Best Classic Literature Books

The only complete ancient Greek trilogy to survive — Agamemnon returns from Troy to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra; their son Orestes kills Clytemnestra in revenge; the Furies pursue Orestes until Athena establishes a jury court to try him. The founding myth of justice.

Miss Jean Brodie, teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh in the 1930s, dedicates herself to educating her chosen set of girls for life rather than for exams. She is charismatic, dangerous, and will be betrayed. Spark's masterpiece in 137 pages.

Julien Sorel, brilliant son of a provincial carpenter, rises through seduction, hypocrisy, and calculation — as tutor in the Rênal household, then as secretary to a Parisian aristocrat. His relationship with two women (Mme de Rênal and the volatile Mathilde de la Mole) ultimately destroys him.

Socrates and his interlocutors ask what justice is — and end up designing an ideal city, debating the nature of the soul, defining the philosopher-king, arguing for the immortality of the soul, banning poets from the ideal state, and constructing the allegory of the cave. The most influential philosophical text in the Western tradition.

Marian Forrester, wife of a retired railroad pioneer in Nebraska, is observed across years by Niel Herbert — first as a boy who worships her, later as a young man who watches her adapt to reduced circumstances after her husband's financial ruin. A novel about idealism and its loss.

Brighton, the 1930s. Pinkie Brown is a seventeen-year-old gang leader, a Catholic who believes in damnation and acts accordingly. After a murder, he marries Rose, a waitress who could testify against him, intending to kill her after she can no longer be called as a witness. Ida Arnold, a cheerful hedonist, pursues him. Greene's darkest and most theologically exact novel.

Bette Fischer, a poor seamstress humiliated by her beautiful cousin Adeline's superior life, quietly engineers the destruction of Adeline's family — through the Hulot family's weakness for women, and through her own secret alliance with the courtesan Valérie Marneffe. Balzac's greatest study of revenge and female power.

Effi Briest, seventeen, marries the older Baron von Instetten and follows him to a posting in Pomerania. Lonely and frightened, she has a brief affair with Major Crampas. Years later, her husband discovers the letters, challenges Crampas to a duel, kills him, divorces Effi, and separates her from her daughter. Effi dies of illness and grief.

Thucydides's account of the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BCE) that ended Athenian power. The first work of rigorous political and military history — including Pericles's Funeral Oration, the Melian Dialogue, and the catastrophic Sicilian Expedition.

Lucretius's philosophical poem expounding Epicurean atomism — the argument that the universe consists of atoms and void, that the soul dissolves at death, that the gods do not intervene in human affairs, and that therefore the fear of death is irrational. Written in Latin hexameters of great beauty, c. 60 BCE.

Bradley Pearson, failed writer of 58, falls violently in love with Julian Baffin — the 20-year-old daughter of his rival Arnold. The love is absurd, overwhelming, and destroys everything. Murdoch's most formally adventurous novel includes multiple unreliable forewords and postscripts that reframe the entire narrative.

The novel begins: 'Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce.' Emily and Sarah Grimes grow up in Depression-era New York and move through postwar America — marriages, jobs, affairs, children — in separate but parallel patterns of disappointment. Yates's most compressed novel and possibly his finest.

Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter at a country fair in a drunken rage, swears off alcohol, and through sheer willpower rises to become mayor of Casterbridge. When his wife and daughter return, and when Donald Farfrae arrives to threaten his position, the mechanism of his destruction begins.

Charles Arrowby, retired theatre director, retreats to a house on the English coast to write his memoirs and renounce the world. He then discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Hartley, lives nearby — and becomes obsessed with rescuing her from her marriage. Murdoch's Booker Prize winner is a novel about the self-deceptions of obsessive love.

Three generations of the Wendall family — Loretta, her son Jules, her daughter Maureen — struggle through poverty, violence, and desire in Detroit from the 1930s to the 1967 riots. Oates's National Book Award winner traces the working-class American century through one family's attempt to survive it.

Charlie Citrine is a successful Chicago playwright haunted by the memory of Von Humboldt Fleisher, the brilliant, doomed poet who was his mentor. While Humboldt died broke and mad in New York, Charlie faces alimony, a gangster creditor, and a beautiful younger woman—and discovers that Humboldt left him a gift from beyond the grave.

On a colonised Mars, a repairman named Jack Bohlen has schizophrenia, and an autistic boy named Manfred Steiner may be able to see the future. A corrupt water-union boss wants to exploit Manfred's ability for real estate speculation. The novel explores autism, time, capitalism, and the nature of reality with characteristic Dick intensity.

Ilya Ilyich Oblomov has not left his sofa in years. The famous first chapter follows him through the course of a single morning — visitors come, he considers getting up, does not get up. The novel follows his late attempt, under the influence of a love affair, to change, and his return to inertia.

Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, 26, was a high school basketball star in Mount Judge, Pennsylvania. Now he works demonstrating a kitchen gadget and goes home to a pregnant, alcoholic wife. One spring afternoon he gets in the car and drives south, not quite sure why. Updike's first Rabbit novel and one of the founding documents of postwar American restlessness.

Bellow's last novel is a portrait of his friend Allan Bloom (renamed Ravelstein)—a philosopher who wrote a bestseller, spent the money lavishly, and then died of AIDS. Chick, the narrator, is clearly Bellow himself. A meditation on friendship, mortality, and the specific kind of love that can exist between two men whose wives and students cannot entirely share.

Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin is a Russian chess grandmaster of astonishing talent and near-zero social function. As he prepares to play the match of his career against the Italian champion Turati, his obsessive mind begins to translate the world entirely into chess — and to break down when the patterns become inescapable.

Tristram Shandy attempts to write his life story and cannot get past the moment of his conception. The novel is all digression — Uncle Toby's military obsessions, the Shandean theory of noses, blank pages, marbled pages, dedications to the reader — and is widely considered the most metafictional novel ever written, despite being the eighth-century novel.

Twelve stories from The Strand Magazine collected into the first Holmes short story anthology, including A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League, and The Speckled Band. The short story format reveals Conan Doyle's genius at compression — twelve complete puzzles delivered at full intensity.

Paul Bäumer enlists in the German army at 18, full of patriotic idealism, and spends the next few years watching his friends die one by one on the Western Front while the world that sent them there carries on. Remarque's novel is the definitive anti-war testimony: written in the flat, precise language of men who have stopped expecting rescue.