50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die : The Secret Garden, The Odyssey, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Scarlet Letter, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula and others

50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die is the book that everyone should read to understand themselves and each other. The authors and works for this book were selected, as a result of numerous studies, analysis of the texts over the past 100 years and the demand for readers. It must be read in order to understand the world around us, its history, to recognize the heroes, to understand the winged expressions and jokes that come from these literary works. Reading these books will mean the discovery of a world of self-development and self-expression for each person. These books have been around for decades, and sometimes centuries, for the time they recreate, the values they teach, the point of view, or simply the beauty of words.

This volume includes famous works:

Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden

Homer - The Iliad

Homer - The Odyssey

Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

Charles Dickens - Bleak House

Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist

Lyman Frank Baum - The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House Of The Seven Gables

Thomas Hardy - Jude The Obscure

Robert Louis Stevenson -The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island

Henry Haggard - King Solomon's Mines

Wilkie Collins - The Woman In White

H. G. Wells - The Island Of Doctor Moreau

Sir Walter Scott - Ivanhoe

Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone A Romance

Lucy Maud Montgomery - Anne Of Green Gables

Louisa May Alcott - Little Women

Henry Fielding - Amelia

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

Euripides - Medea

Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime And Punishment

Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin A Romance Of Russian Life In Verse

James Fenimore Cooper - The Last Of The Mohicans

Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe

Joseph Conrad - Heart Of Darkness

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels

William Shakespeare - Romeo And Juliet

William Shakespeare - Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark

William Shakespeare - Othello

Oscar Wilde - The Picture Of Dorian Gray

John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come

Charles Darwin - The Origin Of Species Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life

Alfred Tennyson - Idylls Of The King

Bram Stoker - Dracula

James Joyce - Ulysses

Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy

Howard Pyle - Robin Hood

Jane Austen - Emma

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

Thomas Hardy - Tess Of The D'urbervilles A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented

Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron

Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Book

More by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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242 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).
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1552 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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656 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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541 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.
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684 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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541 books
Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) began his literary career writing articles and short stories for Dickens' periodicals. He published a biography of his father and a number of plays, but his reputation rests on his novels. Collins is well known for his mystery, suspense, and crime writings. He is best known for his novels in the emerging genres of Sensation and Detective fiction.
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772 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.
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78 books
Sir 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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281 books
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942), was a Canadian author best known for her series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, which was an immediate success. The first novel was followed by a series of sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish 20 novels as well as 500 short stories and poems. She was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
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550 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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453 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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1327 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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617 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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257 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.
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517 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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732 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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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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1474 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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838 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.
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166 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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537 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.
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285 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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190 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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112 books
Howard Pyle
The work of American illustrator and author Howard Pyle (1853–1911) has appeared in more than 3,500 publications, and in his lifetime, he became one of the country's most famous illustrators. On his death in 1911, the New York Times called Pyle "the father of American magazine illustration as it is known to-day." He is best known for his 1883 novel, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.
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964 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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19 books
Emily Bronte
Emily Jane Brontë was a novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature.
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645 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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50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die : The Secret Garden, The Odyssey, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Scarlet Letter, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula and others

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Library of Masterpieces - 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

The Secret Garden

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