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To Kill a Mockingbird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with serious issues of rape and racial inequality.
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Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen. First published on 28 January 1813, it was her second published novel. Its manuscript was initially written between 1796 and 1797 in Steventon, Hampshire, where Austen lived in the rectory. Originally called First Impressions, it was never published under that title, and in following revisions it was retitled Pride and Prejudice.
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This novella, only 140 pages, was first
printed in it's entirety in Life Magazine Sept 1st 1952,
inspiring a buying frenzy selling over 5 million copies of the
magazine in just 2 days.
The story about an aging Cuban
fisherman wrangling a large marlin in the gulf stream was written in
1951 in Cuba and published in 1952. In 1953 it won the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction and led to Hemingway's nomination for the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1954.
Man's struggle against nature is the
resounding theme throughout the book as Hemingway portrays Santiago's
travails as an experienced fisherman facing a dry-spell of 85 days
before finally wrangling a prized marlin. Hemingway also highlights
the indomitable spirit of man while illustrating his ideal of
manliness and character in the strong and determined fisherman facing
danger and discomfort without complaint and with resolution, both in
the days it takes Santiago to kill the marlin, and as he fights off
the sharks that end up destroying his prized catch before he reaches
the coast. Some say that Hemingway's tale is a reflection of his own
determination to prove his writing career was not over, and the
portrayal of the sharks may echo the critics who had been claiming
for the ten years that his writing career, after the successful
release of For Whom the Bell Tolls
in 1940, was over.
The book is dedicated "To Charlie
Scribner And To Max Perkins," friends of Hemingway's that had
passed away before the book came out. Max Perkins, who also edited F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, died in 1947 and Scribner, who was
president of the publisher Charles Scribner's Sons, died in 1952.
The last work published by Hemingway
during his lifetime, signed first editions can sell upwards of
$15,000 - $17,000.
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Published in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking world and has been translated into all major languages. Since its publication with a $3.00 sticker, it has reportedly sold more than 65 million copies. The novel's antihero, Holden Caulfield, has become a cultural icon for teenage rebellion. Due to its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst, it has frequently been met with censorship challenges in the United States making it one of the most challenged books of the 20th century.
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John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
stands as a pivotal piece of American literature. The story follows
the Joad family (and thousands of others) as they are driven from the
Oklahoma farm where they are sharecroppers during the Great
Depression. The drought, economic hardship, and changes in financial
and agricultural industries send them searching for dignity and
honest work in the bountiful state of California.
The novel earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction in 1940, and inspired the classic film of the same
name the same year. The film starred Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, and
Steinbeck's words and ideas shine through that medium. In 1962,
Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for the body of
his work, and The Grapes of Wrath stands as his most
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Jane Eyre is a famous and influential novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published in London, England in 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. with the title Jane Eyre. An Autobiography under the pen name "Currer Bell". (Harper & Brothers of New York came out with the American edition in 1848.)
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Ulysses is a modernist novel by James Joyce. It was first
serialized in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and later
published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Originally, Joyce conceived of
Ulysses as a short story to be included in Dubliners, but decided instead to
publish it as a long novel, situated as a sort of sequel to A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, picking up Stephen Dedalus’s life over a year later.
Ulysses takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin.
Within the massive text of 265,000 words (not so “short”
anymore, eh?), divided in 18 episodes, Joyce radically shifts narrative style
with each new episode, completely abandoning the previously accepted notions of
plot, setting, and characters. The presentation of a fragmented reality through
interior perception in Ulysses, often through stream-of-consciousness, is one
of many reasons it is a paramount of Modernist literature.
Ulysses presents a series of parellels with Homer’s epic
poem Odyssey (Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus.) Not only can
correspondences be drawn between the main characters of each text — Stephen
Dedalus to Telemachus, Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, and Molly Bloom to Penelope,
but each of the 18 episodes of Ulysses reflects an adventure from the Odyssey.
In 1998, the
American publishing firm Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the
100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
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Written in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is widely
considered to be one of the author’s greatest works. Set in New York City and
Long Island during the Roaring Twenties, the focus of the story is (of course)
its title character, Jay Gatsby, and his unswerving desire to be reunited with
Daisy Buchanan, the love he lost five years earlier. However, Nick Carraway,
who happens to be both Gatsby’s neighbor and Daisy’s cousin, narrates Gatsby's journey
from poverty to wealth, into the arms of his beloved, and eventually to death.
The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly one of the greatest American
literary documents of the 1920s, the decade for which Fitzgerald himself coined
the term “Jazz Age.” However, in writing the book, Fitzgerald was in fact
holding up a mirror to the society of which he was a part. In true Modernist
fashion, The Great Gatsby addresses the social issues of the period — namely materialism
and displaced spirituality — that ultimately led the decline of the era.
The novel’s initial sales situation was less than
impressive; fewer than 25,000 copies were sold by Fitzgerald’s death in 1940.
But The Great Gatsby gained great popularity during WWII as the critical
mainstream began to embrace the author’s work. The Armed Services Editions
circulated 150,000 copies to troops alone. Today, The Great Gatsby has sold over
25 million copies worldwide, sells an additional 500,000 copies annually, and
is Scribner's most popular title. Ranked #2 on the Modern Library’s list of the
100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, the novel is also listed on
their Top 100 Novels as well as The Observer’s All-Time 100 Best Novels and
Time Magazine’s 100 Best Modern Novels.
The Great Gatsby has resulted in a number of adaptations,
including Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 major motion picture starring
Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, and Joel Edgerton.
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Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's only novel. It was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte. The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centers (as an adjective, Wuthering is a Yorkshire word referring to turbulent weather).
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Commonly named among the Great American novels, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain, is generally regarded as the
sequel to his earlier novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; however, in
Huckleberry Finn, Twain focused increasingly on the institution of
slavery and the South. Narrated by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn in Southern
antebellum vernacular, the novel gives vivid descriptions of people and
daily life along the Mississippi River while following the adventure of
Huck and a runaway slave, Jim, rafting their way to freedom.
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Set during World War 1, Ernest Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms is the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving
as an ambulance driver in the Italian army, and his love affair with an English
nurse named Catherine Barkley. The novel is semi-autobiographical, based on
Hemingway's own experiences serving in the Italian campaigns during the war.
While some assume the title of the work to be taken from a poem by 16th century
English dramatist George Peele, others believe it to be a simple pun of the
word “arms.”
A Farewell to Arms was first serialized in the
May-October issues Scribner's Magazine 1929. It was published in book form in
September of that year. As the work became available to the public just over
ten years after the November 1918 armistice, Hemingway assumed his audience
would recognize many of the references. In fact, certain basic information
isn't alluded to in the book at all, as it was common knowledge around the time
of publication.
The result of this immediacy? Arguably one of
the best novels written about World War I… ever. A Farewell to Arms was
Hemingway's first bestseller, affording him financial independence and
cementing his stature as a modern American writer. More specifically, the novel
and its content helped to established the author as a key member of the “Lost
Generation,” a subset of Modernist artists namely defined by their post-war
disillusionment. A Farewell to Arms is ranked 74th on Modern
Library’s “100 Best” English-language novels of the 20th century.
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Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and in later editions, Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. " Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. The first edition published in 1855 contained 12 poems on 95 pages. The final edition published contained almost 400 poems.
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A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With 200 million copies sold, it is the most printed original English book, the most printed and among the most famous works of fiction.
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Catch-22 is Joseph Heller’s first novel and his most
acclaimed work. Set during World War II, the novel uses a distinctive non-chronological
third-person omniscient narration, mainly focusing on the life of Captain John
Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Occasionally, the narrator
also shows us how other characters, such as the chaplain or Hungry Joe,
experience the world around them. As the novel’s events are described from the
different points of view through separate out-of-sequence storylines, the
timeline of Catch-22 develops along with the plot.
The novel's title refers to a plot device that is repeatedly
invoked in the story. Catch-22 starts as a set of paradoxical requirements
whereby airmen mentally unfit to fly did not have to, but could not actually be
excused. By the end of the novel, the phrase is invoked as the explanation for many
unreasonable restrictions. “Catch-22” has since entered the English language and
can be understood as an unsolvable logic puzzle, a difficult situation from
which there is no escape.
Upon publication, the book was not a best seller in the
United States. It was merely a cult favorite until the publication of the
paperback edition in 1962, which set record sales — most likely benefitting from a
national debate about the pointlessness of the Vietnam War. Catch-22 has since
been ranked as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century
by the Modern Library, one of the 20th century's top 100 novels by the
Radcliffe Publishing Course, and one of the 100 greatest novels of all time by
The Observer.
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The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come is a Christian allegory written by John Bunyan and published in February, 1678. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of English literature, has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been out of print.
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Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens first serialised in All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It is regarded as one of his greatest and most sophisticated novels, and is one of his most enduringly popular novels; having been adapted for stage and screen over 250 times.
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Animal Farm is a dystopian novella by George Orwell. Published in England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a democratic socialist and a member of the Independent Labour Party for many years, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and was suspicious of Moscow-directed Stalinism after his experiences with the NKVD during the Spanish Civil War.
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War and Peace, a Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy, is considered one of the world's greatest works of fiction. It is regarded, along with Anna Karenina (1873–7), as his finest literary achievement. Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. First titled '1805' the first installment was published in the January 1865 edition of Russkiy Vestnik. It ran in serial form for 2 years before Tolstoy reworked much of the manuscript before publishing it in 1869 as War and Peace.
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The Wind in the Willows is a classic of children's literature by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie. The Wind in the Willows was in its thirty-first printing when then-famous playwright, A. A. Milne, who loved it, adapted a part of it for stage as Toad of Toad Hall in 1929.
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"Including selections from The Rebecca notebook and Other memories"--Cover.
"...new edition of the beloved classic..."--P. [4] of cover.
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Margaret Mitchell only published one complete novel, but it was quite the book - Gone With the Wind earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and National Book Award for 1936. The epic romance tale set in and around Atlanta, Georgia during the American Civil War has remained a bestseller, even before the equally popular film starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh was made in 1939.
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The full title of Charles Dickens' most famous work is technically A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas. This novella was published on December 19, 1843, and the first edition run of 6000 copies were sold out by Christmas Eve of that year. The publication of the first edition was fraught with complications, and even though the book was received to positive reviews, profits of the book fell far below Dickens' expectations, and the financial strain caused rifts between Dickens and the original publisher, Chapman & Hall.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George
Orwell has become the definitive dystopian novel of the twentieth
century. Originally published on June 8, 1949 by Secker and
Warburg in the United Kingdom, the book follows the main character,
Winston Smith, through his disillusionment with totalitarianism and a
doomed struggle of resistance. George Orwell is a pen-name, Orwell's
real name was Eric Blair. -
