Daniel Defoe relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Robinson Crusoe wrestles …
A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (aka Moll Flanders) is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1722. It purports to be the true…
"My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else," proclaimed Charles Dickens in explaining the theme of this classic novel. Published in 1854, the story concerns one Thomas …
A short story from James Joyce's Dubliners. The unnamed protagonist in "Araby" is a boy who is just starting to come into his sexual identity. Through his first-person narration, we are immersed at th…
Shakespeare’s King Lear challenges us with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the pain that it represents. Its figures harden their hearts, engage in violence, or try to alleviate the suf…
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams’ essay “The World I Live In.”
'For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.…
Born a slave circa 1818 (slaves weren't told when they were born) on a plantation in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write. In 1845, seven years after escaping to the North, he published…
Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French existentialist, displays his mastery of drama in NO EXIT, an unforgettable portrayal of hell. The play is a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased charact…
In purely poetic value, Paradise Regained is little inferior to its predecessor. There may be nothing in the poem that can quite touch the first two books of Paradise Lost for magnificence; but there …
