Library of Masterpieces - 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

The Centennial Library is an essential collection of timeless masterpieces from various genres and eras. This carefully chosen selection spans the vast landscape of world literature, offering readers a timeless journey through the most influential and enduring works:

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)

Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)

Paradise Lost (John Milton)

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

Emma (Jane Austen)

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë)

Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)

Middlemarch (George Eliot)

Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)

Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)

Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)

Dracula (Bram Stoker)

A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle)

The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)

Sons and Lovers (D. H. Lawrence)

Ulysses (James Joyce)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

A Room with a View (E. M. Forster)

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)

Animal Farm (George Orwell)

The Time Machine (H. G. Wells)

Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)

The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis)

The Screwtape Letters (C. S. Lewis)

Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)

The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

The Call of the Wild (Jack London)

Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)

The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)

The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

On the Road (Jack Kerouac)

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)…

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Library of Masterpieces - 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime
illiam Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Louisa May Alcott, Miguel de Cervantes, John Milton, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, H. G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kenneth Grahame, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm Lowry, Ford Madox Ford, Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers, L. Frank Baum, L. M. Montgomery, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Erich Maria Remarque, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas, Henrik Ibsen, Rudyard Kipling, Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Dante Alighieri, Niccolò Machiavelli
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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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181 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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223 books
John Milton
John Milton is a famous English poet and intellectual known for his epic, Paradise Lost.
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965 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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405 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.
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311 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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159 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.
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345 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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1551 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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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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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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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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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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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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541 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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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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539 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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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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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.
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259 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.
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284 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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466 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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74 books
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.
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214 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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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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426 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).
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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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177 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.
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150 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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1112 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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1088 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.
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371 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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145 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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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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389 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.
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124 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.
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161 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.
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221 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.
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11 books
Richard Wright
Richard Wright won international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the black experience. He stands today alongside such African-American luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and two of his books, Native Son and Black Boy, are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. He died in 1960.
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432 books
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.
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17 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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22 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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21 books
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.
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358 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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151 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.
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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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283 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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48 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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237 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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31 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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272 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.
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1176 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.
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497 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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355 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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853 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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644 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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204 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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195 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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191 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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97 books
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolo Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance.
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Library of Masterpieces - 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

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Library of Masterpieces - 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

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A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies

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National Geographic

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Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension

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101 Libros Imprescindibles Para Leer En Tu Vida

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Analectas

Confucio

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Alexandra Popoff

Louisa May Alcott

Miguel de Cervantes

John Milton

Jane Austen

Charlotte Brontë

Emily Brontë

Anne Brontë

George Eliot

Charles Dickens

Thomas Hardy

Jonathan Swift

Daniel Defoe

Joseph Conrad

Robert Louis Stevenson

Mary Shelley

Bram Stoker

Arthur Conan Doyle

Wilkie Collins

Oscar Wilde

T. S. Eliot

D. H. Lawrence

James Joyce

Virginia Woolf

Aldous Huxley

George Orwell

H. G. Wells

Lewis Carroll

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Kenneth Grahame

C. S. Lewis

Mark Twain

Jack London

Herman Melville

Ernest Hemingway

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Edith Wharton

Walt Whitman

Kate Chopin

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Richard Wright

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Margaret Mitchell

Sylvia Plath

Carson McCullers

L. Frank Baum

L. M. Montgomery

Leo Tolstoy

Ivan Turgenev

Thomas Mann