Best Classic Literature Books

D'Artagnan arrives in Paris from Gascony, nearly duels Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and promptly makes them all friends. Together the four Musketeers serve King Louis XIII while foiling the schemes of Cardinal Richelieu and the mysterious Milady de Winter. Dumas's greatest adventure novel is relentless entertainment — swashbuckling, witty, morally simple, and structurally impeccable.

The second volume of The Lord of the Rings splits the broken Fellowship into two threads — the war for Rohan and the lonely road into Mordor — and introduces Treebeard, Gollum, and the impossible burden Frodo and Sam now carry alone.

Two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — live parallel lives in California's Salinas Valley over three generations, reenacting the story of Cain and Abel with tragic consequence.

Through letters — to God and to her sister — Celie chronicles her life of abuse in rural Georgia, her transformation through Shug Avery's love, and her gradual discovery of her own power.

The animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human farmer, establish a democracy, and watch helplessly as the pigs gradually become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced.

Arthur Miller's classic drama of the 1692 Salem witch trials, written as an allegory of McCarthy-era persecution. As accusations of witchcraft consume a Puritan village, John Proctor must choose between saving his life and keeping his name in a community gone mad.

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant insect — and the story focuses less on the transformation than on his family's response to it.

A plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and Dr. Bernard Rieux leads the medical response — in a novel that is simultaneously a chronicle of epidemic and an allegory for Nazi occupation.

American ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with English nurse Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the Italian front in World War I — a love story that the war will not leave intact.

Betty Smith's beloved coming-of-age classic. Francie Nolan grows up poor but hungry for life and learning in the Williamsburg tenements of early-twentieth-century Brooklyn, in a tender, unsentimental portrait of an immigrant family's struggles, dreams, and resilience.

An imaginative, red-haired orphan is accidentally sent to Avonlea instead of the boy the Cuthbert siblings expected — and changes their lives and the whole town forever.

Alan Paton's landmark 1948 novel of South Africa. A black Zulu pastor travels to Johannesburg to find his lost son, whose fate collides with that of a white landowner's son, in a lyrical, sorrowful story of fathers, country, and the gathering tragedy of apartheid.

In a future where firemen burn books rather than extinguish fires, Guy Montag begins to question the society he enforces — and the books he has been trained to destroy.

A group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island organise themselves — and gradually descend from democratic order to murderous tribalism.

Two itinerant ranch workers in Depression-era California — the clever George and the big, gentle Lennie — share a dream of their own land that the world will not allow them to reach.

Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a wealthy village squire in what became the most controversial and celebrated mystery novel ever written.

The tempestuous, obsessive love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw across two generations on the wild Yorkshire moors.

Hercule Poirot investigates a murder aboard a luxury Nile steamer, where every passenger has a motive and the truth is buried beneath layers of deception.

Milkman Dead journeys from his prosperous Michigan family into the American South in search of gold and discovers instead his family's history, his people's mythology, and the meaning of flight.

Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer Prize–winning epic follows Wang Lung, a poor Chinese farmer, from his wedding day through poverty, famine, and hard-won wealth, tracing the rise and moral cost of a family bound to the land across a time of vast upheaval.

American expatriates and British socialites drink their way through Paris and Pamplona, orbiting around the love that Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley cannot consummate.

In post-nuclear San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts down rogue androids nearly indistinguishable from humans — the basis for the film Blade Runner.

New York lawyer Newland Archer is engaged to the perfectly suitable May Welland when the scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe — and complicates everything he thought he wanted.

In 1940s Ohio, a young Black girl named Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes, believing beauty — as defined by the white standards she has absorbed — is the one thing that could save her from her world's cruelties.