Classic Literature

Three noteworthy works by the remarkable mid-19th Century British sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Bronte: Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte, 1847), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte, 1847), and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Bronte, 1848).

Pride and Prejudice is the story of Mr and Mrs Bennet (minor gentry), their five daughters, and the various romantic adventures at their Hertfordshire residence of Longbourn. The parents' characters are greatly contrasted: Mr Bennet being a wise and witty gentleman; while Mrs Bennet is permanently distracted by the issue of marrying off her daughters at any cost. The reason for Mrs Bennet's obsession is that their estate will pass by law after Mr Bennet's death to his closest blood relative: his... more info>>

In the end, it was Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell (whom Huxley taught at Eton), whose vision of the future had the touch of prophecy. The modern world did not collapse into the cold, damp totalitarian hell Orwell described in his 1948 novel 1984. What has happened is closer to Huxley's vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World--a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering... more info>>

On Sunday morning, October seventh, 1849, Reuben A. Riley and his wife, Elizabeth Marine Riley, rejoiced over the birth of their second son. They called him James Whitcomb. This was in a shady little street in the shady little town of Greenfield, which is in the county of Hancock and the state of Indiana. The young James found a brother and a sister waiting to greet him--John Andrew and Martha Celestia, and afterward came Elva May--Mrs. Henry Eitel-- Alexander Humbolt and Mary Elizabeth, who, of... more info>>

PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Ion.

Forster's 1924 masterpiece, A Passage to India, is a novel about preconceptions and misconceptions and the desire to overcome the barrier that divides East and West in colonial India. It shows the limits of liberal tolerance, good intentions, and good will in sorting out the common problems that exist between two very different cultures. Forster's famous phrase, "only connect," stresses the need for human beings to overcome their hesitancy and prejudices and work towards realizing affection and ... more info>>

Literary theorist Georg Lukács complains in his seminal work, The Historical Novel, that the works of imaginative literature too often use history as a mere backdrop, a way for an author to decorate the story and characters. Lukács singles out Sir Walter Scott, English author of such works as Ivanhoe and the Waverly novels, as a notable exception. According to Lukács Scott's novels document, with painstaking verisimilitude, the character of the historical period in which the action is taking pla... more info>>

One of the most important works of art of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is a profound, stirring, and ambitious novel written by an artist at the height of her extraordinary powers. Like all great works of art, To the Lighthouse is rich with meaning and implication. On the simplest level, it is about the Ramsay family, their vacation home on the Hebrides Islands in Scotland, and the guests who come to stay with them there. On a deeper level, the novel is a meditation on time, on how it... more info>>

A landmark work of world literature, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is an account of one day in the life of an upper class British woman, her husband, and her circle of friends. Woolf's narration of Clarissa Dalloway's day begins with her protagonist's preparations for a party she is holding at her house that evening, and it ends as the party gets underway. In between, Clarissa is visited by an old friend, Peter Walsh, and her mind is returned to a time thirty years earlier when she considered m... more info>>

Under the roiling seas of Venus, under the deadly atmosphere are the Keeps, fully enclosed cities, and within them live the descendants of those survivors who used atomic energy to propel the spaceships which first took them to Venus. In the massive superstructures that were built under the Venusian seas a complex feudal society devoted to decadence has evolved. Presiding over that society are the Immortals--genetic throwbacks to the mutant atomic survivors--who control the culture. This is a st... more info>>

Virginia Woolf's most overtly experimental and perhaps most challenging work, The Waves traces the lives of six characters from childhood through old age, presenting them through their own interwoven voices. The voices, always placed in quotations and introduced with the name of the person speaking, fall somewhere between spoken soliloquy and an interior monologue. The tension between these two things, between the spoken and the unspoken, is, in part, what gives the novel so much of its emotiona... more info>>

When Harry Feversham resigns his commission shortly before being deployed into battle in Africa, his friends and fiancée turn on him, giving him four white feathers ... symbols of cowardice. But Harry is no coward, and he decides to prove himself. His quest to restore his honor will take him undercover in the bustling markets of Cairo to the scorching deserts of the Sudan, from unbearable torture at the hands of barbaric tribesmen to ecstasy in the arms of the woman he loves. It is an unforgetta... more info>>

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, published in 1952, heralded the beginning of one of the most diverting and provocative adventures in modern American fiction. Vonnegut went on to write novels that perhaps had greater formal skill and technique, but Player Piano is a tour de force of imaginative insight into modern life and a shrewd satire of American progress. What must Vonnegut's first readers have made of Player Piano? The story gives off the dank chill of 1984 and Brave New World, b... more info>>

A stirring, straightforward work written near the end of her luminous career, Virginia Woolf's The Years is a portrait of the Pargiters, a staid London family presided over by Colonel Abel Pargiter. In some ways, "portrait" is not an entirely appropriate word, because Woolf's subject in this novel (and an abiding concern in all of her works) is fluidity and flux: the movement of the seasons and years, the experience of maturing and growing old, and the pain of change, passing, and loss. Although... more info>>

Unstuck in time, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five--an unforgettable Everyman named Billy Pilgrim--is never sure what part of his life he is going to have to act in next. Vonnegut's wildly imaginative, witty and affecting novel tells Billy Pilgrim's story in just that fashion. It spins back and forth through time, layering in the elements of Billy's life, which begins, chronologically, in 1922 in the upstate New York town of Ilium, and ends over 50 years later, when he is a success... more info>>

Kurt Vonnegut's "explosive meditation" of a novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) is subtitled "Goodbye Blue Monday!" It is peppered with simple, childlike illustrations drawn by the author, and it tells a crazy-quilt story that eventually defies the constraints of the novel format itself. All of this seems to constitute an act of self-liberation, and it is: Vonnegut overhauling his creative world, breathing deeply and toying with the very nature of the novel. The title echoes the claims of a well... more info>>

In this wild, hurtling, apocalyptic tale, we meet the grown-up children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absent-minded "father of the atomic bomb," who have the only example of their father's last discovery--ice-nine. From Ilium, New York we travel to a Caribbean banana republic where Bokononism is practiced--and ice-nine begins to overtake mankind.

"His best book," Esquire wrote of Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, adding, "he dares not only to ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it." This novel fits into that aspect of the Vonnegut canon that might be classified as science fiction, a quality that once led Time to describe Vonnegut as "George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer ... a zany but moral mad scientist." The Sirens of Titan was perhaps the novel that began ... more info>>

The perfect crime goes awry in W.R. Burnett's tough and brutally wise 1949 novel The Asphalt Jungle, and the problem is, in the end, human nature. Told in 40 short, blunt but richly atmospheric chapters, the novel meticulously details the planning and execution of a major jewel heist. The robbery is devised by Doc Reimenschneider, a master criminal just out of prison. It requires the involvement of a variety of different people, from the muscle--an itinerant hood named Dix, an overgrown country ... more info>>

In some ways, it was unfortunate for author James Leo Herlihy that his novel Midnight Cowboy was adapted into the landmark film of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Although the film, which won several Oscars including Best Picture, certainly brought the rising author a new level of regard and notice, its almost legendary status in the history of American filmmaking has somewhat overshadowed its literary progenitor. This is especially unfortunate since Herlihy's work is consi... more info>>

In Robert L. Fish's Edgar Award-winning novel, The Fugitive, the protagonist Ari Schoenberg doesn't seem like much of a hero. Paunchy and short with a heart condition and a bad case of nerves, he doesn't seem all that well suited for a high-stakes cloak-and-dagger mission in South America. Ari, however, is a Holocaust survivor and a man with a sense of deep, abiding purpose, and, as such, he rises to the occasion. The Nazi party seems to be rising again in Brazil, led by a ruthless man named Eri... more info>>

A novel that is as witty and playful as it is probing and profound, Virginia Woolf's Orlando is the fantastic story of a person who lives through five centuries, first as a man and then as a woman. The novel opens with Orlando living as a young man in Elizabethan England. A favorite of the queen, Orlando is given a vast estate by the aging monarch and instructed to never to grow old. He doesn't, and Woolf's novel follows him through the centuries, across the globe, through all sorts of love affa... more info>>

A Room of One's Own is a curious essay. Presented originally as two speeches to the Arts Society at Newham in 1928, the work is remarkable for its distinctive tone, for Woolf's witty and deceptively casual style, and for her decision largely eschew abstract arguments in favor of narrative, anecdote and the guidance of a strong, abiding first person narrator. She also, refreshingly, avoids doctrine and bombast, instead infusing her arguments with subtlety, curiosity and open-minded speculation. T... more info>>

At the great atomic plant in Kimberly, a congressional committee makes a surprise inspection raising the level of the men's tension even higher than it has been. By midday there have already been minor accidents but in the giant nuclear converters which are at the heart of the project work goes on at desperate speed. Until converter Number four fails disastrously. Jorgenson, the supervisor of the technical team and his crew had been running through a new and unstable isotope when the walls of t... more info>>

Perhaps no other novel in this century has had a greater impact upon the way we think and talk about our world than George Orwell's classic, 1984. "Big Brother," "doublespeak," and "the thought police" have become part of our everyday lexicon, and the term "Orwellian" has become a familiar adjective for any situation-real or imagined-where conformity is compulsory and where someone always seems to be watching. Orwell's novel also has the distinction of being, along with Aldous Huxley's Brave N... more info>>