DUBLINERS

Written by James Joyce

“One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
—The Dead, Page 191

Fun Facts

• The Dubliners is a collection of fifteen stories about Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early 20th century.
• Many of the characters in Dubliners reappear in minor roles in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
• Although all of his fiction is based in London, James Joyce spent most of his life outside Ireland.

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THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Written by Oscar Wilde

“For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.”
—Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 8, page 102

Fun Facts

• The Picture of Dorian Gray was the only novel that Oscar Wilde published and it first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine.
• It is considered one of the last works of gothic horror fiction.
• When the book was published it caused a sensation due to its themes of homoeroticism.

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UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe

“‘We don’t own your laws; we don’t own your country; we stand here as
free, under God’s sky, as you are; and, by the great God that made us,
we’ll fight for our liberty till we die.’”
—Chapter 17, page 224

Fun Facts

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin has always been controversial. At first it was because it stirred up sympathy for slaves in the South, and in more recent years because people are unhappy with the characters’ stereotypes.
• The book first appeared in 40 installments of the National Era, an anti-slavery publication. In 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form and was immediately a big success.
• Langston Hughes called Uncle Tom’s Cabin America’s “first protest novel” because it served as an outcry against slavery after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850.

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TREASURE ISLAND

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
—Chapter 1, Page 7

Fun Facts

• Robert Louis Stevenson got a law degree to please his father but never practiced any law.
• A common theme in Stevenson's work is the tension between upstanding duties and reckless abandon, which is exemplified in Treasure Island by the conflict between the respectful gentleman and carefree pirates.
• Stevenson came up with the idea for Treasure Island when drawing a map with his stepson.

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Written by Leo Tolstoy

“Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and commonplace—and most horrifying.”

—pg. 43, chapter 2

Fun Facts

• Leo Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich shortly after he converted to Christianity.
  
• Tolstoy was plagued with questions of the meaning of life and death and many see The Death of Ivan Ilyich as the answers to his own questions.
• Both of Tolstoy's parents died before he was nine years old.

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The Story of My Life

Written by Helen Keller

“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. ‘Light! give me light!’ was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.”
—pg 14, Ch. 4

Fun Facts

• Helen Keller was the first deaf and blind person to earn a bachelor's degree.
• She was not born deaf or blind, but contracted an illness at nineteen months old that left her that way. People speculate that it might have been meningitis or scarlet fever.
• Annie Sullivan, Helen's teacher, was also visually impaired herself. Her relationship with Helen lasted 49 years.

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Inferno

Written by Dante Alighieri

"Love, that releases no beloved from loving"
—line 103, pg 45, Canto V

Fun Facts

• Inferno is one of three ‘canticas’ that make up The Divine Comedy which is an allegorical poem about the Christian afterlife. It is considered the most important epic poem of Italian literature.
• It helped establish the Tuscan dialect as the Italian standard.
• There are many mathematical and numerological patterns throughout the book particularly with threes and nines.

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Persuasion

Written by Jane Austen

"She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning."
—page 30, chapter 4

Fun Facts

• Jane Austen contracted her final illness while writing Persuasion and would not live to see Persuasion or Northanger Abbey published.
• Because Jane died before it was published, her brother Henry Austen came up with the title and made sure to include a biographical sketch in each of her novels.
• Persuasion is often seen as a tribute to the self-made man because of the character of Captain Wentworth.

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Candide

Written by Voltaire

" ‘Do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always slaughtered each other as they do today, that they’ve always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates and thieves, weak, fickle, cowardly, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloodthirsty, slanderous, lecherous, fanatical, hypocritical, and foolish?’ ‘Do you believe,’ said Martin, ‘that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they find them’."
—Chapter XXI, page 76

Fun Facts

• Candide is taught more than any other book in French literature.
• When the book was first published, Voltaire did not openly admit to having published it. Instead he signed it “Monsieur le docteur Ralph” or “Doctor Ralph.”
• In the first forty years after publication, there were a least 10 imitations of Candide written by people other than Voltaire.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson

"With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two."
—Chapter 10, page 65

Fun Facts

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was an immediate success when published. Within the first year of publication, it was adapted for the stage in both London and Boston.
• The idea for the novel came from a nightmare that Stevenson had. He was unable to finish the dream because he was awoken by his wife.
• After reading the first version to his wife, she suggested he could make it better so he burned the manuscript and rewrote it.

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The Jungle

Written by Upton Sinclair

“Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it—it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life."
—Chapter 3, page 37

Fun Facts

• When writing The Jungle, Sinclair had intended to bring attention to the exploitation of workers in the meat packing industry, instead readers fixated on the abhorrent food safety regulations.
• Public outrage inspired by the novel sparked the creation of two acts of legislation which ultimately established the Food and Drug Administration.
• The Jungle was a criticism of laissez-faire economics that Sinclair felt encouraged greed in our society.

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The Cantebury Tales

Written by Geoffrey Chaucer

"Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf,
For al his kepyng and his jalousye;
And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye;
And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.
This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!"
—The Miller’s Tale, page 180

Fun Facts

• The Canterbury Tales are a collection of short stories written in Middle English in the 14th century.
• Chaucer’s work represents one of the first pieces of literature to refer to paper, which was a recent invention at this time.
• The use of vernacular English—instead of Latin or French—reveals the influential contribution The Canterbury Tales had on English literature.
• Chaucer was a popular and well-respected poet in his day, and is often referred to now as the Father of English Literature.
• The Miller’s Tale represents the second of Chaucer’s The Cantebury Tales.

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A Tale of Two Cities

Written by Charles Dickens

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this."

—Chapter 3, pages 11-12

Fun Facts

• A Tale of Two Cities is one of the two historical novels Dickens ever wrote; the other one is Barnaby Rudge.
  


• A Tale of Two Cities was originally published in All Year Round, a magazine that Dickens created.


• It has been estimated that one in ten people in England was a reader of Dickens during the Victorian era.

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Jane Eyre

Written by Charlotte Brontë

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow—creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."
—Chapter 12, page 115

Fun Facts

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The Red Badge of Courage

Written by Stephen Crane

“He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part—a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country—was in a crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee, no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand.”
— Chapter 5, page 32

Fun Facts

• Crane wrote his first known story when he was just fourteen years old. It was called Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle.
• Crane was inspired to write The Red Badge of Courage by issues of Century which depicted famous battles and military leaders from the Civil War.
• The Red Badge of Courage was first published in serialized form and was an instant hit.

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Wuthering Heights

Written by Emily Brontë

“What does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!”
— Chapter 33, page 304

Fun Facts

• Emily Brontë is the younger sister of Charlotte Brontë, best known as the author Jane Eyre.
• She wrote under the penname Ellis Bell in order to hide the fact that she was female.
• Wuthering Heights was her only novel.
• On first publication the book was poorly received because Victorian readers found it to be scandalous.


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TAGS: Bantam Classics, Emily Bronte, quotations, quotes, Wuthering Heights

Great Expectations

Written by Charles Dickens

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been.”
—Chapter 9, page 75

Fun Facts

• Great Expectations first appeared in serialized form in All Year Around from 1860 to 1861.
• Charles Dickens wrote two different endings for Great Expectations. The majority of versions contain the first ending, or both.
• Great Expectations is considered semi-autobiographical because many incidents are taken from Dickens’ own life.

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Crime and Punishment

Written by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
—Part VI, Ch. 4, pg 471

Fun Facts

• Crime and Punishment was originally published in 1866 as a serialized novel in a literary journal known as The Russian Messenger.
• Dostoevsky came up with the idea for Crime and Punishment after losing all his money at a casino in Germany and being unable to pay his bill or afford meals.
• In the epilogue, the description of Raskolnikov’s time in prison is based on Dostoevsky’s own experiences at a Siberian prison camp, which he wrote about in The House of the Dead.

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The Awakening

Written by Kate Chopin

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clearing, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”
—Chapter VI, pg. 18

Fun Facts

• The Awakening was first published in 1899 but the publisher decided to stop printing it after one printing because of the scandal it caused. It would not be republished until 1969.
• The book was originally criticized as indecent and unwholesome for its open portrayal of Edna’s sexual desires. Upon its republication, it was hailed as an early vision of woman’s emancipation.
• Chopin began writing as a way to support herself after her husband died which was unusual for a woman at the turn of the century.
• The vehement responses to The Awakening cast a shadow over Chopin and she only published 3 more short stories before her death but no other novel.

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The Count of Monte Cristo

Written by Alexandre Dumas

There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.”
—Chapter LXXII, pg. 531

Fun Facts

• In his lifetime, Dumas wrote approximately 250 books however, he often used assistants to help him finish them.
• He had about 73 different assistants throughout his lifetime including August Maquet who helped Dumas write The Count of Monte Cristo.
• Dumas was well-known in Paris at the time of The Count of Monte Cristo’s publication as both a celebrated playwright and as a master of “romans feuilletons,” which were the serialized novels that were extremely popular in nineteenth-century Paris.
• The Count of Monte Cristo was published as a “romans feuilletons” in Paris’ Le Journal des Debats between 1844 and 1846. This explains the “cliff hanger” endings of most of the chapters that would have been used to keep readers reading from week to week.

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The Metamorphosis

Written by Franz Kafka

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
—Chapter 1, pg. 1

Fun Facts

• The humor of The Metamorphosis is often overlooked. When Kafka read the story to his circle of companions in Prague it would often elicit boisterous laughter.
• His unpublished manuscripts which included his three novels, were left to his friend Max Brod. He asked for Brod to destroy them but instead, Brod edited and published most of Kafka’s manuscripts.
• Kafka always felt like an outsider in Prague: the Czechs considered him a German, since his parents were German-speaking, and the Germans labeled him a Czech and a Jew. Many of his books play upon this theme.

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Frankenstein

Written by Mary Shelley

“All my speculations and hopes are as nothing, and like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell.”
—Chapter 24, pg. 201

Fun Facts

• Shelley started writing Frankenstein when she was eighteen and finished when she was nineteen.
• The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. It was turned down by two publishers — John Murray and Ollier, before being accepted by Lakington, Allen and Co.
• Mary Shelley’s life had many tragic elements including her mother’s death while giving birth to the author, her half-sister committing suicide, and her husband’s drowning in 1822.
• Shelley and the other romantics admired Milton’s character of Satan, seeing him as the hero of Paradise Lost. In many ways, the creature echoes Satan’s resentment when he states, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

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The Scarlet Letter

Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”
—Chapter 2

Fun Facts

• Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine along with Franklin Pierce and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
• Hawthorne was a descendent of early Puritan settlers, a heritage that would haunt him and inform his writing.
• The Scarlet Letter was an instant bestseller but in more than fourteen years, Hawthorne only earned $1,500 from it.
• Hawthorne was part of a brief transcendentalist experiment in group living called Brook Farm, located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

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Pride and Prejudice

Written by Jane Austen

“I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who could make you so.”
—Chapter 19, pg.93

Fun Facts

• Jane Austen was only twenty-one years old when she finished writing the first version of Pride and Prejudice.
• The original title of the book was First Impressions, however no copy of the original manuscript under that title is known to exist. She rewrote it into the version we have today fourteen years later.
• Three months after she completed work on the first version of the book, Jane’s father offered it to a publisher who turned it down without ever having read the manuscript.

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A Christmas Carol

Written by Charles Dickens

“‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’”
—Stave Three, Page 45

Fun Facts

• A Christmas Carol is part of a series of five Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848).
• The work has been adapted for theater, opera, film, radio and television.
• Contemporaries noted that the story’s popularity helped redefine the importance of Christmas and the sentiments associated with the holiday.
• Dickens wrote in the wake of British government changes to the welfare system. He wanted this book to reveal the plight of the poor and society’s responsibility to help them.

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Siddhartha

Written by Herman Hesse

“All the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was one world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.”
—Chapter Om (11), p.135-136

Fun Facts

• Siddhartha is from Sanskrit, it is a combination of two words siddha (gotten) and artha (wealth). Together they suggest “one who has found meaning” or “one who has achieved his or her goals.”
• Siddhartha is Hesse’s ninth novel. Hesse wrote it after spending some time in India during the early 1900s and first published it in 1922.
• Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.
• Hesse’s parents expected him to follow the family tradition in theology. Hesse entered the Protestant seminary at Maulbronn in 1891, but was expelled.

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Written by Mark Twain

“Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she’d take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same—she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion—there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge.”
—Chapter 28, Overreaching Don’t Pay

Fun Facts

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a continuation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
• Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
• Mark Twain’s time as a riverboat pilot inspired his pseudonym and gave him material for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• The novel has been banned many times by schools and libraries because of its language.

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Written by James Joyce

“His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self-mistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendor that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had been acquainted with nobility.”
—Chapter V

Fun Facts

• A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man is Joyce’s most personal work
• It was first published in the United States in 1916
• It was originally serialized between 1914-15 in The Egoist
• The novel is a complete rewrite of another story originally titled “Stephen Hero”
• The title is often referenced and altered in both literature in music
• A film version was released in 1977 starring Bosco Hogan as Stephen Dedalus

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