Nick Carraway is a young Midwestern man freshly arrived in New York to make his fortune. He rents a shabby apartment in Long Island next door to a sumptuous mansion: the home of the mysterious and wealthy Jay Gatsby. Carraway spends time catching up with his distant cousin Daisy and her industry-baron husband Tom before being invited to one of Gatsby’s wildly lavish weekend parties. There he meets Jordan, a flapper and a golf star, and an intricate web of romances and betrayals begins to unfold.
The novel is a colorful study of America’s Jazz Age—a term said to be coined by Fitzgerald himself—complete with wealthy socialites living in hedonistic abandon, libertine flappers, jazz bands, roaring roadsters, and greasy speakeasies populated with shady grifters. Contrasted against the glamorous lives of wealthy socialites is the entrenched lower class, who live in gray, dingy squalor among smoldering ash-heaps. Fitzgerald uses the setting to examine the American Dream: the idea that anyone in America can achieve success through hard work and dedication. Gatsby has spent his life reaching for his dream. Some say he’s already achieved it. But has he? Is the dream even real for the hard-working poor that Gatsby and Tom race past in their glittering cars on the way to the decadent city?
Fitzgerald wrote much of his real life into the novel. Like Carraway, he was a Midwesterner educated at an Ivy-league school who went to live on Long Island. Despite his meager finances he hobnobbed with socialites, and spent his career struggling for money to maintain the grand style his romantic interests were accustomed to.
The cover art, titled Celestial Eyes, was commissioned from Francis Cugat, who completed it before the novel was finished. The huge eyes gazing down on the blazing city so moved Fitzgerald that he wrote them into the story.
Fitzgerald saw the novel as a purely artistic work, free of the pulp pandering required by his shorter commissions—but despite that, contemporary reviews were mixed, and it sold poorly. Fitzgerald thought it a failure, and died believing the novel to be fatally obscure. Only during World War II did it come back to the public consciousness, buoyed by the support of a ring of writers and critics and printed as an Armed Service Edition to be sent to soldiers on the front. Now it is an American classic.
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Dostoevsky’s original idea for the novel centered on the Marmeladov family and the impact of alcoholism in Russia, but inspired by a double murder in France he decided to rework it around the new character of Raskolnikov. The novel was first serialized in The Russian Messenger over the course of 1866, where it was an instant success. It was published in a single volume in 1867. Presented here is Constance Garnett’s 1914 translation.
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Despite his accomplishments, Franklin seemed to keep a down-to-earth demeanor, favoring home-spun sayings and simple, direct, honest prose—the kind of prose that shines in this autobiography.
The autobiography itself has a long and complex publication history. Franklin composed it in fits and spurts between 1771 and 1790, and never had a chance to complete it, let alone publish it, in his lifetime. It was first published as a poor French translation of an unrevised edition of the manuscript, and then as a heavily-editorialized and inaccurate English edition by Franklin’s son, William Temple Franklin. In 1868 John Bigelow purchased the original copy of the autobiography and published the first accurate edition, which is what subsequent publications, including this one, are based on.
Though incomplete, this autobiography is a highly readable and fascinating insight into the legendary life of the man some people call the “First American.”
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Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility, was largely written fifteen years earlier, when Austen was approximately the same age as her older protagonist Elinor. It was published anonymously (“By A Lady”), possibly due to propriety, or perhaps because she wanted to avoid any negative publicity if the book was not well-received. She needn’t have worried; it sold out its first printing of a modest 750 copies. She used well-defined characters, humor, and satire to paint a vivid picture of life in the England of George III, with all of its manners, class issues, and unwritten rules of behavior. That it’s still being read over two hundred years later is a testimony to her brilliance.
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Siddhartha is a short, simple tale of a man’s quest to achieve enlightenment and happiness. Over twelve short chapters the reader follows Siddhartha through his time as a young adult, to his exploration of spirituality as a traveling ascetic, to his delvings in lust, business, and greed, to his time as an old man. At each stage of his life Siddhartha yearns for nirvana, finally achieving it only after realizing that it’s all of life’s experiences that form it, not the teachings of any one man.
Today Siddhartha remains an influential text in new Western spirituality.
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The book is organized into several sections, each one giving direction on the ruthless rule of principalities that Machiavelli based on both reading and personal experience. Despite its controversial nature, The Prince is often cited as one of the first examples of modern philosophical thought, and the “advice” contained within is still quoted as relevant today.
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This epic poem follows Ulysses, one of the Greek leaders that brought an end to the ten-year-long Trojan war. Longing for home, he travels across the Mediterranean Sea to return to his kingdom in Ithaca; unfortunately, our hero manages to anger Neptune, the god of the sea, making his trip home agonizingly slow and extremely dangerous. While Ulysses is trying to return home, his family in Ithaca is also in danger. Suitors have traveled to the home of Ulysses to marry his wife, Penelope, believing that her husband did not survive the war. These men are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way.
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The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years travelling the world in the early 1840s. Herman used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopaedic quality at times. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world that’s being painted.
Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially omitted epilogue.
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Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë’s sole published novel before her early death at the age of 30. Published under the pen name of Ellis Bell, a shared surname with the pen names of her sisters, many assumed that such a book could only have been written by a man. Reviewers of the time praised its emotional power but were also shocked at the actions of its characters, and most agreed that it was impossible to put down. After the novel’s original publication in 1847 it was revised into a single volume in 1850, and over time has become a classic of English literature. The story has been reworked into plays, operas, films, TV dramatisations and a ballet, and has inspired many further works of art, music and literature.
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Earnest also holds the sad distinction of being Wilde’s last published play. A feud with an aristocrat whose son was Wilde’s lover led to a court case revealing Wilde as a homosexual—a crime in those days, and punishable by imprisonment with hard labor.
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