The second volume in this essential library gathers James Joyce's modernist vision, Mark Twain's American wit, Jules Verne's boundless imagination, Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure and suspense, Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic brilliance, and Bram Stoker's gothic terror alongside voices from Tolstoy to Tagore, Stendhal to Sienkiewicz. Ranging from French Enlightenment fiction to Victorian sensation novels, Russian realism to early global literature, this collection widens the canon begun in V...

Originally curated by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot as a complete liberal education in fifty volumes, the Harvard Classics gathers philosophy, science, literature, and history into a single indispensable library. Plato's dialogues and Marcus Aurelius's meditations sit alongside Dante's Divine Comedy, Francis Bacon's essays, Charles Darwin's scientific writing, and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, tracing the foundations of Western thought from ancient Greece to the modern age. Homer...

Becky Sharp leaves school by throwing the dictionary out of the carriage window and climbs, by charm and calculation, through a society that deserves her. Amelia Sedley is loyal past all sense. Thackeray called it a novel without a hero and meant it: the gaze is colder than Dickens's and considerably more adult. The Gilded Library volume carries full-page plates — ballrooms, the Waterloo encampment, society drawing rooms — and takes its decoration from the domino mask, the fan, the playing...

Twelve months in the life of Bob Stubbs, a swindler with no talent for it, told by himself: the boots he never paid for at school follow him through the militia, a courtship, a debtor's prison and back. Thackeray wrote it for a comic annual, one chapter to a month, and it is the earliest sight of the voice he would use in Barry Lyndon — a scoundrel who thinks he is the injured party.

An Irish adventurer tells the story of his own life — duels, cards, the Seven Years' War, and a marriage to a rich widow — and is a liar in every sentence. Thackeray lost his own inheritance at the tables and wrote this before Vanity Fair, letting the scoundrel narrate himself into the ground. Kubrick filmed it, slowly and beautifully, and only made the cruelty clearer.

Becky Sharp leaves school by throwing the dictionary out of the carriage window, and proceeds to climb through a society that deserves her. Thackeray subtitled it a novel without a hero and meant it: the good are dull, the charming are ruinous, and Waterloo is fought in a single sentence offstage while the wives wait in Brussels. He drew the original illustrations himself.

This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors last names - The Divine Comedy [Dante Alighieri] - Emma [Jane Austen] - Persuasion [Jane Austen] - Pride and Prejudice [Jane Austen] - Father Goriot [Honoré de Balzac] - Jane Eyre [Charlotte Brontë] - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall [Anne Brontë] - Wuthering Heights [Emily Brontë] - The Way of All Flesh [Samuel Butler] - Don Quixote [Miguel de Cervantes] - Heart of Darkness [Joseph Conrad] - Nostromo [Joseph Conrad] - Mo...

Santa's Christmas Library gathers more than four hundred seasonal narratives, poems, carols, legends, and illustrated selections into a capacious archive of Christmas writing. Moving from folktale and devotional verse to domestic realism, fantasy, satire, and moral fable, the volume traces the holiday's literary transformations across languages and centuries. Canonical Christmas narratives stand beside fairy tales, hymns, children's literature, and lesser-known period pieces, while such la...

Discover the dazzling world of ambition, love, and social ambition with William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." This timeless classic offers a vivid satire of 19th-century English society, capturing the complexities of human nature through unforgettable characters and sharp wit."Vanity Fair" follows the lives of two women of contrasting backgrounds—Rebecca Sharp, a clever and ambitious orphan, and Amelia Sedley, a gentle and naive young woman—against the backdrop of the Napoleonic War...

Catherine Hayes, a servant girl, marries badly, poisons her way through it and is burnt at Tyburn — and Thackeray, sickened by novels that made criminals romantic, wrote her deliberately repellent to spoil the taste. Born in Calcutta and sent home at five, he lost his orphan's fortune at cards and by then was writing for money; this 1839 serial is his attack on the Newgate novel, and his contempt keeps slipping into something like pity.

Redmond Barry recounts his own rise from a penniless Irish boy to a man of fashion and fortune in this masterful example of the unreliable narrator. While he portrays himself as a victim of circumstance and a gentleman of honor, his actions reveal a scoundrel, a gambler, and a domestic tyrant. The novel is a brilliant subversion of the romantic hero trope, set against the opulent but morally bankrupt backdrop of 18th-century Europe. It challenges the reader to look past the protagonist's c...

Henry Esmond is the modest but appealing hero of his own story. Set, for the most part, in the early years of the eighteenth century, Esmond is regarded as a bastard member of his noble family. He gains some ability in arms, exercises his capable brain, and finds that the tumultuous events of those years give him ample opportunity to make his way as a military man. But as political intrigues and love interests come in to play, Esmond discovers there is more to his past than his present cir...