Best Classic Literature Books

Charles Darwin's world-changing 1859 work, which set out the theory of evolution by natural selection. Marshalling two decades of evidence with patience and care, Darwin transformed our understanding of life on Earth and the place of humanity within it.

Three generations of the Brangwen family in the English Midlands — from the 1840s to the early twentieth century — each straining toward something beyond the agricultural life that made them. Seized and destroyed by police on publication for its frank treatment of sexuality.

Hester Prynne, condemned to wear the scarlet letter A for adultery in Puritan New England, lives with her illegitimate daughter Pearl while the father of her child — the revered minister Dimmesdale — declines into secret guilt.

A spoiled orphan comes to live on the Yorkshire moors and discovers a secret walled garden that transforms her — and everyone around her.

A cipher message leads Holmes to Birlstone Manor and a suspicious death, before the novel pivots to the Pennsylvania coalfields and the brutal secret society known as the Scowrers. The fourth and final Holmes novel draws on the real Molly Maguires to give its American backstory genuine historical weight.

The Bright Young Things of 1920s London party relentlessly while Adam Fenwick-Symes tries and fails to marry Nina. Waugh's second novel captures the feverish emptiness of the interwar generation with satirical accuracy that becomes, by the end, something closer to despair.

Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence with her cousin and chaperone, encounters a room with a view and a young man who insists on honesty, and discovers that choosing her own life is harder than she expected.

Wallace's first essay collection includes his piece on the Illinois State Fair, an extended essay on David Lynch, 'E Unibus Pluram' on television and American fiction, and the title essay on a Caribbean cruise — the funniest and most formally inventive piece of literary journalism of the 1990s.

Anne Shirley is now sixteen and a teacher at Avonlea school, navigating new friendships, her growing responsibilities at Green Gables, and the same imaginative intensity that has always defined her.

Ravic, a German surgeon living illegally in Paris in 1939, practises medicine under a false name and pursues the Gestapo officer who destroyed his life. Remarque's wartime novel was written in American exile and captures the atmosphere of Paris just before the German occupation with the precision of someone who knew the city and understood what was about to happen to it.

George F. Babbitt, a real estate agent in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith, is the model American businessman — boosterish, conformist, self-satisfied — who attempts a brief, doomed rebellion against his own life. Lewis's most famous novel gave English a common noun and remains the defining portrait of the American businessman as a social type.

A Wall Street lawyer hires a copyist named Bartleby who performs his duties adequately, then one day begins responding to every request with 'I would prefer not to.' Melville's most modern story anticipates Kafka, Beckett, and the literature of passive resistance.

Billy Budd, a young sailor of exceptional beauty and goodness, is falsely accused by the malicious master-at-arms Claggart, strikes him accidentally and kills him, and must be hanged for mutiny. Melville's posthumously published final work is a philosophical meditation on innocence, law, and justice.

An eccentric host gathers four sleuths and four people who have gotten away with murder for a dinner of bridge. By evening's end the host is dead in his chair, stabbed while his guests played cards — and one of the four murderers has killed again, in the same room, unseen.

Eliot's final novel follows Gwendolen Harleth, who makes a disastrous marriage to a cruel man for financial security, and Daniel Deronda, who discovers his Jewish heritage and commits himself to the Zionist cause — a dual portrait of what English society does to intelligent women and what Jewish identity means.

Twelve years after his jihad swept across the known universe, Paul Muad'Dib sits on the throne of an empire built on ten billion dead. His prescience is a prison, his legend a weapon turned against him, and a conspiracy is forming to finally bring him down.

Two stories: 'Franny,' in which a young woman has a breakdown at a Yale football weekend while clutching a book about the Jesus Prayer, and 'Zooey,' in which her brother attempts to help her recover. The Glass family — seven exceptionally intelligent siblings raised on comparative religion — are Salinger's sustained meditation on the problem of being too smart for the ordinary world.

The complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Gathered from German oral tradition in the early nineteenth century, these two hundred-odd tales — Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Snow White, and many darker, stranger lesser-known stories — are a foundational treasury of Western folklore.

Jack Boughton and Della Miles, a Black schoolteacher, meet in St. Louis in the late 1940s and fall in love in a state where their relationship is illegal.

The Loftis family of Port Warwick, Virginia, is disintegrating: the father drinks, the mother is cold, the beautiful daughter Peyton has been driven mad by the love and hatred of both parents. Styron's first novel — written in the shadow of Faulkner but not trapped by it — is the most accomplished American debut novel of the postwar period, and its account of Peyton's stream-of-consciousness interior monologue rivals the master's best.

Jim Burden looks back on the Bohemian immigrant girl who defined his Nebraska childhood and shaped everything he has become.

Tayeb Salih's landmark Sudanese novel, often called the finest Arabic novel of the twentieth century. A young man returns from England to his village on the Nile and becomes obsessed with the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed, whose violent history in colonial London mirrors and shadows his own.

In a small Illinois town in October, a carnival arrives just after midnight — Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show — and two thirteen-year-old boys discover that its attractions offer exactly what people most desire, at a price that cannot be paid.

The friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two Black women in the Bottom — a hilltop community in Ohio — over five decades, and what Sula's freedom costs both of them.