books
Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev was a Russian writer whose work is exemplary of Russian Realism. A student of Hegel, Turgenev’s political views and writing were heavily influenced by the Age of Enlightenment. Among his most recognized works are the classic Fathers and Sons, A Sportsman’s Sketches, and A Month in the Country. Turgenev is today recognized for his artistic purity, which influenced writers such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Turgenev died in 1883, and is credited with returning Leo Tolstoy to writing as the result of his death-bed plea.
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Harvard's Classics Collection: Complete 71 Volumes : The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction - The Classic Literature & The Greatest Works of Fiction from Antics to Modern Age

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

90 Masterpieces You Must Read (Vol.1) : Novels, Poetry, Plays, Short Stories, Essays, Psychology & Philosophy: The Madman, Moby-Dick, Siddhartha, Crime and Punishment, Hamlet, Great Expectations, Little Women, Meditations, The Einstein Theory, Heart of Darkness, The Red Badge of Courage

180 Masterpieces You Should Read Before You Die (Vol.1) : Leaves of Grass, Siddhartha, Middlemarch, The Jungle, Macbeth, Moby-Dick, A Study in Scarlet, The Call of the Wild, Huckleberry Finn,, The Way We Live Now, Sister Carrie...

10 Masterpieces You Have To Listen To Before You Die: Vol. 1

Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad, Miguel de Cervantes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Sun Tzu, H.G. Wells, Plato

Symposium

Plato

Library of Masterpieces - 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

Harvard Classics: All 71 Volumes

The Bucket List Edition: The Greatest Classics in One Volume : Leaves of Grass, Siddhartha, Dubliners, Les Misérables, Don Quixote, Art of War, Middlemarch, Swann's Way…

The Ultimate Book Club: 180 Books You Should Read (Vol.1) : Leaves of Grass, Siddhartha, Middlemarch, The Jungle, Macbeth, Moby-Dick, A Study in Scarlet…

150 Classics You Should Read Before You Die : Romeo and Juliet, Emma, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Tom Sawyer, Faust, Notre Dame de Paris, Dubliners, Odyssey

Harvard Classics: Complete 51-Volume Anthology : The Greatest Works of World Literature

The Republic

Plato

Marcus Aurelius

John Milton

Benjamin Franklin

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Charles Darwin

Miguel de Cervantes

Wilhelm Grimm

Hans Christian Andersen

Percy Bysshe Shelley

George Gordon Byron

Dante Alighieri

Jonathan Swift

Daniel Defoe

David Hume

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Robert Louis Stevenson

Henry David Thoreau

Immanuel Kant

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Malory

Niccolo Machiavelli

William Shakespeare

Thomas Dekker

Jane Austen

Walter Scott

George Eliot

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Washington Irving

Mark Twain

Henry James

Victor Hugo

Leo Tolstoy

Ivan Turgenev