Gilgamesh Epic, an anonymous Babylonian epic based on early Sumerian sources. Itappeared in two versions: the first written c. 1800 BC; the second, c. 1200 BC. The epic recounts the struggles of Gilgamesh, mythic king of Uruk, against his enemies. It deals with such themes as the transitory nature of human existence, the value offriendship, and the importance of heroes.
Iliad, historic Greek epic poem of the late 8th century BC, attributed to Homer; withthe Odyssey, a rich source for understanding of the religion and people of the period.The Iliad describes the activities of the gods and mortals in the last weeks of the 10-year siege of Troy, when after a quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles refused to continue the battle. After Achilles' friend, Patroclus, was killed by Hector, prince ofTroy, Achilles led the invasion and killed Hector, returning Hector's body to King Priam for a hero's funeral.
2. Homer
The Odyssey
Odyssey, ancient Greek epic, generally ascribed to Homer. Written in 24 books, like its predecessor the Iliad, the story begins 10 years after the Trojan War. For seven ofthose years, Odysseus has been detained by the goddess Calypso. His efforts to returnhome to his loving family are delayed by visits to the land of forgetfulness and to theunderworld, as well as encounters with the one-eyed cyclops, sea monsters, andsirens. When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, he discovers that his wife Penelope is being urged to remarry by various noblemen who want her fortune. Odysseus kills them all and is reunited with his family. See also Iliad
3. Herodotus.
The Histories
Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC), Greek historian and geographer. Little is known of him.He made lengthy journeys through the ancient world (Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Babylon, and perhaps Egypt), spent long periods in Athens, and helped colonize Thurii in S Italy. He is most known for his lengthy, vivid, frequently anecdotal history of the
Persian Wars. Considered the beginning of Western history writing, his work
contains diverse information and is rich in anecdotes. See also Thucydides
4. Thucydides.
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides (c. 470- c. 400 BC), noted ancient historian. After commanding an unsuccessful expedition (424) to Amphipolis in the Peloponnesian War, he went into exile (423-403), during which he wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War.
5. Plato.
Selected Works
Plato (427-347 BC) Greek philosopher. Spending eight years as Socrates' disciple, he founded his Academy of philosophy near Athens, in 387, and taught there until his death. His works are well-preserved, including more than 25 dialogues and some letters. Believing the human mind can attain absolute truth, Plato's is a spiritualistic view of life. His works include The Republic, Theaetetus, Timaeus, Phaedo, and Gorgias.
6. Aristotle.
Ethics, Politics
Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosopher, Plato's disciple for 19 years. After Plato's death, he opened his first school in Asia Minor. Having educated Philip of Macedon's son Alexander between 343 and 334 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens to open a school in the Lyceum. Upon Alexander's death (323), Aristotle, accused of impiety, fled to Euboea where he died a year later. Moving away from Plato's theory of the Forms, he developed the theory of the Unmoved Mover. Among his works are De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics.
7. Aeschylus.
The Oresteia
Aeschylus (525-456 BC), Greek dramatist. The earliest known writer of tragedies whose plays exist in complete form, he was also the first to include more than one character in a play. Seven of his works survive: The Suppliants, The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, and the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Chöephoroe, and The Eumenides). They are characterized by impressive language, and moral and religious themes. See also Oresteia: Oresteia, a trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus, produced in 458 BC and consisting of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and Eumenides. The last and greatest work of Aeschylus, it is also the only surviving Greek trilogy. Each play is complete and stands alone; together they explore the themes of crime, revenge, and expiation.
8. Sophocles.
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonnus,Antigone
Sophocles (496-406 BC), Greek playwright, born at Colonus. Of 120 plays, only 7 tragedies and part of a satyr play remain. These include Ajax, Antigone (441), Electra, Oedipus Rex (c. 428), and Oedipus at Colonus (produced 401). His works introduced a third speaking actor, added stage scenery, and increased the chorus from 12 to 15 members. A popular, prominent figure in his day, he was often elected to public offices he had not sought. With Aeschylus and Euripides, he was considered one of the three great tragedians of ancient Greece. See also Ajax; Antigone
9. Euripides.
Alcestis, Medea Hippolytus, Trojan Women, Electra, Bacchae
Alcestis (438 BC), Greek tragedy by Euripides. The work is best known for its strong characterization of its noble heroine. Alcestis takes her husband's place in Hades so that he may live. Heracles brings her back alive, and husband and wife are reunited. Medea, in classical mythology and literature, the daughter of Aestes, king of Colchis, granddaughter of Asteria, the starry heavens, and wife of the hero Jason. In some descriptions she is the daughter of Hecate. She helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece and escape. When he remarried, Medea killed Jason's bride and her own children and fled in a chariot drawn by dragons. Electra (c. 418-414 BC), tragedy by Sophocles. The heroine, Electra, helps her brother Orestes avenge their father Agamemnon's death by plotting to kill their mother Clytemnestra and stepfather Aegisthus. There is controversy as to the accuracy and originality of this play. Euripides wrote a similar play with the same title in 413 BC.
10. Lucretius.
Of the Nature of Things
Lucretius, or Titus Lucretius Carus, (early half of 1st century BC), Latin poet andphilosopher. According to Jerome, Lucretius was born in 94 BC, was sometimes mad and when lucid wrote books that were later corrected by Cicero. He killed himself in51 or 50 BC. Little else is known of him apart from his one poem, De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, a rendering of the atomic theory of Lucretius' master, Epicurus.
11. Virgil.
The Aeneid
Vergil, or Virgil, or Publius Vergilius Maro, (70-19 BC), Roman poet and the author of the Aeneid, the Eclogues, and the Georgics. Devoting his life solely to his poetry and related studies, he was nevertheless well informed about the current events of his age and was the friend of such men as Octavian and Gallus. Although Epicurean themes appear in his poetry, this trend is replaced by a stoic and neo-Pythagorean attitude. See also Aeneid; Eclogues
12. Marcus Aurelius.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius (Antoninus) (121-180), Roman emperor (161-180) and philosopher, b. as Marcus Annius Verus. With his stepbrother Lucius Verus as coemperor, he succeeded his adoptive father Antoninus Pius as emperor in 161. After the death of Lucius Verus in 169, he reigned as sole emperor. His reign was troubled by numerous revolts and invasions. In 161 he repelled a Parthian invasion of Syria. In 167-68, he drove the Marcomanni, a Germanic tribe, out of Italy. There were also revolts in Egypt, Spain, and Britain. He lowered the taxes of the poor and was lenient to political prisoners, but persecuted Christians. His Meditations is an importantwork of Stoic philosophy.
THE MIDDLE AGES
13. Saint Augustine.
Confessions
Augustine, Saint (354-430), Christian theologian and philosopher. Augustine's Confessions gives us an intimate psychological self-portrait of a spirit in search of ultimate purpose. This he believed he found in his conversion to Christianity (386), which took place only after worldly and philosophical confusion. As bishop of Hippo (North Africa) from 396-430, he defended Roman Catholic orthodoxy against the Manichaeans, the Donatists and the Pelagians. According to the doctrine of his Enchiridion (421), he tended to emphasize the corruption of human will, and the freedom of the divine gift of grace. The City of God (426), perhaps his most enduring work, was a model of Christian apologetic literature. Of the Four Fathers of the LatinChurch, which also included Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory, Augustine is considered
the greatest.
14. Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet famous for the Divine Comedy, written in terza rima. Orphaned in adolescence, he married Gemma Donati. He became one of the rulers of the city-state of Florence, and was responsible for the exile of his brother-in-law and that of his best friend, Guido Cavalcanti. Later, Dante was exiled and wrote his inspired and majestic works under the patronage of various nobles until he died in poverty in Ravenna. Other works include La Vita nuova (The New Life), Convivio (Banquet), De monarchia (On Monarchy), and De Vulgare eloquentia, a treatise appealing for the use of the vernacular in literature. See also Divine Comedy; Terza Rima.
15. Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340-1400), the greatest of English medieval poets, strongly influenced by contemporaneous French and Italian writers. Born in London the son of a wine merchant, he served at court and on diplomatic missions before being appointed controller of customs in London (1374-86). His writings are remarkable for their range, narrative sense, power of characterization, and humor. They include The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Canterbury Tales.
PLAYS
16. William Shakespeare
Complete Works
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), English playwright and poet. Considered by many to be the greatest playwright of all time, he is the most frequently quoted individual writer in the world. His plays have been presented continuously since their writing. He arrived in London sometime around 1590, when his first plays, the three parts of Henry VI, were written. In 1594 he joined the Lord Chamberlain's (later, King's) Men as an actor and playwright. In 1599 he became a partner in the Globe Theatre; in 1608 of the Blackfriars Theatre. He retired to his birthplace, Stratford-on- Avon, in 1613. His poetry includes the heroic poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), the love poem The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601), and the 154 Sonnets, first published 1609. Following is a list of Shakespeare's plays, with the dates of first performances.
Henry VI (Part II) 1590
Henry VI (Part III) 1590
Henry VI (Part I) 1590
Titus Andronicus 1593
Richard III c. 1594
The Comedy of Errors 1594
The Taming of the Shrew c. 1594
Love's Labour's Lost 1594
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 1594-95
Richard II c. 1595
A Midsummer Night's Dream c. 1595
Romeo and Juliet c. 1596
King John 1596
The Merchant of Venice 1596
Henry IV (Part I) 1597
Henry IV (Part II) 1597
The Merry Wives of Windsor c. 1597
Much Ado About Nothing c. 1598
Henry V 1598
Julius Caesar 1599
As You Like It 1599
Twelfth Night 1599
Hamlet 1600
Troilus and Cressida 1601
All's Well That Ends Well 1602
Measure for Measure 1604
Othello 1604
King Lear 1605
Macbeth 1605
Antony and Cleopatra 1606
Coriolanus 1607
Timon of Athens 1607
Pericles c. 1607
Cymbeline 1609
The Winter's Tale 1610
The Tempest 1611
Henry VIII 1612
Two Noble Kinsmen c. 1613
17. Moliere.
Selected Plays
Molière (1622-73), pseud. of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, French playwright. Trained as a lawyer, he abandoned the law and joined an amateur dramatic group. His first important work was L'Étourdi (The Blunderer), performed at Lyons in 1655. An accurate observer of contemporary manners and types, he is remembered principally for his comedies of character, such as The School for Wives (1622), Tartuffe (1664), The Misanthrope (1666), and The Imaginary Invalid (1673). He wrote other kinds of plays as well: farce, as The Imaginary Cuckold (1660); comedy ballet, such as The Bores (1661); and spectacular "machine plays," eg, Amphitryon (1668) and Psyche (1671). Some of the plays are in verse, others in prose. He directed his own plays and often played the leading role himself. Although his plays ridiculed customs and character types, it was done without bitterness.
18. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Faust
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), German poet. One of the greatest German writers and thinkers, his range is vast: from simple love poems to profound philosophical poems or scientific theories. In his long life he was a lawyer, botanist, politician and civil servant, physicist, zoologist, painter, and theater manager. Johann Gottfried von Herder taught him to appreciate Shakespeare, and this influenced his Götz von Berlichingen (1773). His major works include The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel Italian Journey (1816), the classical drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787), Torquato Tasso (1789), Egmont (1788), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), Elective Affinities (1809), and his most famous work,Faust (1808, 1832). See also Faust
19. Henrik Ibsen.
Selectetd Plays
Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906), Norwegian playwright. He profoundly influenced world theater with tense, skillful dramas of complex individuals in conflict with bourgeois institutions. His widely translated works include Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), and When We Dead Awaken (1899).
20. George Bernard Shaw.
Selected Plays and Prefaces
Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), British dramatist, novelist, essayist, and critic, b. Ireland. He moved from Dublin to London in 1876, joined the Fabian Society, and became a notable public speaker and writer of political and economic tracts. By the 1880s he was highly respected for the excellence of his art, music, and drama criticism, written for London newspapers. He began writing plays in the early 1890s, achieving finally a large lifetime output that established him as the leading British playwright of his time. Many of his plays were provided with extended and pertinent prefaces. Among the most notable are Arms and the Man (1894); Candida (1897); The Man of Destiny (1897); The Devil's Disciple (1897); Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900); Caesar and Cleopatra (1901); Mrs. Warren's Profession (1902);
Man and Superman (1903); Major Barbara (1905); The Doctor's Dilemma (1906); Misalliance (1910); Androcles and the Lion (1912); Pygmalion (1913); Heartbreak House (1919); Back to Methuselah (1921); Saint Joan (1923); The Apple Cart (1929); Too True to Be Good (1932); and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). Other important writings by Shaw are the novel Cashel Byron's Profession (1886); the essays The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and The Perfect Wagnerite (1898); the political tracts Fabian Essays on Socialism (1889) and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism (1928); and the collections of his music and drama criticism. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.
21. Anton Chekhov. Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard
Chekov, or Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860-1904), Russian playwright whose theatrical realism evolved with the Moscow Art Theatre under Constantin Stanislavski. Chekov depicted the frustrations of Russian society in the final years of tsarism. The characters of The Sea Gull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), The Three Sisters (1900), and, especially, The Cherry Orchard (1904) were created with such validity that they bridged the Bolshevik Revolution and remain favorites of Soviet theater and elsewhere.
22 Eugene O'Neill.
Morning Becomes Electra, The Ice man Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night
O'Neill, Eugene (Gladstone) (1888-1953), US playwright, b. New York City. He wrote 45 plays, covering a wide range of subjects and dramatic styles. His plays reflect his pessimistic philosophy that man, robbed of his traditional faith by science, has nothing with which to replace it. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936 for his dramas, and four Pulitzer prizes for Beyond the Horizon (1919), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day's Journey into Night (1967), produced after his death. His 11-act trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) transfers the Orestean story to New England. At the time of his death he was engaged on a cycle of plays about a long period in American life, including The Iceman Cometh (1946) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947). He is viewed as the United States' most important playwright.
23. Samuel Beckett.
Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapps Last Tape
Beckett, Samuel (1906-89), Irish novelist and playwright. Living in Paris since 1937, he writes in both English and French. His bleak mastery of theater of the absurd is shown in such plays as Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Not I (1973). He is concerned with alienated individual consciousness in his novels, such as Murphy (1938), Malone Dies (1951), Molloy (1951), and Watt (1953). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. See also Theater of the Absurd
24. Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman
Miller, Arthur (Asher) (1915-), US playwright, b. New York City. After his first play The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), he wrote a novel Focus (1945), then a play All My Sons (1947), which won the Critics' Circle Award. Death of a Salesman (1949) won a Pulitzer Prize as well as the Critics' Circle Award. Other notable plays include The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1963), and The Price (1968). He also wrote the screenplay for the film The Misfits (1961) and the television drama Playing for Time (1980). More recent works include volume two of Arthur Miller's Collected Plays (1981) and the play The American Clock (1980).
NARRATIVES 1
25. John Bunyan.
The Pilgrim's Progress
Bunyan, John (1628-88), English preacher and author. A Parliamentarian soldier during the English Civil War, he became a Puritan minister in 1655 and twice suffered imprisonment for his nonconformist religious activities. His writings, popular and colloquial in style, include Grace Abounding (1666), and The Pilgrim's Progress (1678).
26. Daniel Defoe.
Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731), English journalist and novelist. He joined the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion (1685) and William III's army (1688). He supported the foreign king in the poem The True-born Englishman(1701) and was imprisoned for his pamphlet "The Shortest Way with Dissenters" (1702). His works include Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Roxana (1724).
27. Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, Meditations Upon a Broomstick, Resolutions When I Come to Be Old
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), Irish satirist and novelist. He became secretary to Sir William Temple (1689) and was ordained (1694), seeking benefits for Irish clergy. He wrote religious pamphlets and Tory propaganda (The Examiner 1710-11). His early works include A Tale of a Tub (1704), on religious and scholarly corruption and The Battle of the Books (1704), satirizing the controversy over ancient and modern learning. His Gulliver's Travels (1726) satirized courts and politicians. Swift had frequent contact with London literary circles until the late 1720s. He wrote numerous works criticizing Britain's treatment of Ireland, including A Modest Proposal (1729), a satire suggesting that children be fattened and eaten. His later works were increasingly bitter.
28. Laurence Sterne.
Tristram Shandy
Sterne, Laurence (1713-68), English novelist. A clergyman, he began as a political and ecclesiastical satirist, but his later works became more sentimental as he catered to public taste and wrote in a sentimental vein. His writings include a novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (9vols., 1760-67), Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760), and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768).
23. Henry Fielding.
Tom Jones
Fielding, Henry (1707-54), English novelist. He wrote comedies, such as Historical Register for the Year 1736, and later took up political journalism. His novels include Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749).
30. Jane Austen.
Pride and Prejudice, Emma
Austen, Jane (1775-1817), English novelist. A clergyman's daughter, she led an uneventful life but wrote six novels of great craftsmanship, insight, and wit: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818), and Northanger Abbey (1818).
31. Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights
Brontë, Emily (1818-48), English novelist and poet. She was the sister of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, also novelists. Her love for her native Yorkshire moors and her insight into human passion are manifested in her poetry and in her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). Brontë, Charlotte (1816-55), English novelist. She was the sister of Emily and Anne, also novelists. Her four novels --The Professor (written 1846, published 1857), Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), and Villette (1853)--are works of remarkable passion and imagination. See also Jane Eyre Brontë, Anne (1820-49), English novelist. The youngest of the Brontë sisters, she became a governess, an experience reflected in Agnes Grey (1847). Her other novel is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
32. William Makepeace Thackeray.
Vanity Fair
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-63), English novelist, comic illustrator, and journalist. A prolific writer in several genres, including satiric, historic, and fairy-tale, his works include Barry Lyndon (1842), Vanity Fair (1848), Pendennis(1850), Henry Esmond (1852), and The Virginians (1859).
33. Charles Dickens.
Picnic Papers, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit
Dickens, Charles (John Huffam) (1812-70), English novelist. Immensely popular in his own time, he remains to this day the most widely read novelist in the English language. He created many memorable comic characters in his novels while at the same time attacking social injustices. He spent his childhood in Chatham and London where his father held minor posts in the navy. At the age of 12 he went to work in a shoe-black factory when his father was thrown into debtors' prison. At 17 he became a court stenographer and less than two years later a parliamentary reporter. In 1833 he began contributing sketches on London life, signed Boz, to periodicals. The best of these were collected and published as Sketches by Boz (1836). Their favorable reception led to the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-37), which was highly successful. Dickens would continue to write for the rest of his life. Most of his novels first appeared in installments in periodicals. He himself edited two major periodicals: Household Words (1850-59) and All the Year Round (1858-70). His early novels were Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and Barnaby Rudge (1841). Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) drew upon impressions he received of the United States on a visit in 1842. A Christmas Carol,the first and most successful of his holiday stories, appeared in 1843. Between 1844-46 he lived in Italy and Switzerland. Dombey and Sons appeared in 1848, followed byDavid Copperfield (1850), his own favorite novel and his most autobiographical work. The 1850s also saw the publication of Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), and his only historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In 1856 he moved to his last permanent home, Gad's Hill Place, Kent. In 1858 he separated from his wife of 22 years, who had bore him 10 children. He was linked romantically with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. Great Expectations, considered by many critics to be his finest novel, appeared in 1861. His last completed novel was Our Mutual Friends (1865). In 1867-68 he made a triumphant US tour, giving dramatic readings from his works. He died of a stroke in 1870 before completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He was buried in the Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey.
34. George Eliot,
The Mill on the Floss, Middelmarch
Eliot, George (1819-80), English novelist whose real name was Marian Evans. Her romantic union with G.H. Lewes, a married man, created a major scandal. Early and well known novels, all realistic works about the problems of middle class people, include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861). Middlemarch (1872) is considered her best work.
35.Lewis Carroll.
Alice's adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-glass
Carroll, Lewis (1832-98), pseud. of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; English mathematician, photographer, and novelist. He is especially remembered for Alice'sAdventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1872), which have attracted much serious scholarly criticism as well as being popular children's classics. See also Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
36. Thomas Hardy.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), English novelist and poet. His novels, most of them tragic works set in the region of Wessex, include Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy later concentrated on poetry, in volumes such as Wessex Poems (1898). Noted poems by him include "The Darkling Thrush" (1900), "Channel Firing" (1914), and "The Convergence of the Twain" (1914). Between 1903 and 1908 he published The Dynasts, an epic-drama.
37. Joseph Conrad.
Nostromo
Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), British novelist, b. Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland. His years as a ship's officer in Asian, African, and Latin American waters suggested the exotic settings of many of his novels. His works include Almayer's Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1903), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Victory (1915), and the short novel The Heart of Darkness (1902). Conrad deals with the psychological conflicts that confront men in extreme situations.
38. E. M. Forster.
A Passage to India
Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1878-1970), English author. His novels deal with the individual's blind acceptance of social convention, denying the free and spontaneous in life. They include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and, his most famous work, A Passage to India (1924). His short stories were collected in The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928). The Art of the Novel (1927) is an important collection of lectures in literary criticism. Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) are collections of essays on literature, society, and politics. Forster also, with Eric Crozier, wrote the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera version of Melville's Billy Budd (1951). Though Forster's novels are conventional in structure, the excellence of his style places him among the foremost fiction writers of his time.
39. James Joyce.
Ulysses, Finnigan's Wake
Joyce, James (1882-1941), Irish novelist. He was educated by Jesuits but renounced Catholicism and left Ireland in 1904 to live and work in Europe. Joyce revolutionized the form and structure of the novel. The stream-of-consciousness technique is increasingly apparent in Joyce's work, which includes Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939), all set in Dublin. See also Stream-of-Consciousness Novel
40. Virginia Woolf.
Mrs. Dallaway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941), English novelist and critic, daughter of Leslie
Stephen, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. She founded the Hogarth Press (1917) with her husband Leonard. Her novels include Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928),The Waves (1931), and The Years (1937). They display her experimentation with fictional forms, particularly the stream-of-consciousness technique. See also Bloomsbury Group
41. D. H Lawrence.
Sons and lovers, Women in Love
Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885-1930), English author. The son of a coal
miner, he became a school teacher. In 1909 he had some poems published in the English Review and in 1911 his first novel The White Peacock appeared. In 1912 he went to Europe with Frieda von Richthofen, whom he married in 1914. During World War I, because of his pacifism and her being German, many people suspected them of being spies. In 1919 they left England to travel and live in Europe, Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. Lawrence believed that modern Western society was dehumanizing, that people were losing contact with their basic physical and sexual selves. The semiautobiographical novel Sons and Lovers had appeared in 1913. The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921) traced a family's history through several generations, concentrating on two women of the last generation. In the 1920s Lawrence wrote novels such as The Plumed Serpent (1926) with Nietzschean heroes. Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was long banned in England and the United States because of its explicit description and discussion of sex. Among his best known short stories are "The Prussian Officer" and "The Rocking-Horse Winner." Etruscan Places (1932) is his most important travel book. Studies in ClassicAmerican Literature (1916) is a provocative work of criticism. Lawrence died of tuberculosis at age 45.
42. Aldous Huxley.
Brave New World, Collected Essays
Huxley, Aldous (Leonard) (1894-1963), English novelist. He abandoned his medical studies, became a journalist and began to satirize the hedonism of the 1920s in novels such as Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World (1932) presents a nightmarish utopia of the future. Later novels include Eyeless in Gaza (1936), The Devils of Loudun (1952), and Island (1962). Brave New World Revisited (1958) is a collection of essays. See also Brave New World
43. George Orwell.
Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell, George (1903-50), pseud. of Eric (Arthur) Blair; English journalist, critic, and novelist, b. India. Orwell fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. His books include the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and Homage to Catalonia (1938); the antitotalitarian fable Animal Farm (1945); and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel.
44.Thomas Mann.
The Magic Mountain
Mann, Thomas (1875-1955), German novelist and essayist. He modeled his concepts of the "burger" from his wealthy merchant father and of the exotic artistic temperament from his mother. These two elements he later represented as the polarity inherent in human life. His most powerful works, in which he apologized for the conservative traditions in Germany, came from WWI. His opposition to fascism grew from WWII. His novels include Buddenbrooks (1901), Tonio Kröger (1903),Death in Venice (1912), The Magic Mountain (1924), Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), Doctor Faustus (1947), and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954). Leaving Germany in 1933, he took US citizenship in 1944 and settled in Zurich in 1952. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929 and the Goethe Prize in 1949.
45. Franz Kafka.
The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories
Kafka, Franz (1883-1924), Austrian novelist, b. Prague. Son of a successful Jewish businessman, Kafka suffered under his father's dominance. Little known in his lifetime, he became famous in 1945 with the English translation of his novels, such as The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), America (1927), and Metamorphosis (1915). His work recorded modern man's fate of having been caught in an incomprehensible nightmare world. The heroes persisted in hope, but their endeavors were absurd. His collections of autobiographically oriented short storiesforeshadowed his novels.
46. Francois Rabelais.
Garguntua and Pantagruel
Rabelais, François (c. 1494- c. 1553), French humanist and satirist. He left convent life to study medicine and was appointed hospital physician at Lyons in 1532. He traveled widely in Italy. His life work (Pantagruel 1532; Gargantua 1534; Tiers Livre 1546; Quart Livre 1548, 1552) is a series of vivid, hedonistic, satirical digressions. Condemned by theologians and the Sorbonne, his works were widely popular and gained him the protection of important patrons.
47. Voltaire.
Candide and Other Works
Voltaire (1694-1778), French philosopher, historian, and poet, b. François Marie Arouet, Paris. Voltaire is known for his penetrating wit and brilliant style. He left Paris after publication of Philosophical Letters (1734). After a stay in Prussia (1750-53) he settled at Ferney (1758), where he added to his literary reputation based on The Henriade (1723), Zaire (1732), Mérope (1743), Candide (1759) by conducting a vigorous philosophical campaign in favor of the Enlightenment and against superstition, obscurantism, and metaphysics. His ethical position, expressed in Essay on Morals (1756), was founded on toleration and practical humanitarianism as opposed to dogmatic theology. See also Candide; Enlightenment
48. Stendhal.
The Red and the Black
Stendhal (1783-1842), pseud. of Marie Henri Beyle, French novelist. After an unhappy childhood, Stendhal sought pleasure in Paris, joined Napoleon's army, and traveled widely in Italy. His literary output ranged from autobiographical studies to a treatise on love, from books on aesthetics through Romanticism into the realism of his two greatest novels, The Red and the Black (1831) and Charterhouse of Parma (1839).
49. Honore de Balzac.
Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet
Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850), French novelist. Balzac began writing thrillers in aParis attic before his spectacular failure as a publisher. His first success was LesChouans (1829), and many great novels followed in his grand scheme The Human Comedy. They include Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot (1835), and La Cousine Bette (1847)
. 50. Gustave Flaubert.
Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), French novelist. He spent most of his life in Rouen among the provincial bourgeoisie featured in many of his works. A Realist, his novels include Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbô (1862), Sentimental Education (1869), and The Temptation of St Anthony(1874).
51. Marcel Proust.
Remembrance of Things past
Proust, Marcel, (1871-1922), French novelist. The son of a doctor, he studied law at the Sorbonne, and deliberately infiltrated the Parisian social élite. Proust was interested in philosophy and translated some works of John Ruskin. He suffered from asthma and nervous disorders and in 1908 withdrew into his cork-lined bedroom. Here he wrote the seven-part novel cycle A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), published between 1913-1927. The first volume, Swann's Way, was published at his own expense, since his eccentricities and his reputation for dilettantism prevented him from finding a publisher. The second volume (Within a Budding Grove, 1918), however, won the Prix Goncourt. With his health failing, Proust raced to complete his work; the last three books were published posthumously.
52. Andre: Malraux.
Man s Fate, Voices of silence
Born in Paris in 1901, Andre Malraux has come to personify the ideal of I'homme engage the intellectual who is also the man of action.He spent the greater part of the years I923-17 in Indo-China and China, devoting hirnself first to archaeological researches and later working for the Kuomintang before the break with the Communists. Active on the Republican side of the fighting in the Spanish Civii War, he was confined as a prisoner of war during the occupation of France, but escaped to join the Resistance movement. Since the war he has held a succession of ministerial posts in the French government; he was one of de Gaulle's principal advisers and became the Minister of Culture. Just after the War he created Voices of Silence in two Volumes, The Imaginary Museum and the second volumn was Scultpure of the World. Among his many published works are the novel Man's Estate, which won the Prix Goncourt, Days of Hope, and The Metamorphosis of the Gods. He became Minister of Culture under George pompidou's Goverment. During his life and after his death his entire career came into question and his entire literary career is still questioned.
53. Albert Camus.
The Plague, The Stranger
Camus, Albert (1913-60), French novelist, playwright, and essayist, born in Algeria. After working in avant-garde theater and journalism, he became one of the leaders of the French Resistance. He achieved recognition with his first novel The Stranger (1942). Despite the recurrent themes of "the absurd" and mankind's powerlessness in his novels The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956), and in essays (The Rebel, 1951), he committed himself to humanitarian values and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957.
54. Edgar Allan Poe.
Short Stories and Other Works
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49), US poet and short-story writer, b. Boston. Orphaned in 1811, he was raised in Richmond, Va., by a wealthy merchant, John Allan. He briefly attended the University of Virginia (1826), enlisted in the army, was appointed to West Point, and then, after a final breach with Allan, went to New York City, where a volume of poetry, his third, was published (1831). To support himself he began to write short stories and held several editorial jobs. During 1835-37 he edited the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, but he began drinking and lost the job.
Subsequently, he was editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (1839-40) and Graham's Magazine (1841-42) in Philadelphia and of the Evening Mirror andBroadway Journal (1845-46) in New York. He gained repute for his literary criticism, as well as for his numerous short stories. His stories include "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Gold Bug" (1843), "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1843), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844), tales of mystery and horror. Although plagued by alcoholism before his death, he produced his finest verse, including "The Raven" (1845), "To Helen" (1848), and "Annabel Lee" (1849). He is regarded as the creator of the modern detective story and greatly influenced other writers.
55 Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Scarlet Letter selected Tales
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-64), US novelist and short-story writer, b. Salem, Mass. After graduating from Bowdoin College (1825), he returned to Salem, where he began to write tales and historical sketches. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he was a leader in the development of the short story as a particularly American fictional form. HisTwice-Told Tales appeared in 1837. Unable to make a living as a writer, however, he worked as a clerk in the Boston Customs House during 1839-41. While living in Concord, Mass., he wrote Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). Subsequently, he worked at the Salem Customs House (1846-49) and wrote his first novel, The ScarletLetter (1850). The following year The House of Seven Gables, a novel, and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales were published. In 1853 he was appointed US consul in Liverpool, England. He lived in England until 1858 and then in Italy (1858-59). Other works include the novels The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860).
56. Herman Melville.
Moby Dick, Bnrtleby theScrivener
Melville, George Wallace (1841-1912), US naval engineer and explorer, b. NewYork City. He made several voyages to the Arctic, and on his second trip with George DeLong (1879), the ship was frozen in for two winters before it sank near Siberia. Melville commanded one of two lifeboats that made it to Siberia. He then led the survivors on a 500-mi (805-km) hike along the coast to recover DeLong's body and the ship's records. In the Lena Delta (1884) is his account of that voyage. In 1887 he became chief of the Navy's Bureau of Steam Engineering. There he designed the ships' machinery, increasing their efficiency, and streamlined administrative work.
57. Mark Twain.
Huckleberry Finn
Twain, Mark (1835-1910), pseud. of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, US journalist, lecturer, and author, b. Florida, Mo. The first US author of world rank to write authentically colloquial novels employing a genuine American idiom. His work, whichbegan as pure humor and developed to bitter satire, was marked by an egalitarian attitude and a strong desire for social justice. "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865), a short story, brought Twain fame. His reputation was furthered by the travel books Innocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It (1872). In 1872 Twain settled in Hartford, Conn., whence he made many successful lecture tours around the United States and the world. He collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner on The Gilded Age (1873). Mark Twain's Sketches, Old and New (1875) was followed by three of his finest and best-known works, all utilizing material from his boyhood: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (novel, 1876), Life on the Mississippi (nonfiction, 1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (novel,1885). He published another travel book, A Tramp Abroad (1880), and two historical novels, The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), a social satire. Saddened and embittered by personal and financial losses, Twain later wrote such pessimistic works as The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches (1900), What Is Man? (1905), and The Mysterious Stranger (1916). Twain's works revolutionized the language of American fiction and had a great influence on many laterAmerican writers.
58. Henry James.
The Ambassadors
James, Henry, Jr. (1843-1916), US novelist, short-story writer, and critic, b. New York City. The son of Henry James, Sr., and brother of William James, he received his early education abroad but went to Harvard Law School for a law degree. Encouraged by William Dean Howells, he entered upon a literary career and published his first novel Watch and Ward in 1871. In 1876 he established residence in England, and in 1915 became a British subject. James, the master of a complex prose style, had a keen insight into values ofcharacter. He felt strongly that a writer should "never allow anything to enter a novel which was not represented as a perception or experience of one of the characters." Usually the central figure in his works was an American involved in one of the arts, either wealthy himself or moving in wealthy or influential circles. In many of these novels the principal theme lies in the contrast of American and European traits. Among his many works are the novels Roderick Hudson (1876), Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors (1903).
59. William Faulkner.
The Sound and the Fury, As I lay Dying
Faulkner, William (1897-1962), US author, b. New Albany, Miss. He was raised in Oxford, Miss., where he later made his home. He joined the Royal Air Force in Canada in 1918, briefly attended the University of Mississippi after World War I, and lived for a short time in the early 1920s in New York City, New Orleans, and Europe. His first book was a collection of poems, The Marble Faun (1924). Soldier's Pay, a novel,appeared in 1926 and another novel, Mosquitoes, in 1927. With Sartoris (1929), his third novel, Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County, the setting of most of his futureworks. Drawing on his own background and on the people he knew best, he wrote a series of novels and stories that depict the South through the 19th and 20th centuries. The primary themes of the so-called Yoknapatawph Saga include the relationship of the past to the present and the effects of the disintegration of traditional Southern society. An innovative stylist, he often used the stream-of-consciousness technique and complex time sequences. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for 1949. His works include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962). He received Pulitzer Prizes for the latter two works.
60. Ernest Hemingway.
Short Stories
Hemingway, Ernest (Miller) (1899-1961), US author, b. Oak Park, Ill. After graduating from high school in 1917 he worked as a newspaper reporter. In World War I he served as an ambulance driver in France, then joined the Italian infantry and was wounded. After the war he became a correspondent in Paris for the Toronto Star. He met Gertrude Stein, who strongly influenced his direct, terse prose. He published Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), the short stories In Our Time (1924), and the novel The Torrents of Spring (1926), but it was with the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) that he established his reputation as a writer. This novel about expatriates also established Hemingway as the spokesman for the Lost Generation. He maintained his reputation with A Farewell to Arms (1929) and such short stories as "The Killers" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." To Have and Have Not (1937) was not as well received as his two previous novels, but For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which drew on his experience as a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, was a critical and popular success. Hemingway's nonfiction as much as his fiction concerned itself with people leading dangerous or especially virile lives and facing the consequences with stoic courage. Death in the Afternoon (1932) is about bullfighting; Green Hills of Africa (1935), about big-game hunting. The novel The Old Man and the Sea appeared in 1952. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He committed suicide in 1961. Several works were published after his death: A Moveable Feast (1964), memoirs of Paris in the 1920s; Islands in the Stream (1970), a novel; The Nick Adams Stories (1972).
61. Saul Bellow.
The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift
Bellow, Saul (1915-), US author, b. Lachine, Canada. Reared in Chicago, he taught English and creative writing at various universities. A novelist, short story writer, and playwright, his first novel, The Dangling Man, appeared in 1944. Subsequent novels include The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), The Dean's December (1982), Him With His Foot in His Mouth (1984), and More Die of Heartbreak (1987). Bellow won three National Book Awards for fiction (1954, 1965, 1971). He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift (1975) and the 1976 Nobel Prize in literature.
62 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Don Quixote
Cervantes, Miguel de (1547-1616), Spanish novelist, poet, and dramatist. He went to Italy in 1569, in the service of a cardinal, was wounded in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. While returning to Spain in 1575, he was captured and kept as a slave in Algiers. He was ransomed in 1580 and settled in Madrid. Cervantes' works include La Galatea (1585), Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605; 1615), and Novelas Ejemplares (1613). See also Don Quixote de la Mancha
63 Jorge Louis Borges
Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-86), Argentine writer, the best-known Argentine author of the 20th century. His huge output of work has become a frame of reference for all Latin American writers. Most famous for his short stories--including the collections El hacedor(1960), and El libro de arena (1975)--he also wrote books of poetry and essays. His stories often use elaborate puzzles to dramatize what he believes is the extreme difficulty of achieving knowledge. Despite this skepticism, he writes with humor and awe about our attempts to unravel life's mysteries.
64. Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
One hundred Years of Solitude
García Márquez, Gabriel (1928-), Colombian novelist. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) has become one of the most popular books ever in the Spanish- speaking world. It focuses on the remote town of Macondo, which was also the setting of his previous novels. The events are often fantastic but the town's up-and-down history has been interpreted as symbolic of Latin America's. Macondo's feuding,eccentric citizens are both funny and tragic. Withered Leaves (1955) began the saga. His other works include The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1983), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1988). In 1978, he formed Habeas, a human rights organization. He fled to Mexico in 1981. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
65. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol.
Dead Souls
Gogol, Nikolai (1809-52), Russian novelist and dramatist whose work marks the transition from pure Romanticism to early realism. He made his reputation with folk tales, such as Taras Bulba (1835), the stories Diary of a Madman (1835) and TheNose (1836), and the drama The Inspector General (1836), which show the early development of his characteristically grotesque satirical style. Dismayed by reactionary criticism, he turned to religion for spiritual support and lived mostly in Rome from 1836 to 1848. Here he completed the first and only published part of his major work Dead Souls (1842) and the short story The Overcoat (1842). He spent the last ten years of his life working on the second part of Dead Souls but this was destroyed before publication.
66 Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev.
Fathers and Sons
Turgenev, Ivan (Sergeevich) (1818-83), Russian novelist, playwright, and short- story writer. He was at his most prolific between 1850-60. The play A Month in the Country, which would strongly influence Chekhov, appeared in 1850. A Sportsman's Sketches, short stories, was published in 1852. Three novels also appeared: Rudin (1855), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), and On the Eve (1860). His works received official disapproval because they spoke out against social and political evils. After the appearance of his greatest novel Fathers and Sons, about nihilism, he left Russia. Well-known short stories include "First Love" (1870), "A Lear of the Steppe" (1870), and "Torrents of Spring" (1871).
67. Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.
Crime and Punishment The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Mikhailovich) (1821-81), Russian novelist. After writing Poor Folk (1846) and The Double (1846), he joined a revolutionary group, was arrested, and sentenced to death (1849). Reprieved at the last minute, he was sentenced to four years' hard labor in Siberia. He married (1857) and returned to St. Petersburg, where he edited several journals with his brother Mikhail and wrote Notes from the Underground (1864). After Crime and Punishment (1866) appeared, he married his secretary, Anna, left Russia to escape creditors. While abroad, he wrote The Idiot (1868-69) and The Possessed (1871-72). His last major work The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80).
68. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
War and Peace
Tolstoy, (Count) Leo (1828-1910), Russian novelist and philosopher. While
serving in the army, he began the autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852-57). After taking part in the defense of Sevastopol (1855), he lived on his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and in St Petersburg, marrying in 1862. After writing War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-77), he underwent a spiritual crisis, as recorded in Confession (1879). Later works, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and Resurrection (1899-1900), advocate nonviolence and a simple life and reflect his rejection of Orthodox Christianity. Estranged from his wife, he died after fleeing from his home. See alsoAnna Karenina; War and Peace
63. Vladimir Nabokov.
Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak Memory
Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977), US author, b. Russia. He lived in Western Europe before going to the United States in 1940. Many of his novels were written in Russian and later translated into English. His works include Laughter in the Dark (1938),Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), and Ada (1969). He also wrote short stories and poetry.
70. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.
The First Circle, Cancer Ward
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1918-), Soviet author. Arrested for criticism of Stalin while in the Red Army, he was sentenced to a forced labor camp (1945-53), where he contracted cancer, from which he recovered. Subsequently exiled in Kazakhstan, he was officially rehabilitated in 1957. Now a major spokesman for Soviet dissident intellectuals, his writings include the novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The First Circle (1964), Cancer Ward (1966), August 1914 (1972), the nonfiction The Gulag Archipelago (1974), and his memoirs The Oak and the Calf (1980). He encountered growing opposition from the Soviet regime, was deported to the West (1974), and settled in the United States, eventually forming a publishingcompany. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature (1970).
70a Gertrude Stein
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946), US author and critic, b. Allegheny, Pa. She abandoned the study of medicine to devote her life to literature. She joined her brother in Paris(1903) and established a famous salon where she entertained and became a counselor and confidante of many of the great artists and writers of the time: Cézanne, Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and many more. Her first important book was Three Lives (1909). Other important works include Tender Buttons (1914), a volume of poems, and The Making of Americans (1925), a narrative. Her memoirs, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually a book by Stein about Stein but presented as the work of her secretary and constant personal companion, attained wide popularity.
PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, POLITICS, ESSAYS
71. Thomas Hobbes.
Leuiathan
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), English philosopher. After serving as a tutor, Hobbes traveled extensively in Europe. Fleeing England (1642), he remained a royalist in exile until the restoration of Charles II (1660). In De Corpore (On Bodies), De Homine (On Man), and De Cive (On the State), he presented his view that matter and its motion comprise the valid subject matter of philosophy. Organic and inorganic matter obey similar laws of self-assertion and collision respectively. Nature, including the human, is a theater of necessary causes and determined effects. Hobbes' materialism is projected on the political plane in Leviathan (1651). See also Leviathan; Materialism
72. John Locke.
Second Treatise of Government
Locke, John (1632-1704), English philosopher. He studied at Oxford and served as physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury (until 1682). He went into exile in Holland (1683), but returned after the Glorious Revolution, when his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the first great work of British Empiricism, appeared. At the same time, his Essays on Civil Government (1690), establishing his version of thecontract of government, was published. Locke advocated a concept of limited sovereignty, implying a right to restore liberty where threatened. In religion, he was a rationalist.
73. David Hume.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Hume, David (1711-76), philosopher, historian, and man of letters, b. Edinburgh, Scotland. Hume left Scotland in 1734 and lived thereafter in London and Paris. His remarkably original A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) initially was a literary
failure. More successful were his History of England (1754-62) and various essays and philosophical "inquiries." He also held a succession of minor official posts and traveled extensively. Widely known for his humanitarianism and skepticism, Hume held a form of empiricism that affirmed the contingency of all phenomenal events. The posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) indicates the extent of his atheism.
74. John Stuart Mill.
On Liberty
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73). English philosopher. He received an extraordinary education from his father, James Mill, recounted in his Autobiography (1873). Heserved in the East India Company, edited several periodicals, and was a member of Parliament (Westminster, 1865). He advocated a form of utilitarianism, in a book by that name (1861). On Liberty (1859) became famous for its defense of civilliberties. In System of Logic (1843) he attempted to provide a rigorous account of inductive reasoning. His epistemology was empiricist. See also Mill, James; Utilitarianism
75. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto
Marx, Karl (1818-83), German social philosopher and political activist, founder (with Friedrich Engels) of the world Communist movement. He studied history, philosophy, and law and received a doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841. He rejected the philosophical idealism of G.W.F. Hegel but accepted his dialectical method and combined it with the philosophical materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess to produce his own approach of dialectical materialism. In Paris after1843 he met Friedrich Engels, with whom he was to share a lifelong collaboration. His association with such French radicals as P.J. Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and thefollowers of Saint-Simon and Fourier deepened his socialist commitments.
In Paris he wrote Toward the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (1844), which proclaimed that "religion was the opium of the people." He also wrote, with Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46), describing inevitable laws of history. Expelled from France, he went to Brussels, published a newspaper, and joined the Communist League, an international workers' society, for which he and Engels wrote their epochal Communist Manifesto (1848). From 1848, Marx was to devote his life to scholarly and political activity aimed at analyzing and overthrowing capitalism. Expelled from Belgium (1848), he participated in the revolutionary movements in France and Germany. Expelled from both those countries, he finally went to London
(1849), where he was to live until his death. Although Engels assisted him financially, Marx's London years were largely spent under conditions of poverty, illness, and family tragedy as he toiled on research in the British Museum and produced a stream of writings, including The Class Struggles in
France, 1848-1850 (1950) and Das Kapital (3 vols., 1867, 1885, 1894), whose last two volumes were edited by Engels. The monumental Kapital, systematically criticizing what Marx saw as capitalism's exploitative and self-destructive tendencies, became the "bible of the working class." In 1864 he became one of the founders of the International Workingmen's Association (the "First International"), an association of labor, reform, and radical movements. His defense of the Paris Commune (1871) in speeches and The Civil War in France (1871) gave him an international reputation, and he became the leading spirit of the International. He denounced both the nonrevolutionary reformism of British labor leaders and the anarchism advocated by Mikhail Bakunin. Split into factions, the International dissolved in 1874. Marx, however, continued to be consulted by many as a kind of socialist prophet. During this period he generally, as in Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), advocated a hard line and less collaboration with bourgeois elements. Since his death the ideas of Marx have continued to have immense influence. See also Communist Manifesto
Friedrich Engels:
Engels, Friedrich (1820-95), German political writer and Socialist. He was a disciple of Karl Marx, with whom he collaborated in formulating the theory of dialectical materialism. As agent in England of his father's textile business (1842-44) he took an interest in the workers' conditions and, under the influence of the Chartist movement, wrote The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845). This brought him into touch with Marx, then an exile in England, and together they wrotethe Communist Manifesto (1848). While Marx was doing research and writing in London, Engels supported him, and from 1870 until Marx's death (1883) he helped Marx with his writings. He completed Das Kapital (1894), which Marx left unfinished.
76. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.
Thus SpakeZarathustra, Selected Other Works
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900), German philosopher. He studied classical philosophy at Bonn and taught at Basel (1869). He met and broke with Richard Wagner (1874). His Birth of Tragedy (1872) betrays the influence of Wagner's art. In 1879 he abandoned philology for philosophy, and celebrated his new notion of the "free spirit" in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-91). His aphoristic method was misunderstood or ignored. His later works include Beyond Good & Evil (1886), On the Genealogy ofMorals (1887), and Ecce Homo (1888).
77. Sigmund Freud.
Selected Works
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), Austrian psychiatrist and founder of the psychoanalytic movement, b. Freiberg, Moravia. Working with Josef Breuer, Freud developed new methods for treating mental disorders--free association and dream interpretation (summarized in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). He developed theories of the neuroses involving childhood relationships to one's parents and stressed the importance of sexuality in both normal and abnormal development. These controversial aspects of his theories were not well-received by his contemporaries, but gradually his ideas became widely discussed and gained acceptance. Later Freud extended psychoanalysis to a wide variety of cultural and social-psychological phenomena. The impact of Freud's writings (such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1904; The Ego and the Id, 1923; and Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930) on modern thought is incalculable. The influences on medicine, psychotherapy, and psychology are obvious, but they also are considerable for literature, religion, education, and child care. Freud brought sex out into the open as a topic fit for discussion. He caused psychologists to realize that human motivations could be unconscious and made them look closely at child-parent relations as a source for both healthy and sick development. No individual has influenced the development of modern psychiatry and psychology more than Freud.
78. Niccolo Machiavelli.
The Prince
Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469-1527), Florentine statesman and political theorist, an outstanding figure of the Italian Renaissance. He served from 1498 to 1512 as an official and diplomat of Piero Soderini's republican government of Florence. Machiavelli lost his post when the Medici returned to power; he devoted the remainder of his life to writing a number of important literary, political, and historical works. His Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1513-17) argued that the experience of the past could provide solutions for the present. A pamphlet, The Prince, written in 1513, made Machiavelli famous. Advocating the need of the ruler to preserve and enhance his own power and that of the state by whatever means necessary, The Prince became a guidebook to power politics and made Machiavelli'sname synonymous with cunning, ruthlessness, and political immorality.
73. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
Selected Essays
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, (Seigneur de) (1553-92), French essayist. Originally a magistrate, he retired from public life to his private lands in 1571 to compose his Essais (1580). Written in a style that alternated between high eloquence and racy colloquialism, the Essais constituted an intellectual autobiography that moved from stoicism through skepticism to a mature acceptance of all that life offered. A new edition of the Essais, with additions, was published in 1588, and he continued to work on them until his death.
80. Rene: Descartes.
Discourse on Method
Descartes, René (1596-1650), French philosopher and mathematician. He received a Jesuit education and saw military service (1612-21). Thereafter he retired to pursue scientific and philosophical inquiries. He founded analytic geometry and contributed to geometrical optics in the treatise that prefaced the Discourse on Method (1637).
Here, and in his Meditations, Descartes introduced modern metaphysics, as the work of deduction and intuition. Mind, he held, was essentially separate from matter, whichwas extended, inert substance. Mind knows matter only through ideas, whose clarity and distinctness, guaranteed by God, confers truth. Descartes died in Sweden, shortly after accepting the invitation of Queen Christina to join her intellecual court. See also Cartesian; Cogito Ergo Sum; Rationalism
81. Blaise Pascal.
Thoughts (Pensees)
Pascal, Blaise (1623-62), French mathematician. A prodigy, he had written a book on conics by the age of 16 and later, with Pierre de Fermat, laid the foundations of the theory of probability. He also contributed to calculus and hydrodynamics before retiring from science in 1655 to devote himself to religious and philosophical writing, of which his Pensées are the best known example.
82. Alexis de Tocqueville.
Democracy in America
Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805-59), first sociologist to examine the impact of democracy on nonpolitical institutions. In his study "Democracy In America" he held that democratic emphasis on equality might suppress individuality and lead to total conformity--a tyranny of the majority.
83. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Selected Works
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82), US essayist and poet, a key figure in American thought and literature, b. Boston. After graduating from Harvard University (1821), he taught school, attended Harvard Divinity School (1825-26), and was a Unitarian minister in Boston (1829-32). Rejecting the formal structure of the church, he resigned his pastorate and went to Europe. There he met Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth and became acquainted with German Romanticism. On his return to the United States he began giving lectures; many of these were published or were incorporated into his essays. In 1835 he settled in Concord, Mass., becoming friends with Henry David Thoreau,Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and others of the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson's book Nature (1836) expressed the fundamental principles of Transcendental thought. Subsequent works included two series of Essays (1841, 1844); Poems (1846); Representative Men (1850), biographical essays; English Traits (1856), lectures given in England in 1847; The Conduct of Life (1860); May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), poetry; and Society and Solitude (1870). In these works Emerson preached his philosophy: belief in the soul; the unity of God with manand nature; self-reliance; and hope.
84. Henry David Thoreau.
Walden, Civil Disobedience
Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62), US author, b. Concord, Mass. After graduating from Harvard University (1837), he taught school for several years in Concord. There he became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists. During 1841-43 he lived with Emerson as a handyman and assistant. During this period some of his early prose and poetry appeared in the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial. An ardent individualist, in July 1845, he began to live at Walden Pond, near Concord, in a cabin that he built. He kept a daily journal, recording, among other things, the plant and animal life that he observed and worked on his first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). In 1846 he spent one night in jail for refusing to pay a federal poll tax in protest against the Mexican War, which he regarded as a war for the extension of slavery; his famous essay on "Civil Disobedience" (1849) stemming from this incident emphasized his belief that man should live according to his conscience. Thoreau left Walden in September 1847. Subsequently, he worked in his father's pencil factory and at odd jobs. His masterwork, Walden, or meditative narrative, appeared in 1854. During the 1850s, he was active in the antislavery movement, helping escaped slaves on their way to Canada, lecturing against slavery, and praising John Brown. He died of tuberculosis. Records of his walking excursions were published in The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866). His Poems of Nature was published in 1895. See also Brown, John; Civil Disobedience; Transcendentalism; Walden
85. William James,
The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism and Four Essays from The
Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious
Experience
James, William (1842-1910), US philosopher and psychologist, b. New York City.Regarded by many as the greatest of American psychologists and an outstanding philosopher, he pioneered research in many areas, including emotions, consciousness, attention, and the laboratory study of human functions. A precursor of the functionalist school, he also did much to establish psychology as relevant to practical problems. His masterpiece, Principles of Psychology (1890), is one of the great achievements in psychology. Other noted works include The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Pragmatism (1907). See also James-Lange Theory; Pragmatism
86 John Dewey.
Human Nature and Conduct
Dewey, John (1859-1952), US educator, philosopher, and psychologist, b. Burlington, Vt. While he was a professor at the University of Chicago (1894-1904), he founded (1896) the Laboratory School to experiment with educational methods. He joined the faculty of Columbia University (1904) and taught there until 1930. A chief founder of Functionalism, Dewey strove to make the social sciences deal with the practical problems of education and mental disturbances. His theories about "learning-by-doing" and individualized instruction had profound impact on US educational practices and the development of applied psychology. His books include The School and Society (1899) and Experience and Education (1938).
87 George Santayana
Skepticism and Animal Faith, Selected other Works
Santayana, George (1863-1952), US philosopher and poet, b. Spain. After emigrating to the United States (1872) he became a professor at Harvard (1889- 1912), resigning to settle in Italy. His works tended toward skepticism in the tradition of the Platonic doctrine of Essence. At the same time he admitted a positive knowledge of the realm of universals or "essences." After World War II, he secluded himself from people and events; this withdrawal being paralleled by the moral detachment of his works. A naturalist and materialist, he viewed religion as imaginative but not necessarily significant. His most important works include The Sense of Beauty (1896), The Life of Reason (1905-06), Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), and The Last Puritan (1935).
POETRY
88.John Donne.
Selected Works
Donne, John (c.1571-1631), English poet and cleric. Raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Anglicanism, he was ordained in 1615 after years of poverty. In 1621 he became dean of St Paul's Cathedral, London, where his sermons attracted much attention. Although widely known in his lifetime, the poems for which he is now famous were not published until 1633. Noted for their wit, extravagant imagery, and passion, they include love poems, satires, and religious sonnets. See also Metaphysical Poetry
89. John Milton.
Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On The Morning of Christ's Nativity Sonnets, Areopagitica
Milton, John (1608-74), English poet and prose writer. Born in London, educated at Cambridge University, he traveled in Europe (1638-39), and served as Latin secretary to the Commonwealth government (1649-60). In 1652 he became blind. His work is characterized by Latinized language and grandeur of imagery. A Puritan, he nevertheless questioned Christian orthodoxy. His greatest works are L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (both 1632), Comus (1634), Lycidas (1637), Areopagitica (1644), Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671).
90. William Blake.
Selected Works
Blake, William (1757-1827), English poet, painter, and engraver. He was apprenticed to an engraver (1772) and studied at the Royal Academy (1778). A friend of William Godwin and Thomas Paine, he supported the French Revolution. His work is characterized by the prophetic and mystical visions he experienced. Poetical Sketches (1783) was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), and Songs of Experience (1794). His prophetic books, portraying his private mythologies, include The Book of Urizen (1794), The Four Zoas (1797), Milton and Jerusalem (1804). In addition to his own works, Blake illustrated The Book of Job and Dante's Divine Comedy.
91. William Wordsworth.
The Prelude, Selected Short Poems; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), English poet. He spent much of his youth exploring the countryside around Cumberland. He visited France twice (1790-92), sympathizing with the revolutionaries. With his sister Dorothy, to whom he was very close, he settled in Dorsetshire and became friends with Samuel Coleridge, with whom he wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798). Disillusioned with politics, Wordsworth explored the correlation between nature and the development of the human mind in poems such as "The Ruined Cottage" (1797), "Tintern Abbey" (1798), "The Prelude" (1805, 1850), "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (1807), and "Resolution and Independence" (1807).
92. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kulbla Khan Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), English Romantic poet and critic. Although he devoted most of his literary life to criticism, political journalism, and philosophy, he is chiefly remembered today as the author of the poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," and "Christabel." His poetry is noted for its rich imagery and exotic settings. In 1798 he and William Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, a collection of their poems that is generally considered the real beginning of the Romantic movement in English poetry. His greatest critical work, Biographia Literaria (1817), documents the critical theories of Romanticism. His criticisms of Shakespeare were highly influential in his day, as were his writings on German metaphysical philosophy.
93 William Butler Yeats
Collected Poems Collected, Plays, The Autobiography
Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), Irish poet, b. Dublin. A founder-member of the Rhymers Club in London (1891), his verse became increasingly austere as he developed a complex symbolism to commemorate public events and private friendships. With his friend Lady Gregory he helped to found the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (1904), for which he wrote plays. He was also involved in Irish nationalist politics and was a skeptical adherent of spiritualism. He married Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 and served as a senator of the Irish Free State (1922-28). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Among his many memorable poems are "Easter, 1916," "The Second Coming," and "Sailing to Byzantium." See also Abbey Theatre; Gregory, (Lady) Augusta (Persse); Irish Literary Renaissance
94. T. S. Eliot.
Collected Poems, Collected plays
Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965), British poet and critic, b. St. Louis, Mo. He moved to England in 1914 and became a British citizen in 1927, the same year he converted to Anglo-Catholicism. He found early encouragement for his poetry in fellow expatriate Ezra Pound. After the publication of his first poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), he devoted the rest of his life to literature as a poet, playwright, critic, and editor. The Waste Land (1922) created a literary sensation with its unique, complex language utilizing literary allusions and mythical and religious symbolism to descry the emptiness of contemporary life. Later poems, notably Ash Wednesday (1930) and the Four Quartets (1935-42) held out hope through religious faith. Of his five plays in verse, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), his first, was the most successful. His critical works, including The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), and Elizabethan Essays (1934), did much to revive interest in earlier poetry and to raise the scholarly standards of 20th century criticism. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
95. Walt Whitman.
Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855), A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads
Whitman, Walt(er) (1819-92), US poet and essayist, recognized as the poetic spokesman of the American spirit, b. Huntington, N.Y. In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems, the radical form and content of which brought critical disdain and left the poet with a life-long unsavory reputation. Whitman frequently revised and augmented Leaves of Grass over the next 35 years. In 1865, while employed as a government clerk, he published Drum-Taps, reissued in 1866 with Sequel to Drum-Taps; both included in a later edition of Leaves of Grass. A collection of essays, Democratic Vistas (1871), was incorporated with more poems in Two Rivulets (1876) and published with Leaves of Grass. Publicity over an 1881 edition of his poems brought Whitman his firstfinancial success, and only at the time of his death was he beginning to be recognized as an important world poet, whose work had a vital influence on contemporaries and succeeding generations alike.
96. Robert Frost.
Collected Poems
Frost, Robert (Lee) (1874-1963), US poet, b. San Francisco. After his father's death (1885), his Scottish-born mother brought her family to New England. Frost dropped out of Dartmouth College to work in a cotton mill and as a cobbler. He then attended Harvard for two years but dropped out because of ill health. He farmed (1899- 1906) then taught school (1906-12). He wrote poetry, but few poems were published. In 1912 he took his family to England. His lyric poems A Boy's Will (1913) and narrative poems North of Boston (1914) were enthusiastically received in England, establishing his reputation as a poet. In 1915 he returned to the United States and purchased a farm in Franconia, N.H. From 1916 he taught in a number of universities and colleges including Amherst, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. He published many volumes of poetry and received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943. In 1961 he recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. He used simple forms and colloquial speech in his poems depicting the landscape and people of New England often to make profoundstatements about life and death. Among his many well known poems are "Birches," "The Death of the Hired Hand," "Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken," and "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening."
97. Dylan Thomas.
Under The Milkwood
Thomas, Dylan (1914-53), Welsh poet. His verse is powerfully rhetorical, occasionally willfully obscure, but at its best, as in the poems in Deaths and Entrances (1946), both original and simple. His radio play Under Milk Wood (1954) makes skillful use of speech rhythms. His obsessive drinking contributed to his early death while on a lecture tour in the United States.
98. Williams, William
Paterson
CarlosWilliams, William Carlos (1883-1963), US author, b. Rutherford, N.J. A practicing physician, he produced numerous poems. He is regarded as the founder of the Objectivist school of poetry. Williams' poems deal with everyday life. His works include Paterson (5 vols., 1946-58), a long poem set in Paterson, N.J., and Pictures from Breughel (1963; Pulitzer Prize 1964). He also wrote short stories, plays, novels, and the nonfiction work In the American Grain (1925).
HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY
99. Basic Documents in American History,
edited by Richard B. Morris The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter
100. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Confessions
Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), French philosopher and author. One of the most original prophets of modernity, he went to Paris in 1741 and was associated with Denis Diderot and the Encyclopedists. Although often living in the provinces or in Switzerland, Rousseau remained in contact with Parisian intellectuals thereafter. In his celebrated Discourses on the Sciences and Arts (1750) and in On Equality (1754) he argued that man's natural goodness is perverted by artificial and inequitable societies. The New Héloise (1761) celebrated love in a new romantic style. In The Social Contract (1762) he envisioned a liberated society that would conform with a kind of humanistic, individualized education, also outlined in Émile (1762). His Confessions (1781-88) convey the impression of a passionate and often persecuted human spirit. See also Social Contract
101. James Boswell.
The Life of Samuel Johnson
Boswell, James (1740-95), Scottish biographer and author. He traveled widely in Europe, meeting Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau. His early works include Account of Corsica (1768) and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), an account of his travels with Samuel Johnson. A friend of Johnson and fellow member of the Literary Club, his Life of Johnson (2 vols., 1791) is one of the greatest English biographies.
102. Henry Adams.
The Education of Henry Adams
Adams, Henry (Brooks) (1838-1918), US author, b. Boston. A direct descendant of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, he was secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., first (1860-61) while the latter was in Congress and then (1861-68) when he was US minister to Britain. Returning to the United States, he taught history at Harvard University (1870-77). He resigned his teaching position and settled in Washington, D.C., devoting himself to writing. His works include the muckraking Chapters of Erie (articles written earlier with his brother Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and published in book form in 1886); Democracy (1880) and Esther (1884), topical novels; the monumental History of the United States Under the Jefferson and Adams Administrations (9 vols., 1889-91); Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed 1904, published 1913), reflections on medieval culture; The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed 1906, published 1918), a brilliant autobiographical work; and The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (essays written earlier and published posthumously in 1919 by his brother Brooks Adams). His elegant but pessimistic theories of history and his ironic view of himself influenced writers of the 1920s.
103 Fernand Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean, World in the Age of PhilipII: Civilization and capitalism, 15th- 18th Century
104: Poets of the English Language, edited by
W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson
ANNEX
I. William H.McNeill. The Rise of the West
Will and Ariel Durant. The Story of Civilization
II. Samuel Eliot Morison. The Oxford History of the American People, Page Smith. A People's History of the United States
III. Alfred North Whitehead. Science and The Modern World
IV. Alfred North Whitehead. An Introduction to
Mathematics
V. E. H. Gombrich. The Story of Art
VI. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. How Read a Book
VII Sigfried Gideon Time Space and Architecture
VIII John Ruskin The Stones of Venice
IX Contemporary Drama, edited by E Bradlee
Watson and Benfield Pressey
X (99)Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B. Morris The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter
XI (104)Poets of the English Language, edited by
W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson
XII (103)Fernand Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean, World in the Age of PhilipII: Civilization and capitalism, 15th- 18th Century
Jean Genet,Gutter in the Sky,Plays: BlacksBalcony
Genêt, Jean (1910-86), French dramatist and novelist. The hardships of his childhood quickly led him into delinquency and crime. It is in his books such as Our Lady of the Flowers (1944) and Thief's Journal (1949) that he records his experiences of Europe's bars, brothels, and prisons. His plays, among the best known of which are The Maids (1947) and The Balcony (1956), are concerned with an equivocal world of illusions, masks, and mirrors. A collection of his poems, Treasures of the Night, was published in 1980.
Jack Kerouac,On The Road
Kerouac, Jack (1922-69), US author, b. Lowell, Mass. A poet and novelist, his novel On the Road (1957) is considered a preeminent work of the Beat Generation. He also wrote Dharma Bums (1958). Beat Generation, term referring to a group of US writers in the 1950s who
rejected middle-class values and commercialism. Originally centered in New York, where many of them first met, the group included poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. When Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco, his City Lights Press became publisher to many of the Beat writers.
Curzio Malaparte,
The Skin
G. Rider Haggard,
She
Charles Beaudelaire,
Poet
Baudelaire, Charles (1821-67), French poet and critic, precursor of Symbolist poetry. He contributed to reviews and translated Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire was charged with obscenity on the publication of his volume of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). His critical works include Curiosités esthétiques (1868) and L'Art Romantique (1869).
Lewis Mumford,
The City
Rudolf Arnheim,
Film and Photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractus Logico-Philosophicus( Logical Philosophy)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951), Austrian philosopher. A colleague of Bertrand Russell, he was actively involved in the Vienna Circle. In Tractatus logico- philosophicus (1921), he analyzed the problem of language and its limits which later influenced the rise of logical positivism and linguistic analysis. Philosophical Investigations (1953) and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) were published posthumously. See also Logical Positivism
GERMAN READING LIST
22 not found in INFODESK look up
1. Berthold Brecht 102
Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956), German dramatist, b. as Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht. Among his notable works, most depicting a world of struggle and suffering in auniquely bittersweet manner, are: In the Jungle of Cities (1923), Edward II (1924), A Man's a Man (1926), The Threepenny Opera (with music by Kurt Weill, 1928), TheRise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny (with music by Kurt Weill, 1930), St. Joan of the Stockyards (1932), The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeoisie (with choreography by George Balanchine and music by Kurt Weill, 1933), The Private Life of the Master Race (1937), Mother Courage and Her Children (with music by PaulDessau, 1941), The Good Woman of Setzuan (with music by Paul Dessau, 1943),
Galileo (English version, 1947), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1st version, with musicby Paul Dessau, 1948), Schweyk in the Second World War (with music by Hans Eisler, 1956), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (published posthumously, 1957). After Hitler came to power (1933), Brecht lived abroad, first in Scandinavia, then in the United States. After appearing under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee (1947), he returned to Europe, first to Switzerland, then to East Berlin. There he directed the Berliner Ensemble and tested his dramatic theories, such as the Verfremdungs-Effekt (alienation or distancing effect, devices reminding the audience that the theater is not reality). His plays move from realism to expressionism in what he called epic theater, an attempt to merge social with aesthetic concerns.
2. Georg Buchner 172
3. Alfred Döblin 20
4. Annette E. von Drost-Hülhoff 215
5.Wolfram von Eschenbach 564
Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170- c. 1220), German lyric poet and romance writer, b. Eschenbach, Bavaria. Associated with the court of Landgrave Herrman of Thuringia, he probably knew Walther von der Vogelweide and Hartman von Aue. His works include the romances Parzival, Willehalm, and Titurel, and eight or nine lyric poems. He became a major character, much romanticized, in Wagner's Tannhäuser. Seealso Parzival
6. Lion Feutchwanger 265
7.Johann Gotlieb Fichte 782
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814), German philosopher. He turned Kantian influence in the direction of subjective idealism in System of Morality (1800) and embraced romantic nationalism in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807-08). His philosophic system is pivoted on the so called "ego," which becomes aware of its own freedom and its unity with the absolte.
8.Theodor Fontane 223
9. Sigmund Freud 273
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), Austrian psychiatrist and founder of the psychoanalytic movement, b. Freiberg, Moravia. Working with Josef Breuer, Freud developed new methods for treating mental disorders--free association and dream interpretation (summarized in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). He developed theories of the neuroses involving childhood relationships to one's parents and stressed the importance of sexuality in both normal and abnormal development. These controversial aspects of his theories were not well-received by his contemporaries, but gradually his ideas became widely discussed and gained acceptance. Later Freud extended psychoanalysis to a wide variety of cultural and social-psychological phenomena.
The impact of Freud's writings (such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1904; The Ego and the Id, 1923; and Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930) on modern thought is incalculable. The influences on medicine, psychotherapy, and psychology are obvious, but they also are considerable for literature, religion, education, and child care. Freud brought sex out into the open as a topic fit for discussion. He caused psychologists to realize that human motivations could be unconscious and made them look closely at child-parent relations as a source for both healthy and sick development. No individual has influenced the development of modern psychiatry and psychology more than Freud.
10 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 263
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), German poet. One of the greatest
German writers and thinkers, his range is vast: from simple love poems to profound philosophical poems or scientific theories. In his long life he was a lawyer, botanist, politician and civil servant, physicist, zoologist, painter, and theater manager. Johann Gottfried von Herder taught him to appreciate Shakespeare, and this influenced his Götz von Berlichingen (1773). His major works include The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel Italian Journey (1816), the classical drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787), Torquato Tasso (1789), Egmont (1788), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), Elective Affinities (1809), and his most famous work, Faust (1808, 1832). See also Faust
11. Jeremias Gotthelf 300
12 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm 25
Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786-1859), eminent German philologists. They are best remembered for their collections of folklore. Jacob collected the tales from German peasants, and Wilhelm arranged them. The first volume of the tales was published in 1812, the second in 1815, and a volume of historical notes in 1822. Some of the best-known tales are "Snow-White," "Rumplestiltskin," "Tom Thumb," "The Golden Goose," "Hansel and Gretel," and"Rapunzel."
13. Friedrich v Hardenberg ( Novalis) 529
14. Gerhardt Hauptmann 315
15. Geo. Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 577
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831), German philosopher. He studied at Tübingen (1788-93) and taught at Jena (1805). He was director of the gymnasium (high school) at Nürnberg until 1816, and professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, thenBerlin, where he became famous for a romantic, metaphysical system that traced the self-realization of spirit by so-called dialectical "moments" to perfection. First in the Phenomenology of Mind (1807) and then, in Science of Logic (1812-16), Hegel claimed to express the course of universal reason with his metaphysical dynamism. His lectures on the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of history were
published posthumously. See also Dialectical Logic
16. Heinrich Heine 97
Heinrich Heine, b. Dec. 13, 1797, d. Feb. 17, 1856, was one of the greatest and most controversial German writers of the 19th century. That he was born a Jew exacerbated the many conflicts that he precipitated both by his conduct and his polemical prose and verse.
In the eyes of the youthful Heine, the French occupation of the Rhineland under Napoleon meant liberation and equality. Hero worship of the emperor merged later into admiration of French culture and the constitutional monarchy (1830-48) of Louis Philippe. Heine's father failed in business, and Heine was supported by his millionaire uncle, Solomon, in Hamburg, with whose daughters, Amalie and Therese, he claims to have fallen in love. Whether Heine's passion was real or feigned is still disputed, but many of the poems in his Book of Songs (1827; Eng. trans., 1846) seem to be addressed to one or the other of his cousins. While some of these lyrics are genuinely moving, in others there lurks, behind the romantic facade, the ironic cynic Heine later became. Composers thought the lyrics genuine, however. Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Brahms, Wagner, and Hugo Wolf all wrote music for them.
Heine studied law in Bonn, where he preferred the literature lectures of August Wilhelm von Schlegel; in Berlin, where he frequented the salon of Rahel Varnhagen von Ense; and in Gottingen, where, after being expelled for dueling (1825), he received his doctorate and Lutheran baptism. The baptism was professionally necessary, but Heine never did practice law, for his fame as a writer had soared with the publication of the four volumes of Reisebilder (Travel Pictures, 1826-31).
Disappointed in not receiving an expected professorship at Munich, but elated over the July Revolution in France, Heine made Paris his home after 1831. Through his uncle he had entree to Baron Rothschild and the financial elite; as poet he was courted by salons; and because of his reputation as a radical he was welcomed by German political exiles. He formed a liaison with the illiterate Crescentia Mirat ("Mathilde"), whom he married just before having a duel with Solomon Strauss, who had taken umbrage at allegations concerning his wife in Heine's book Uber Ludwig Borne (Concerning Ludwig Borne, 1840).
Heine's Harzreise (Harz Journey, 1826) had ridiculed Gottingen professors, "with their sausage quotations"; Hanoverian aristocrats, "asses who talk about nothing but horses"; and the establishment in general. His "Bader von Lucca" (Baths of Lucca), which had appeared in the third volume of Reisebilder, attacked the poet Count von Platen for his homosexuality. Platen had incited the riposte by his slur on Heine's Jewishness, but the public was shocked nonetheless, and Heine was included in Metternich's ban (1835) on the "Young German" writers. Hamburg disregarded the federal censorship, however, and Heine's publisher there, Campe, was ingenious in smuggling editions across the Prussian and other borders.
By 1840, Heine's deteriorating health led to a sojourn in the Pyrenees, where he composed the mock-epic Atta Troll (1843), which combines moonshine madness, humor, and romance with satire on political poetry. Two visits to Hamburg inspired his second epic, Deutschland: Ein Wintermarchen (Germany: A Winter Tale, 1844), criticizing conditions in Germany.
Caught in the February Revolution (1848), Heine sought refuge in the Louvre, where he collapsed at the feet of the Venus de Milo. He spent his last eight years in a "mattress grave," apparently paralyzed from syphilis. From this "grave," however, arose his greatest poetry--somberly pessimistic but vividly ironic, witty, and prophetic--published in Romanzero (Romances, 1851) and Gedichte 1853 und 1854 (Poems 1853 and 1854).
To secure an annuity from Solomon's heirs, Heine had to destroy most of his memoirs, but what remained was published in 1884. His last year was brightened by the devotion of Elise Krinitz ("La Mouche"), who inspired poignant love lyrics. Some of them were dictated to her when he could no longer hold a pencil. With Heine's last breath came the word schreiben, "write."G. Wallis Field
Bibliography: Aberbach, D., et al., Jewish Thinkers: Bialik. Heine, Buber, and Rashi (1989); Brod, Max, Heinrich Heine, trans. by J. Witriol (1957; repr. 1976); Butler, E, M., Heinrich Heine (1956; repr. 1981); Field, G. W., A Heine Verse Selection (1965); Hofrichter, L., Heinrich Heine (1963; repr. 1987); Prawer, S. S., Heine the Tragic Satirist (1961) and Heine's Jewish Comedy (1983); Reeves, N., Heinrich Heine: Poetry and Politics (1974); Robertson, R., Heine (1989); Sammons, J. L., Heinrich Heine (1979); Sharp, E., Heine in Art and Letters (1973).
17. Hugo von Hofmannsthal 184
18. Carl Jung 389
Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist. After working with Sigmund Freud (1906-1914), Jung broke with him to found his own school, analytic psychology. For many years Jung investigated and wrote extensively about the human personality, especially its spiritual and unconscious aspects, including the archetypes of the collective unconscious. He identified introversion and extroversion as basic personality types and stressed the importance of personal transformations and self-discovery for the development of a healthy personality. Though his writings are sometimes regarded as obscure, Jung's insights and scholarship rank him among the foremost theorists in psychology. Among his noted works are Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912, tr. as Psychology of the Unconscious; 1952 rev. ed., tr. as Symbols of Transformation) and Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933).
19.Franz Kafka 758
Kafka, Franz (1883-1924), Austrian novelist, b. Prague. Son of a successful Jewish businessman, Kafka suffered under his father's dominance. Little known in his lifetime, he became famous in 1945 with the English translation of his novels, suchas The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), America (1927), and Metamorphosis(1915). His work recorded modern man's fate of having been caught in an incomprehensible nightmare world. The heroes persisted in hope, but their endeavors were absurd. His collections of autobiographically oriented short stories foreshadowed his novels.
20. Immanuel Kant 167
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), German philosopher. From 1740-46 he studied at Königsberg, then supported himself as a private tutor. In 1755 he returned to the university and was made a professor in 1770. The order, regularity, and modesty of his life was undisturbed by the notoriety caused by the publication of his "critical philosophy;" particularly The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790). In addition to his technical treatises, Kant produced several topical essays in support of religious liberalism and enlightenment. See also Enlightenment
21. Gottfried Keller 306
22. Heinrich von Kleist 104
23. Fr. Gottlieb Klopstock 483
24. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz 418
25. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 489
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-81), German philosopher and man of letters. He founded a literary journal (1759-65) with Christoph Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn. He was responsible for the creation of a so-called native German drama, inspired by Shakespeare rather than classical French forms. In Minna von Barnhelm (1763), Hamburg Dramaturgy, (1767-69), and Emilia Galotti (1772) he worked out and illustrated his dramatic theories. Nathan the Wise (1779) portrayed his liberal humanitarianism and commitment to the German Enlightenment. See also Enlightenment
26.Heinrich Mann 94
27. Thomas Mann 76
Mann, Thomas (1875-1955), German novelist and essayist. He modeled his
concepts of the "burger" from his wealthy merchant father and of the exotic artistic temperament from his mother. These two elements he later represented as the polarity inherent in human life. His most powerful works, in which he apologized for the conservative traditions in Germany, came from WWI. His opposition to fascism grew from WWII. His novels include Buddenbrooks (1901), Tonio Kröger (1903), Death in Venice (1912), The Magic Mountain (1924), Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), Doctor Faustus (1947), and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954).
Leaving Germany in 1933, he took US citizenship in 1944 and settled in Zurich in 1952. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929 and the Goethe Prize in1949.
28.Friedrich Nietzsche 78
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900), German philosopher. He studied classical philosophy at Bonn and taught at Basel (1869). He met and broke with Richard Wagner(1874). His Birth of Tragedy (1872) betrays the influence of Wagner's art. In 1879 heabandoned philology forphilosophy, and celebrated his new notion of the "free spirit"in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-91). His aphoristic method was misunderstood orignored. His later works include Beyond Good & Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Ecce Homo (1888).
29. (Novalis see #13)
30. Paracelsus( Theophrastus
Bombast von Hohenheim) 51
31. Max Planck 552
Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig (1858-1947), German theoretical physicist,
professor at Kiel and later in Berlin, where he studied the characteristics of the radiation emitted by black bodies. In 1900 he came to the conclusion that the frequency distribution of the radiation could only be accounted for if the radiation
was emitted in quanta, rather than continuously. An explanation of radiant heat energy distribution given off from a heated surface was proved by Planck's radiation law (1900). Planck's constant (1900) indicates wave and particle behavior on the atomic scale. His equation, relating the energy of a quantum to the frequency, is the basis of the quantum theory. He was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for his work. See also Blackbody; Quantum Theory
32. Erich Maria Remarque 22
Remarque, Erich Maria (1898-1970), German novelist. A wounded veteran of WWI, he later settled in Switzerland in the 1930s as his books were banned in Germany. His novels, including All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), The Road Back (1931), and Flotsam (1941), treat the themes of war and postwar adjustment. See also All Quiet on the Western Front
33. Freidrich von Schiller 104
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759-1805), influential German
dramatist, historian, and democratic philosopher. He wrote blank verse Sturm und Drang plays: Don Carlos (1787), a trilogy on Wallenstein (1799), Mary Stuart (1800), Maid of Orleans (1810), and William Tell (1804). Beethoven's 9th Symphony uses his "Hymn to Joy."
34. August Willhelm Schlegel 667
35. Freidrich Schlegel 104
36. Arthur Schopenhauer 805
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), German philosopher. He was overshadowed by G.W.F. Hegel until 1852, when Schopenhauer's system was popularized. His main work,The World as Will and Idea (1818), establishes will as the moving force behind theworld. A primordial drive to endure, it creates the possibility of its own negation as Nirvana. On Basis of Morality (1841) cites compassion as the foundation of ethics. Schopenhauer's fame was established by his caustic and witty essays, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851).
37. Benedict de Spinoza 246
Spinoza, Baruch (1632-77), Dutch philosopher. After his expulsion from the synagogue for "atheism," he worked in seclusion as a lens grinder. Although he was austere and reclusive, his reputation as a philosopher-scientist grew. He refused generous gifts and employment and worked alone on his Ethica (Ethics) (1660-66). The Theological-Political Treatise (1670) contained the first modern historical interpretation of the Bible. Spinoza declined the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg in order to preserve his independence. Moral autonomy (Ethics) and toleration
(Political Treatise), were among his central ideas.
38. Walther von der Vogelweide 787
39. Franz Werfel 271
40. Stefan Zweig 68
List adapted from Marcel Reich-Ranicki's Die Anwälte Der Literatur
G.E. Lessing
Friedrich Nicolai
J. W. Goethe
Friedrich Schlegel
Ludwig Börne
Heinrich Heine
Theodore Fontane
Alfred Kerr
Mritz Heimann
Alfred Polgar
Thomas Mann
Siegfried Jacobsohn
Kurt Tucholsky
Walther benjamin
Friedrich Sieburg
Robert minder
Hans Mayer
Golo Mann
Friedrich Luft
Hilde Spiel
Walther Jens
Martin walser
Joachim Kaiser