Library
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Whitman spent thirty-seven years growing this book, folding each new poem into an ever-larger single work he called his language experiment. Out of its free, unrhymed lines came modern American poetry. The book is a hymn to the open road, the body, the city, the Civil War hospital ward, and above all the democratic 'I' that contains multitudes and refuses to apologize. 'Song of Myself' remains its center of gravity: fifty-two sections of catalogue, chant and extravagance that begin 'I celebrate myself, and sing myself.' Emerson asked for exactly this poet; almost no one else in 1855 was ready for him.
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo, trans. Isabel Florence Hapgood
Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, in Isabel F. Hapgood's standard English translation. Jean Valjean is released from the galleys after nineteen years for stealing bread, meets the saintly Bishop Myriel, and spends the rest of his life climbing toward goodness under an assumed name. Against him stands Inspector Javert, who cannot conceive of a convict becoming a good man; around them lies the France of the barricades — Fantine's ruin, little Cosette in the Thénardier inn, the sewers of Paris, the students of 1832. Five parts, a hundred characters, and a plea for the poor that has never gone out of print.
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, published in 1651 in the aftermath of the English Civil War, is the founding text of modern political philosophy. Its argument is stark: out of the state of nature — where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' — men covenant to surrender their natural rights to an absolute sovereign, the Leviathan, whose power alone holds off the war of all against all. Written with the force and clarity of a man who had watched society dissolve, it set the terms of every later debate about authority, obligation and the social contract. This edition uses the 1909 Everyman text.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott's 1868 classic, drawn from her own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts. The four March sisters — tomboyish writer Jo, gentle Beth, pretty Meg, and spoiled Amy — grow up poor but loved while their father is away at the Civil War, learning through squabbles, plays, sacrifices and first love what kind of women they will become. Warm, funny and unexpectedly honest about ambition and loss, it refuses the fairy-tale endings of its time, and has outlasted them all. One of the few books passed down, generation to generation, entirely by love.
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert, trans. Eleanor Marx-Aveling
Flaubert's 1857 masterpiece, the novel that perfected literary realism and put its author on trial for immorality. Emma Bovary, a doctor's wife in provincial Normandy, is intoxicated by romantic novels — and, married to a kind but dull husband, tries to live out the passions and luxuries they promised her, through adultery and debt. Flaubert's obsession with le mot juste, the exact word, produced prose of unprecedented precision; his portrait of a woman destroyed by borrowed dreams has never been equalled. This edition uses Eleanor Marx-Aveling's translation.
Mansfield Park
Jane Austen
Jane Austen's 1814 novel, her most serious — and, she joked, her least fashionable. Poor cousin Fanny Price, sent at ten years old to live with her wealthy relations at Mansfield Park, grows up as the invisible moral centre of the household. When the glittering Henry and Mary Crawford arrive from London with their modern charms and modern laxity, the estate itself seems to be put to the test. A quieter, darker Austen than Pride and Prejudice: about constancy, conscience, and the price of doing right when no one is watching.
Martin Eden
Jack London
Martin Eden is a rough, unlettered sailor in Oakland who saves an art student from a gang of thugs and is invited home to dinner. There he meets Ruth Morse, his host's sister: pale, refined, college-educated, everything the working-class world he comes from is not. He falls in love at first sight, and the visit sets the course of his life. To make himself worthy of Ruth, Martin decides to become educated and to become a writer. He teaches himself grammar from a reference book, reads voraciously in the library, sleeps five hours a night, and writes story after story, essay after essay, from the kitchen of the small house he shares with his sister and her family. The manuscripts come back from the magazines with unfailing regularity. His neighbors think he is mad, his family thinks he is idle, Ruth's family thinks he is beneath them, and Ruth herself asks him to take a steady job and give up his dream. Martin refuses. He keeps writing through hunger and rejection, sustained by his belief in his own work and by the image of success that will let him marry Ruth. Only Joe, a workmate at a laundry, and Lizzie Connolly, a working girl who loves him without conditions, stand by him. Then everything reverses. When a magazine finally accepts one story, the editors who ignored him for years discover him, publish everything they hold, and turn him into a fashion. The same drawing rooms that shut their doors now open them wide. London's novel, first published in 1909, is a fierce and clear-eyed account of ambition, class, and the machinery of literary fame, and it ends with one of the most quietly devastating final chapters in American fiction.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius, trans. George Long
The private notebooks of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, written in Greek on campaign in the Danube wars — never meant for publication, which is exactly why they survive as the most intimate work of ancient philosophy. Not argument but practice: reminders to himself to do the work, accept what he cannot control, remember that he will die, and treat other people — however maddening — as fellow-rational beings. The bedside book of everyone from emperors to prisoners of war for eighteen centuries; still the most practical book of wisdom from the ancient world.
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka, trans. David Wyllie
Franz Kafka's 1915 novella, in David Wyllie's translation, and the most famous opening sentence in modern fiction. Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect — and then does what he has always done: worries about missing his train and losing his job. His family feeds him, avoids him, takes in lodgers, and gradually rearranges itself around the space he used to fill, until his sister Grete declares that he must go. Comic in its timing, unbearable in its sympathy, and entirely literal about the fear of being useless.
Middlemarch
George Eliot
George Eliot's study of provincial life, and by common consent the most intelligent English novel of the nineteenth century. In the Midlands town of Middlemarch, the ardent Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar twenty-seven years her senior in the hope of doing great work, while the talented young doctor Lydgate, newly arrived with plans for reform, marries for beauty and money and finds both ruinous. Around them turn debts, gossip, blackmail and disappointed idealism. Eliot's eight books close with the most famous defence in fiction of those who 'lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs'.
Moby Dick; Or, The Whale
Herman Melville
Melville's 1851 whaling epic, the great American novel its own century could not see. Ishmael, the sole survivor of the Pequod, tells the story of Captain Ahab's monomaniacal hunt for the white whale that took his leg — a voyage through the whole world of the whale fishery, from a Nantucket inn to the Pacific, from cetology to metaphysics. Call me Ishmael, it begins; and by the end the hunt has become one of literature's deepest meditations on obsession, nature and fate. This edition preserves the original 1851 text.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass's account of his own life, published in 1845 while he was still a fugitive — and such an indictment that friends feared it would give him away. Born into slavery in Maryland, he never knew his birthday; he watched an aunt whipped, learned to read from the wife of a Baltimore shipwright, bartered bread for letters with boys in the street, and at sixteen fought back against a 'slave-breaker' and never submitted again. To prove his authorship he had to name names, which meant admitting he had escaped less than seven years earlier — the very facts that put him at risk.