Book

Masterpieces of World Literature

Philosophy and fantasy, plays and poems, essays and epics -- 270 literary classics that range from The Divine Comedy and Death Comes for the Archbishop to The Aeneid and The Grapes of Wrath are summarized and analyzed in this essential reference. 244 books chosen by Frank N. Magill.

Source

Order by

1
One Thousand and One Nights
Unknown · 2018
2
Beowulf
Unknown
3
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Unknown
4
Everyman
Unknown · 1959
5
The Twelve Labours of Hercules
Unknown · 1808
6
Argonautika
Apollonius of Rhodes
7
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes
Unknown · 1908
8
Mahabharata
Vyasa · 2010
9
The Nibelungenlied
Unknown · 1962
10
Orpheus and Eurydice
Unknown
11
Poem of the Cid
Unknown · 1975
12
Reynard the Fox
Unknown · 2018
13
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Howard Pyle · 1883
14
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Simon Armitage · 2008
15
The Song of Roland
Unknown
16
The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories
Hans Christian Andersen · 2007
17
The Birds
Aristophanes · 1889
18
Confessions
Augustine of Hippo · 1482
19
Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio · 1516
20
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321
21
The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams · 1777
22
Emma
Jane Austen · 1815 · 12 lists
23
Lysistrata
Aristophanes · 1872
24
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius · 170
25
Oresteia
Aeschylus · -500
26
The Orlando Furioso
Ludovico Ariosto · 1824
27
Poetics
Aristotle · 1536
28
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1813 · 28 lists
29
Prometheus Bound
Aeschylus · -500
30
Summa Theologica
Thomas Aquinas · 1467
31
Robert Browning's Poetry
Robert Browning · 2006
32
Eugénie Grandet
Honoré de Balzac · 1868 · 4 lists
33
The Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire · 2012
34
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck · 1548
35
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · 26 lists
36
Life Is a Dream
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · 1914
37
The Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell · 1791
38
Selected Poems of Lord Byron
Lord Byron · 2002
39
The New Atlantis
Francis Bacon · 1627
40
The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett · 1908
41
Father Goriot
Honoré de Balzac · 2012
42
Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan · 1678
43
Poems of Matsuo Bashō
Matsuo Bashō
44
Complete Poetry & Prose
William Blake · 1929
45
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
46
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett · 1989
47
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847 · 29 lists
48
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll · 1865
49
Biographia Literaria
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1817
50
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer · 1478
51
Le Cid
Pierre Corneille · 1636
52
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather · 1927
53
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1615 · 27 lists
54
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899 · 29 lists
55
Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper · 1826 · 5 lists
56
My Ántonia
Willa Cather · 1918
57
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad · 1904 · 9 lists
58
Catiline Orations
Marcus Tullius Cicero
59
The Pioneers
James Fenimore Cooper · 1800
60
The Plague
Albert Camus · 1947 · 7 lists
61
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane · 1855
62
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1798
63
Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov · 1914
64
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · 22 lists
65
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844
66
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 · 22 lists
67
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 19 lists
68
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · 1861 · 19 lists
69
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
Charles Dickens · 1800 · 4 lists
70
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin · 1859
71
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens · 1994
72
Poems of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson · 1890
73
Demons
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 2000
74
The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne
John Donne · 1941
75
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe · 1719 · 11 lists
76
The Bacchae
Euripides · 1954
77
Electra
Sophocles · 1588
78
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 2000
79
Four Quartets
T.S. Eliot · 1943
80
Medea
Euripides · 1703
81
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871 · 26 lists
82
Parzival
Wolfram Eschenbach · 1885
83
Silas Marner
George Eliot · 1861 · 4 lists
84
The Trojan Women
Euripides · 1905
85
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner · 1936 · 16 lists
86
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner · 1915
87
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin · 1883
88
A Fable
William Faulkner · 2022
89
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
90
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · 2018
91
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856 · 25 lists
92
A Passage to India
E. M. Forster · 1924 · 18 lists
93
Penguin Island
Anatole France · 2014
94
The Poems of Robert Frost
Robert Frost · 1991
95
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929 · 26 lists
96
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding · 1749 · 11 lists
97
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol · 1842 · 12 lists
98
Faust
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1808
99
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon · 1776
100
Stories of Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol · 2022
101
She Stoops to Conquer
Oliver Goldsmith · 1773
102
The Odes
Horace · 1749
103
Dream of the Red Chamber
Cao Xueqin · 1958
104
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume · 1748
105
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway · 1929 · 9 lists
106
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway · 1940 · 13 lists
107
The Histories of Herodotus
Herodotus · 1899
108
The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1851 · 3 lists
109
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Victor Hugo · 1924
110
Hunger
Knut Hamsun · 1890 · 8 lists
111
The Iliad
Homer · -800
112
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 1895 · 8 lists
113
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes · 1651
114
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo · 1862 · 16 lists
115
The Odyssey
Homer · -800
116
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway · 1952 · 15 lists
117
The Return
Hisham Matar · 1950 · 6 lists
118
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850 · 13 lists
119
Tess Of The D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
120
Works and Days
Hesiod · 1993
121
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen · 1889
122
An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen · 1882
123
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen · 1890
124
Stories of Washington Irving
Washington Irving · 1899
125
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho · 1988 · 6 lists
126
The Ambassadors
Henry James · 1903 · 8 lists
127
The Golden Bowl
Henry James · 1904 · 6 lists
128
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James · 1881 · 13 lists
129
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce · 1916 · 15 lists
130
Pragmatism
William James · 1999
131
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 1898 · 5 lists
132
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
C.G. Jung · 1956
133
Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
134
Volpone
Ben Jonson · 1606
135
The Castle
Franz Kafka · 1907 · 8 lists
136
Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant · 2016
137
The Complete Poems
John Keats · 1994
138
Kim
Rudyard Kipling · 1901 · 8 lists
139
The Sickness Unto Death
Soren Kierkegaard · 1954
140
The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925 · 21 lists
141
Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis · 1922 · 6 lists
142
Daphnis and Chloe
Longus · 1717
143
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Locke · 1690
144
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis · 1920 · 7 lists
145
De Rerum Natura
Lucretius · 1991
146
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence · 1913 · 11 lists
147
Areopagitica
John Milton · 1644
148
Benito Cereno
Herman Melville · 1855
149
Billy Budd, Foretopman
Herman Melville · 1924 · 3 lists
150
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann · 1909 · 11 lists
151
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann · 1954 · 3 lists
152
Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann · 1662 · 4 lists
153
Essays
Michel de Montaigne · 1618
154
Das Kapital
Karl Marx · 1867
155
The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton
John Milton · 2007
156
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann · 1924 · 18 lists
157
The Misanthrope
Molière · 1666
158
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville · 1851
159
Mort
Terry Pratchett · 1557
160
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill · 1859
161
Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667
162
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1515
163
Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters · 1915
164
Tartuffe
Molière · 1669
165
Utopia
Thomas More · 1518
166
Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche · 2009
167
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche · 2011
168
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 1479 · 6 lists
169
Mourning Becomes Electra
Eugene O'Neill · 1932
170
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948
171
The Age of Reason
Thomas Paine · 1794
172
The Cantos
Ezra Pound · 1917
173
The Poetry of Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin · 2003
174
The Complete Works of Plato
Plato · 2005
175
An Essay on Man
Alexander Pope · 1733
176
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin · 1995 · 2 lists
177
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe · 1849
178
Pensées
Blaise Pascal · 1672
179
The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope · 1712
180
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913
181
The Republic
Plato · 375
182
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1858
183
Cyrano de Bergerac
Edmond Rostand · 1897
184
The Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke · 2006
185
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais · 1930
186
Phèdre
Jean Racine · 1677
187
First Folio
William Shakespeare · 1953
188
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles · 2020
189
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles · 2006
190
Antigone
Sophocles · -450
191
Dracula
Bram Stoker · 1897 · 16 lists
192
East of Eden
John Steinbeck · 1952
193
Ethics
Baruch de Spinoza · 1558
194
The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser · 1590
195
The Father
August Strindberg · 1887
196
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 1818 · 20 lists
197
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939 · 32 lists
198
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726 · 17 lists
199
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott · 1800 · 3 lists
200
Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886 · 3 lists
201
Miss Julie
August Strindberg · 1889
202
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1969 · 3 lists
203
The Poems of Sappho
Sappho · 1924
204
The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1994
205
The Red and the Black
Stendhal · 1830 · 14 lists
206
Scepticism and Animal Faith
George Santayana · 1923
207
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886 · 7 lists
208
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu · 2000 · 10 lists
209
Thyestes
Seneca · 1674
210
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1880 · 13 lists
211
Tristan
Gottfried von Strassburg · 1823
212
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne · 1759
213
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith · 1776
214
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 1885
215
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
216
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1876 · 24 lists
217
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope · 1857
218
Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas · 2016
219
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville · 1945
220
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
Henry David Thoreau · 2005
221
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev · 1907 · 5 lists
222
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides · 1526
223
Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson · 2014
224
Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain · 1883
225
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1847 · 15 lists
226
Walden
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 · 7 lists
227
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · 29 lists
228
The Aeneid
Virgil · 19
229
Candide
Voltaire · 1746 · 11 lists
230
Ramayana
Valmiki · 1823
231
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne · 1870
232
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton · 1910 · 5 lists
233
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde · 2018
234
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman · 1855
235
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · 20 lists
236
The Prelude
William Wordsworth · 1850
237
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells · 1895 · 5 lists
238
To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927 · 25 lists
239
The Waves
Virginia Woolf · 1931 · 9 lists
240
Autobiographies
William Butler Yeats · 1791
241
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats · 1994
242
Germinal
Émile Zola · 1885 · 5 lists
243
Don Juan
Lord Byron · 1819
244
The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot · 1991

Masterpieces of World Literature

One Thousand and One Nights

Beowulf

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Everyman

The Twelve Labours of Hercules

Argonautika

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

Mahabharata

The Nibelungenlied

Orpheus and Eurydice

Poem of the Cid

Reynard the Fox

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Song of Roland

The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories

The Birds

Confessions

Decameron

The Divine Comedy

The Education of Henry Adams

Emma

Lysistrata

Meditations

Oresteia

The Orlando Furioso

Poetics

Pride and Prejudice

Prometheus Bound

Summa Theologica

Robert Browning's Poetry

Eugénie Grandet

The Flowers of Evil

The Good Earth

Jane Eyre

Life Is a Dream

The Life of Samuel Johnson

Selected Poems of Lord Byron

The New Atlantis

The Old Wives' Tale

Father Goriot

Pilgrim's Progress

Poems of Matsuo Bashō

Complete Poetry & Prose

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Waiting for Godot

Wuthering Heights

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Biographia Literaria

The Canterbury Tales

Le Cid

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Don Quixote

Heart of Darkness

Last of the Mohicans

My Ántonia

Nostromo

Catiline Orations

The Pioneers

The Plague

The Red Badge of Courage

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Three Sisters

The Brothers Karamazov

The Count of Monte Cristo

Crime and Punishment

David Copperfield

Great Expectations

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

On the Origin of Species

The Pickwick Papers

Poems of Emily Dickinson

Demons

The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne

Robinson Crusoe

The Bacchae

Electra

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Four Quartets