Best Classic Literature Books

Odysseus's ten-year voyage home from Troy to Ithaca — through the Cyclops's cave, Circe's island, the underworld, and the sirens — is Western literature's founding journey narrative.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork about racial injustice and moral growth in Depression-era Alabama, seen through the eyes of young Scout Finch.

In the totalitarian super-state of Oceania, Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history to serve The Party. His secret rebellion — and its consequences — is one of the most important political novels ever written.

On the desert planet Arrakis, young Paul Atreides must navigate political intrigue, ecological disaster, and prophetic destiny to avenge his family and fulfil a legend centuries in the making. The best-selling science fiction novel of all time.

Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin is humanity's most gifted military mind, trained from childhood in the zero-gravity Battle Room of a space station to fight the alien Formics. But the game and the war may not be as separate as Ender believes.

The Joad family, driven from their Oklahoma farm by the Dust Bowl, joins the great migration west to California — and finds exploitation, hunger, and community in equal measure.

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, Arthur Dent is rescued by Ford Prefect — who turns out to be a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom in the universe. Their adventures take them to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a planet populated by telephone sanitisers, and a search for the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The comprehensive American cooking bible — first published in 1931, continuously revised ever since, and still the most trusted and comprehensive home cooking reference ever produced.

Janie Crawford's search for love and selfhood across three marriages in Black Southern communities — told in a voice of extraordinary lyrical power.

A collection of parables set in ancient Babylon that deliver timeless financial wisdom through the story of a man who rises from slavery to become the city's wealthiest citizen.

Candide, raised on Pangloss's philosophy that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is expelled from his castle and travels through earthquakes, Inquisitions, the Seven Years War, and El Dorado, finding nothing to support Pangloss's optimism. The sustained satirical assault on Leibnizian theodicy that made Voltaire famous.

Huck Finn and the escaped slave Jim raft down the Mississippi River in a journey that becomes the great American meditation on freedom, race, and conscience.

Meursault kills an Arab on an Algerian beach — and at his trial is condemned not for the murder but for his failure to grieve his mother.

Written as fiction but widely understood as the autobiography of Jesse Livermore — the greatest stock speculator of the early twentieth century — this 1923 classic follows the narrator's career from bucket shops to Wall Street, through multiple fortunes made and lost, and distils lessons about markets, timing, and human nature that remain current.

Mexico in the 1930s: religion has been outlawed, priests are hunted, and the last priest in a southern state is a wanted man. He is also a drunkard who has fathered a child and abandoned his vows. Pursued by a mestizo informer and a dedicated police lieutenant, he continues to administer sacraments he believes himself unworthy to give. Greene's greatest theological novel.

Vietnam, 1952. Thomas Fowler, a world-weary British journalist, watches as Alden Pyle, a young idealistic American CIA operative, arrives in Saigon with theories about a Third Force. Their rivalry over a Vietnamese woman, Phuong, becomes inseparable from the political catastrophe Pyle helps to engineer. Greene's prescient masterpiece about American innocence and its costs.

Lemuel Gulliver travels to four extraordinary lands — Lilliput (tiny people), Brobdingnag (giants), Laputa (flying island of abstracted philosophers), and the country of the Houyhnhnms (rational horses served by bestial humans). Each voyage is a systematic satirical assault on something Swift found contemptible in early eighteenth-century Europe.

Albany, 1938. Francis Phelan is a bum, an alcoholic, a man who dropped his infant son on the kitchen floor and could not live with it. He was also a professional baseball player and is haunted, literally, by the people he has killed. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winner is the third of the Albany Cycle — a hallucinatory, lyrical, deeply American novel about guilt, grace, and the impossibility of going home.

Frank and April Wheeler have convinced themselves they are different from their suburban Connecticut neighbours — more intelligent, more alive, too good for the lives they are living. April proposes they move to Paris. Frank agrees. The plan unravels. Yates's debut novel is the most precise and merciless portrait of postwar American suburban conformity ever written.

Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is 46, co-owner of a Toyota dealership, a member of the country club, comfortable and bored in the Pennsylvania suburb he once tried to escape. It is 1979: the gas crisis, Carter's malaise speech, Iran. His son Nelson has come back with a pregnant girlfriend. Updike's Pulitzer Prize winner — middle-class American contentment as its own form of dissatisfaction.

Augie March grows up poor and Jewish in Depression-era Chicago and refuses to be defined by it. Picaresque, exuberant, and crammed with characters from every class and corner of American life, this is Bellow's most ebullient novel—the one that announced an entirely new way of writing American English.