The Great Classics Library

The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or One Thousand and One Nights
Anonymous

Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin and his lamp, Ali Baba - these are only some of the more famous and enduring tales from this rich collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment. The work as we have it was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Turkish, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezar Afsan (Persian: A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.

The Upanishads
Anonymous; trans. Swami Paramananda

The Upanishads are philosophical texts considered to be an early source of Hindu religion. More than 200 are known, of which the first dozen or so, the oldest and most important, are variously referred to as the principal, main (mukhya) or old Upanishads. The oldest of these, the Brihadaranyaka, Jaiminiya Upanisadbrahmana and the Chandogya Upanishads, were composed during the pre-Buddhist era of India, while the Taittiriya, Aitareya and Kausitaki, which show Buddhist influence, must have been composed after the 5th century BCE. The remainder of the mukhya Upanishads are dated to the last few centuries BCE. New Upanishads were still composed in the medieval and early modern period: discoveries of newer Upanishads were being reported as late as 1926. One, the Muktika Upanishad, predates 1656 and contains a list of 108 canonical Upanishads, including itself as the last. However, several texts under the title of "Upanishads" originated right up to the first half of the 20th century, some of which did not deal with subjects of Vedic philosophy. The newer Upanishads are known to be imitations of the mukhya Upanishads.

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen

Elisabeth and Darcy - need one say more? This was Austen's second published novel, and its alliterative title may have been no more than an attempt to capitalize on its predecessor, "Sense and Sensibility." -- The film world owes a great debt to "Pride and Prejudice", which has been repeatedly put on the big screen: in 1940, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, inf 2003 with Kam Heskin and Orlando Seale, in 2005 with Keira Knightley (in an Oscar-nominated performance) and Matthew Macfadyen. The BBC has presented two versions: in 1995 with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and in 1980 version with Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul. Stage versions have been both spoken and sung.

Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen

The story of the Dashwood sisters, Austen's first published novel. It has, to say the least, endured well. Film versions include Ang Lee's 1995 version (adapted by Emma Thompson) and a Tamil version called "Kandukondain Kandukondain " (2000). A 1981 serial directed by Rodney Bennett appeared on TV, as did another in 2008 adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by John Alexander.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Alice in Wonderland)
Lewis Carroll

Curiouser and curiouser... What was there about Alice Liddell that attracted not one, but two of the enduring artists of her time to immortalize her? The nineteenth century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron has left us a picture of a striking young brunette, then a teen. But by then she had already been photographed, and made immortal, by the brilliant if (luckily for us) slightly eccentric mathematician Charles Dodgson, whose whimsical attempts to amuse his then little friend have virtually created their own mythology for subsequent generations. The White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, the Duchess and the Queen of Hearts have inspired everybody from Walt Disney to Jefferson Airplane. A true cultural artifact and a must-read at every age.

Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There
Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)'s "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1871)is the sequel to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865). In a number of ways it is a kind of mirror image of Wonderland: the first book begins outdoors, in the warm month of May (May 4),[1] uses frequent changes in size as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of playing cards; the second opens indoors on a snowy, wintry night exactly six months later, on November 4 (the day before Guy Fawkes Night),[2] uses frequent changes in time and spatial directions as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of chess. In it, there are many mirror themes, including opposites, time running backwards, and so on.

Don Quixote de la Mancha
Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age in the Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.
This translation, by John Ormsby, includes a look at the author's life.
Alonso Quixano (or Quijano), a retired country gentleman nearing 50 years of age, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes their every word to be true, despite the fact that many of the events in them are clearly impossible. Quixano eventually appears to other people to have lost his mind due to lack of sleep and food from dedicating all of his time to reading.

A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" - Charles Dickens' stirring tale of the French Revolution. One edition of this novel was an Oprahs Book Club pick, together with "Great Expectations".

Bleak House
Charles Dickens

One could readily divide this sprawling novel into several fairly large ones - a satire on bureacracy at its worst (in this, the Chancery Court system), an orphan's discovery of the secrets around her birth, a bona fide murder mystery complete with a master detective (how one would have loved to have seen a series of "Inspector Bucket" novels)... And with this Dickens' usual plethora of memorable, sometimes admirable, sometimes despicable characters and his fierce anger about social injustice incarnated in the plight of the hapless Jo.

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

Murdstone, Micawber, Steerforth, Heep, Peggoty, Betsey Trotwood, Tommy Traddles, Rosa Dartle, Dora, Agnes.... "Barkis is willin'"; "TAKE CARE OF HIM HE BITES"... How much treasure of character and dialogue lies in this one work? "It is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind" - this is Dickens' own heart cry, only one piece of his true-life story that made it into the most autobiographical of his novels. And perhaps the most beloved - which is saying much.

Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens

What inspired Dickens to tackle this theme? A man so obsessed with having a male heir that he neglects and even abuses the daughter who adores him. Not the least of Dickens' accomplishments is that he finds nobility in the relentlessly oblivious Dombey Sr. - a very hard man to like. The jewel and heart of the novel, though, is little Florence, a cousin to Little Nell, and who might be almost as unbelievable in her dedication to a heartless father were the real world not so filled with equally devoted daughters trying to win a parents' love.
Too, this is not the first time Dickens painted the bond between a brother and a sister, but the young age of "Flo" and Paul here makes it all the more heartrending. With this, a beautiful woman enslaved by her own beauty and its uses, a stolid admirable sailor and a truly vile villain whose ultimate comeuppance is almost gleeful in its extremity.

Little Dorrit
Charles Dickens

A financial scandal straight out of today's headlines makes this tale as relevant as Trollope's "The Way We Live Now", but this novel is rich too with Dickens' own experience of debtor's prison and withering satire of implacable bureaucracy. The incidental characters - Doyce, the computer nerd of his time, Pancks, the walking lesson in not judging by appearances, the chillingly ambivalent Miss Wade - linger as hauntingly as the fragile yet indomitable Amy Dorrit.

Great Expectations
Charles Dickens

First published serially in All the Year Round in 1860-61, published as a book in 1861, this novel was one of Dickens' greatest critical and popular successes. It tells of the coming-of-age of Pip (Philip Pirrip), raised in the marshes of Kent by his harsh sister and her good-tempered husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. One day the young Pip helps a convict escape. Later sent to live with Miss Havisham, a woman driven half-mad years by being abandoned on her wedding day, he becomes enamored of the orphaned Estella, whom Miss Havisham is teaching to torment men with her beauty. When an anonymous benefactor helps him, Pip assumes it is Miss Havisham. But he is wrong, about that, and a number of other things, and only learns wisdom through loss and pain. An edition of this novel was chosen for Oprah's Book Club, together with "A Tale of Two Cities".

Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens

"Please sir, can I have some more?" - Even if you've never read this poignant tirade against workhouses and the lot of the poor, no doubt you feel like you know the story. But despite being seen as a musical and numerous film versions starting in 1909 and going up to Roman Polanski's 2005 version, and of course the inevitable BBC version, the book still holds riches that can only be found on the page.

Our Mutual Friend
Charlles Dickens

Before its cameo on the hit show "Lost", this novel had a certain celebrity of its own. The opening alone would make it memorable, a bit of the Gothic that also paints the Hexams' poverty in the most desperate terms. This followed so soon by a society dinner. Dickens has his usual field day with the better-off class of arriviste, but also rather grimly shows when aspirations turn sour at the lower end of the economic scale as well. Bradley Headstone (subtle) is a cousin to Shakespeare's Angelo and Sophocles' Creon in his twisted rigidity. As always with Dickens, there is ample entertainment, wonderfully and randomly eccentric characters and more than a little pathos. All this and a mystery too (though Dickens took it lightly and rather expected the reader to get it early on).

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle

"It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes...round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man." One would like to have met Professor Joseph Bell, who apparently was so like the fictional Sherlock Holmes that Robert Louis Stevenson recognized the portrait from afar. At any rate, the character he inspired has long had his own life, is even a byword, and has inspired memorable performances from actors as different as Basil Rathbone and Robert Downy Jr. Since this book appeared, there have been many Sherlocks, with different styles and different signature traits. But here is the original to discover for the first time, or revisit like an old friend.

Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters

The Spoon River Anthology (1915), a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses.
"It is not strange that any one reading this much exploited book, with its ambitious 'creation'or rather, recreation 'of a whole community of personalities,' should, like Mr. William Marion Reedy, in whose paper, The Mirror, the poems originally appeared, be reminded of Balzac....the concentrated, purely psychological method, plus the austere, unemphatic style, which makes of these brief life-summariessome tragic, some tender, some simply grotesque or terrible so many self-epitaphs, is much more that of the Divine Comedy. Indeed, we half suspect that not only the somewhat bizarre invention, but also the grave, succinct, intense, moral tone, was derived directly from a reading of Dante.Just as the mediaeval Italian poet on his memorable stroll through the infernal regions, in Virgil's company, encounters the shades of his former fellow citizens of Florence, and listens to them as they tell the stories of their lives on earth, so Mr. Masters, eavesdropping, as it were, on the outskirts of a village cemetery, is able to report the veridic revelations of Spoon River's honouredand dishonoureddead. The result as, one by one, these glimmering ghosts emerge momentarily from their gloom, rehearse their ancient wrongs, or ironically read the lying descriptions on their tombstones, is the stripping stark naked of the collective moral, spiritual, and even physical life of an entire community....
While Spoon River purports to be a semi-rural farming community in our own Middle West, its precise location is of particular significance only as this has permitted the poet to study at first hand the figures which he evokes so vividly by virtue of a penetrating, almost morbid, imaginative sympathy, combined with powers of expression which, if not specifically those of the poet, reveal such general poetic qualities as even the analytical novelist himself must share if he is to be a genuine creative artist. Doubtless elsewhere there are little towns like Spoon River which, plumbed, would reveal an equal range and richness of character. Indeed, the charge most often formulated against American life as material for art, is its uniformity, its mediocrity. Hence what is really significant is that writers like Mr. Masters should at length appear to unearth and avail themselves of this native wealth, not merely in its superficially picturesque traitsour sectional story-tellers have sufficiently covered thesebut in its permanent human aspects."

Moby Dick
Herman Melville

Moby-Dick, also known as The Whale, first published in 1851, is widely considered to be a (perhaps THE) Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature.
The story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg. Ahab intends to take revenge.<<br> In Moby-Dick, Melville employs stylized language, symbolism, and metaphor to explore numerous complex themes. Through the main character's journey, the concepts of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of gods are all examined as Ishmael speculates upon his personal beliefs and his place in the universe. The narrator's reflections, along with his descriptions of a sailor's life aboard a whaling ship, are woven into the narrative along with Shakespearean literary devices such as stage directions, extended soliloquies and asides. The book portrays insecurity that is still seen today when it comes to non-human beings along with the belief that these beings understand and act like humans.
The story is based on actual events in which the whaleship Essex was attacked by a sperm whale while at sea and sank.
Melville wrote of it "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."

The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault

Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots.... Charles Perrault did not write these stories but he collected them and retold them in a witty way, like the elegant courtier he was, and so made them available to millions since, including the Brothers Grimm and a long list of filmmakers. This little volume is where it all started.

The Life of Christ
Ernest Renan

When it first appeared, this book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused some controversy, and enraged many Christians. But the book has remained in print ever since.

Pamela or Virtue Rewarded
Samuel Richardson

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, first published in 1740. The story was a bestseller of its time and was very widely read, even though it also received criticism for its perceived licentiousness.
It tells the story of a beautiful but poor 15-year old servant-maid named Pamela Andrews whose master, Mr. B, a nobleman, makes unwanted advances towards her after the death of his mother whose maid she was since the age of 12. Mr. B is infatuated with her, first by her looks and then her innocence and intelligence but his high rank hinders him from proposing marriage. He abducts her and locks her up in one of his estates and attempts to seduce and to rape her. She rejects him continually refusing to be his mistress though she begins to realize that she is falling in love with him. He intercepts and reads her letters to her parents and becomes even more enamored by her innocence and intelligence and her continuous attempts to escape. Her virtue is eventually rewarded when he shows his sincerity by proposing an equitable marriage to her as his legal wife. In the second part of the novel, Pamela attempts to accommodate herself to upper-class society and to build a successful relationship with him.

Ivanhoe, A Romance
Walter Scott

Ivanhoe is the story of one of the remaining Saxon noble families at a time when the English nobility was overwhelmingly Norman. It follows the Saxon protagonist, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is out of favour with his father for his allegiance to the Norman king, Richard I of England. The story is set in 1194, after the failure of the Third Crusade, when many of the Crusaders were still returning to Europe. King Richard, who had been captured by the Duke of Saxony on his way back, was believed to still be in the arms of his captors. The legendary Robin Hood, initially under the name of Locksley, is also a character in the story, as are his "merry men", including Friar Tuck and less so, Alan-a-Dale; Little John is merely mentioned. The character that Scott gave to Robin Hood in Ivanhoe helped shape the modern notion of this figure as a cheery noble outlaw.
Other major characters include Ivanhoe's intractable Saxon father, Cedric, a descendant of the Saxon King Harold Godwinson; various Knights Templar and churchmen; the loyal serfs Gurth the swineherd and the jester Wamba, whose observations punctuate much of the action; and the Jewish moneylender, Isaac of York, equally passionate of money and his daughter, Rebecca. The book was written and published during a period of increasing struggle for emancipation of the Jews in England, and there are frequent references to injustice against them.

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Mary Shelley

This novel needs no introduction - or maybe it does? Because this it the ORIGINAL tale which gave birth to so many movies, take-offs, imitations, etc. Shelley wrote the novel at eighteen, as part of a contest between herself and her famous housemates as to who could write the best horror tale (presumably, she won). This original version (told at first through letters) starts in an ice field in the North Pole and has a far darker if also tormented monster. Oh, and there's no Igor. Sorry...

The Jungle
Upton Sinclair

Though muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote this novel to portray the life of the immigrant in the United States, readers have focussed on the large portion addressing the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early-20th century, so that the book is now often interpreted and taught as only an exposure of the industry of meatpacking. Sinclair's own preoccupation however was the poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption of those in power. His observations of the state of turn-of-the-century labor were placed front and center for the American public to see (much as Charles Dickens' observations on the poor of London were placed before the English public in the very different but similarly motivated "A Christmas Carol"). Based on undercover work done in 1904, the novel was first published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist newspaper "Appeal to Reason". Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards at the behest of that magazine's publishers. After multiple rejections by publishers who found it too shocking for publication, he funded the first printing himself. It was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on February 28, 1906 and has been in print ever since.

The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
Tobias Smollett

At the beginning of the novel Peregrine is a young country gentleman, rejected by his cruel mother, ignored by his indifferent father, hated by his degenerate brother, and raised by Commodore Hawser Trunnion who is greatly attached to the boy. Peregrine's upbringing, education at Oxford, journey to France, his debauchery, bankruptcy, jailing at the Fleet, unexpected succeeding to the fortune of his father, his final repentance and marriage to his beloved Emilia all provide scope for Smollett's satire on human cruelty, stupidity, and greed. The novel is written as a series of adventures, with every chapter typically describing a new adventure. There is also a very long independent story, "The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality", inside the novel.
Peregrine Pickle features several amusing characters, most notably Commodore Hawser Trunnion, an old seaman and misogynist who lives in a "garrison" of a house with his former shipmates. Possibly, Trunnion's lifestyle helped Dickens to create Wemmick of Great Expectations. Another interesting character is Cadwallader Crabtree, an old misanthrope and Peregrine's friend, who amuses himself by playing ingenious jokes on the naive and gullible human creatures.
Smollett also caricatured many of his enemies in the novel, most notably Henry Fielding and the actor David Garrick. Fitzroy Henry Lee was supposedly the model for Hawser Trunnion.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Laurence Sterne

This novel, by the Irish-born English author Laurence Sterne, was written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Laurence Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view. The novel can be seen as an epilogue to the possibly unfinished work The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and also as an answer to Tobias Smollett's decidedly unsentimental Travels through France and Italy. (Sterne met Smollett during his travels in Europe, and strongly objected to his spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. He modeled the character of Smelfungus on him.)

Dracula, A Mystery Story
Bram Stoker

Published in 1897 by Irish author Bram Stoker, Dracula is not the first vampire novel, but it is certainly the most influential and introduces the now legendary vampire Count Dracula. It has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel and invasion literature. Structurally it is an epistolary novel, that is, told as a series of letters, diary entries, ships' logs, etc. Literary critics have examined many themes in the novel, such as the role of women in Victorian culture, conventional and conservative sexuality, immigration, colonialism, postcolonialism and folklore.
Before writing Dracula, Stoker spent several years researching European folklore and mythological stories of vampires.
The original 541-page manuscript of Dracula, believed to have been lost, was found in a barn in northwestern Pennsylvania during the early 1980s. It included the typed manuscript with many corrections, and handwritten on the title page was "THE UN-DEAD." The author's name was shown at the bottom as Bram Stoker. Author Robert Latham notes, "the most famous horror novel ever published, its title changed at the last minute."

Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel that, by one account, "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War".The novel is focussed on the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other charactersboth fellow slaves and slave ownersrevolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings. It was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States alone. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The book, and even more the plays it inspired, also helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people, many of which endure to this day. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned "mammy"; the "pickaninny" stereotype of black children; and the Uncle Tom, or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress. In recent years, these negative associations have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."

Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
Jonathan Swift

"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships", better known simply as "Gulliver's Travels" (1726, amended 1735), is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. The book became popular as soon as it was published (John Gay said in a 1726 letter to Swift that "it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery"; since then, it has never been out of print. It has inspired numerous on-screen versions as well as other retellings of the story and gave the English language words like "Yahoo" and "Lillipution".

The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington

This 1918 novel won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. It was the second novel in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, which included The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923, retitled National Avenue in 1927). Orson Welles directed an acclaimed film version of the book in 1942

Idylls of the King
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Idylls of the King, published between 1856 and 1885, is a cycle of twelve narrative poems which retells the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. The whole work recounts Arthur's attempt and failure to lift up mankind and create a perfect kingdom, from his coming to power to his death at the hands of the traitor Mordred. Individual poems detail the deeds of various knights, including Lancelot, Geraint, Galahad, and Balin and Balan, and also Merlin and the Lady of the Lake. There is little transition between Idylls, but the central figure of Arthur links all the stories. The poems were dedicated to the late Albert, Prince Consort.
Tennyson based his retelling primarily on Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and the Mabinogion, but with many expansions, additions, and several adaptations, a notable example of which is the fate of Guinevere. In Malory she is sentenced to be burnt at the stake but is rescued by Lancelot; in the Idylls Guinevere flees to a convent, is forgiven by Arthur, repents, and serves in the convent until she dies. Tennyson amended the traditional spellings of several names to fit the metre.
The Idylls are written in blank verse. Tennyson's descriptions of nature are derived from observations of his own surroundings, collected over the course of many years.

Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero is a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in 184748, satirizing society in early 19th-century Britain. The book's title comes from John Bunyan's allegorical story The Pilgrim's Progress, first published in 1678 and still widely read at the time of Thackeray's novel. Vanity fair refers to a stop along the pilgrim's progress: a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity, which is meant to represent man's sinful attachment to worldly things. The novel is now considered a classic, and has inspired several film adaptations. The character of Becky Sharp is based in part on Thackeray's maternal grandmother Harriet Becher. She abandoned her husband and children when she eloped with Captain Charles Christie. In 1806 shortly after the death of Christie and her husband she married Edward Butler, another army officer. Thackeray lived with his grandmother in Paris in the 1830s and again in the 1840s.

Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau

"Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions."

Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy

"Anna Karenina", which Tolstoy considered his first true novel, is widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction. Although Russian critics dismissed the novel on its publication as a "trifling romance of high life", Fyodor Dostoevsky declared it to be "flawless as a work of art". His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired "the flawless magic of Tolstoy's style", and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as "the best ever written". The novel is currently enjoying popularity as demonstrated by a recent poll of 125 contemporary authors by J. Peder Zane, published in 2007 in The Top Ten, which declared that Anna Karenina is the "greatest novel ever written".

Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne

"Around the World in Eighty Days" is Jules Verne's most popular book in English-speaking countries and yet does not include the slightest touch of his most famous genre: science fiction. Instead, he leveraged the growing and actual possibilities of his time to envision a voyage around the world filled with additional dramas (rescuing a fair maiden, being chased - like Jean Valjean and the modern "Fugitive" - by a policeman), taking his eager readers of the period through exotic lands (America being one of these). Some developments in transportation which inspired Verne were the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in America (1869), the linking of the Indian railways across the sub-continent (1870), and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). Despite the common image associated with the novel, one method the travelers do NOT use is a hot air balloon.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne

In "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", Jules Verne envisions the (then quite-limited) possibilities of submarines for both exploration and military use while exulting in highly dramatic images like an attack by a giant squid. As colorful and imaginative as it is, it was based on a number of real explorers of Verne's time and on the early submarines of Robert Fulton and the French navy. This nineteenth century novel remains very modern, serving as the basis for a number of films.

Candide
Voltaire

"Candide" is both a withering satire of the optimistic ideas of the philosopher Leibniz and an exuberant, often violent, picaresque novel. The naive "Candide" ('candid') is forced out of a sheltered life to wander and face the world's violence and treachery, all the while seeking his love Cunégonde and reuniting with his former tutor Pangloss. Some consider it the prolific Voltaire's greatest work; it is generally considered one of the world's great novels.

The Time Machine
H. G. Wells

What will the future be like? How often have we wondered. But who before Wells thought to imagine a machine that would take us there - a machine that has been re-thought in innumerable movies, novels and other media since? His future was one of divided races, as emblematic in their way as Swift's Yahoos and other races. But what has most remained from the idea which Wells imagined in this book is the idea that we might be able to visit time as we visit space, and the idea has never lost its hold on the popular imagination.

The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells

How many films have there been about aliens invading the Earth? All sprung from this nineteenth century work which itself continues to be reworked in a wide variety of media. As famous as some film versions have been, probably the most effective performance of the work came on radio, when Orson Welles managed to panic people who believed the Martians really were invading.

The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton

This novel from 1920 won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. It is set in upper class New York City in the 1870s. The New York Times Book Review called it "a brilliant panorama of New York 45 years ago." In 1993, Martin Scorcese made it into a film starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder. It is considered one of the major American novels.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde

The central image of this story is so powerful it has become a metaphor with the power of ancient myth: a man whose portrait grows old while he maintains an unnatural youthfulness - and contains to live a pleasure-centered, amoral life. Despite Wilde's claim that "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." the book has the power of an old-fashioned morality tale.