90 Masterpieces of World Literature (Vol.II) : Novels, Poetry, Plays, Short Stories, Essays, Psychology & Philosophy

In '90 Masterpieces of World Literature (Vol.II)', the reader encounters an expansive tableau of human thought and emotion, as painted by some of the greatest writers from diverse eras and geographies. This anthology embraces a wide array of literary styles—from the tight-knit social narratives of Jane Austen to the expansive philosophical musings of Nietzsche, and from the stark realism of Emile Zola to the fantastical realms of Bram Stoker. Set within the context of world literature, this collection shines a spotlight on profound themes such as human agency, moral conflict, and the endless pursuit of happiness, while including influential works that have shaped the literary canon and continued to inspire generations of readers and writers alike. The backgrounds of the authors featured in this volume are as varied as their writing styles, encompassing different centuries, continents, and cultures, thus providing a rich mosaic of historical and cultural perspectives. Figures like Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky share pages with Rabindranath Tagore and Cao Xueqin, each contributing uniquely to themes ranging from societal critique to explorations of individual identity within the broader human experience. This anthology not only showcases works rooted in the Western canon but also opens doors to Eastern philosophies and narratives, enhancing the reader's understanding through a global dialogue of literary art. '90 Masterpieces of World Literature (Vol.II)' is an essential volume for any lover of literature. It offers readers not only a cultural education but also a comprehensive experience of the complexities of human existence through the ages. This collection promises fruitful dialogue between the myriad themes and diverse stylistic approaches of its authors, making it an invaluable resource for both the seasoned scholar and the enthusiastic novice eager to delve into the riches of world literature.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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J. M. Barrie
J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence in Grand Manan, New Brunswick.
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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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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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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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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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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, and critic. Best known for his macabre prose work, including the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his writing has influenced literature in the United States and around the world.
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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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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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Gaston Leroux
Gaston Leroux was a French journalist and playwright. Born in Paris in 1868, he abandoned a law career to become a court reporter and theater critic; as an international correspondent, he witnessed and covered the 1905 Russian Revolution. Two years later, Leroux left journalism to focus on writing fiction. He authored dozens of novels and short stories, and is considered one of the preeminent French writers of detective fiction. His most famous work, The Phantom of the Opera, was originally serialized in 1909 and 1910. He died in 1927.
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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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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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Washington Irving
Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was born in Moscow, as the second son of a former army doctor. In 1846 he joined a group of utopian socialists. He was arrested in 1849 during a reading of a radical letter, and sentenced to death. He spent four years in a convict prison in Siberia, after which he was obliged to enlist in the army. Dostoyevsky’s own harrowing experiences were the inspiration for the novel Crime and Punishment.
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John Milton
John Milton is a famous English poet and intellectual known for his epic, Paradise Lost.
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D.H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 2, 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic, and painter.
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George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin in 1856, was essentially shy, yet created the persona of G.B.S., the showman, controversialist, satirist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into the English language: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities. After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Commonsense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews which were collected into several volumes: Music In London 1890-1894 (3 vols., 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols., 1931). He wrote five novels and some shorter fiction including The Black Girl in Search of God and some Lesser Tales and Cashel Byron's Profession. He conducted a strong attack on the London theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British theatre. His many plays fall into several categories: 'Plays Pleasant'; 'Plays Unpleasant'; comedies, chronicle-plays, 'metabiological Pentateuch' (Back to Methuselah, a series of plays) and 'political extravaganzas'. Shaw died in 1950.
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Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Siren's of Titan in 1959 and established him as ""a true artist"" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene has declared, ""one of the best living American writers.""
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90 Masterpieces of World Literature (Vol.II) : Novels, Poetry, Plays, Short Stories, Essays, Psychology & Philosophy

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Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens, Tiny Fisscher

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Charles Dickens

Jane Austen

Robert Louis Stevenson

Leo Tolstoy

Kenneth Grahame

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Daniel Defoe

Jules Verne

Jonathan Swift

James Fenimore Cooper

J. M. Barrie

Alexandre Dumas

Gustave Flaubert

Victor Hugo

Walter Scott

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Jerome K. Jerome

Thomas Hardy

Willa Cather

Edith Wharton

Kate Chopin

Henry James

Ivan Turgenev

Virginia Woolf

Benjamin Franklin

Edgar Allan Poe

Wilkie Collins

Bram Stoker

Gaston Leroux

H. G. Wells

Joseph Conrad

Washington Irving