LITERATURE

Oh, those dreadful textbooks and anthologies. Who could ever forget the detailed chapter on tying knots in Moby Dick? Perhaps Julius Caesar was your particular nemesis. On the other hand, Macbeth, Frankenstein, and just about any of Poe’s dark stories could deliciously disturb your evenings for nights on end. After all, as a teenager, it was sometimes hard to immerse yourself in the literature of serious life-and-death situations. So here’s your second chance.

British Authors and Playwrights

There are some authors who embody the definition of “classic” literature. We all recognize the names: Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, and Shakespeare. However, could you pass a pop quiz on their greatest works? Here’s a brief rundown to review—just in case.

 

• JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

Jane Austen completed only six novels, which makes it easy to do a rundown of her complete works. In no particular order:

 

Emma: Emma Woodhouse is the most important young lady in her village, living alone with her aging father (the one who thinks that the sooner any party breaks up the better). Clever and pleased with herself, she amuses herself with matchmaking. Despite the disapproval of her friend and neighbor, Mr. Knightley, she persuades her protégée, Harriet Smith, not to marry a respectable farmer, Robert Martin, thinking that Harriet (despite being poor, ignorant, and illegitimate) should set her sights on the new vicar, Mr. Elton. Mr. Elton, however, has set his sights on Emma and is deeply offended when she rejects him. He promptly marries someone else entirely, and Harriet, recovering from her disappointment, falls in love with Mr. Knightley instead. Emma’s eyes are suddenly opened to the fact that no one should marry Mr. Knightley but herself. Fortunately, this turns out to be what he has always wanted.

 

Mansfield Park: Jane Austen’s least appealing heroine is the virtuous but dull Fanny Price, who is sent to live at Mansfield Park with her aunt, Lady Bertram, and promptly falls in love with her cousin Edmund, another deeply virtuous person. The arrival of the worldly Crawfords, brother and sister Henry and Mary, upsets the calm of the neighborhood, with Edmund becoming smitten with Mary despite his disapproval of her character, and Henry attracting the attention of both Bertram sisters, Maria and Julia, despite the fact that both have admirers of their own. Henry, however, falls in love with Fanny, who is almost persuaded that her good influence can redeem his character, but then he elopes with Maria, now Mrs. Rushworth. Amid all the scandal and disappointment, Edmund finally recognizes Fanny’s worth.

 

Northanger Abbey: Catherine Morland’s head is full of ghoulish Gothic novels, so when she is invited to Northanger Abbey by her friend Elinor Tilney (with whose brother, Henry, she is already in love), she thinks she has discovered a horrific mystery: Elinor’s father, the general, has murdered his wife. It turns out to be nonsense, of course, and she is deeply embarrassed that Henry should know of her silly suspicions. General Tilney now discovers that Catherine is not, as he has been led to believe, an heiress, and turns her out of the house. She is back at home thinking gloomy thoughts about her future when Henry appears and…

 

Persuasion: Eight years before the novel starts, Anne Elliot was persuaded by her proud father, Sir Walter, and her well-meaning friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth. Nowtwenty-six, she hasnever met anyone else she can care for (and indeed has turned down a proposal from a neighbor, Charles Musgrove, who subsequently marries her sister, Mary). Chance brings Captain Wentworth, now wealthy, back into the neighborhood, but throws him together with Charles Musgrove’s sisters, Henrietta and Louisa. Anne is forced to watch in silence as he apparently becomes involved with Louisa, whose steadfastness of character seems to appeal to him more than the weakness he has not forgiven in Anne. An outing to Lyme Regis ends with Louisa insisting on jumping off the Cobb, falling and causing herself serious injury. Just as Captain Wentworth’s feelings toward Anne are reawakening, he finds that all his friends believe he is committed to Louisa, and he cannot honorably renege on this perceived promise. But Louisa, in the course of her convalescence, conveniently falls in love with Captain Wentworth’s friend Captain Benwick, and Wentworth is free again.

 

Pride and Prejudice: Spirited but poor Elizabeth Bennet (Lizzy) takes a stand against the proud but extremely wealthy Mr. Darcy, particularly when he destroys the chances of her sister Jane marrying his friend Mr. Bingley. Darcy falls in love with Lizzy much against his better judgment and is tactless enough to tell her so. Scandal hits the Bennet family when the youngest daughter, Lydia, elopes with the charming but feckless Wickham, but Darcy saves the day. An unlikely scenario for bringing lovers together, but it does, as many readers predict, and the two “deserving” daughters make the happy marriages at the end of the novel. After all, “a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

 

Other characters include two more Bennet sisters, plain and studious Mary and silly Kitty; their parents, the empty-headed Mrs. Bennet and introverted, sarcastic Mr. Bennet; Mr. Bennet’s cousin and heir, the bumbling clergyman Mr. Collins; and his haughty patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who also happens to be Darcy’s aunt.

 

Sense and Sensibility: The Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, are completely different in temperament, and, when Marianne falls in love with the dashing Willoughby, the whole world knows it. Elinor, on the other hand, suffers her disappointment over Edward Ferrars in silence. Willoughby is summoned to London just as he appears to be on the brink of proposing to Marianne and instead becomes engaged to a wealthy woman. Marianne’s heartbreak is eventually healed by the less dashing Colonel Brandon, and Elinor gets Edward in the end.

 

Jane Austen also wrote fragments of two other novels, The Watsons and Sanditon, which have been published in their incomplete forms and variously completed by other authors.

 

• THE BRONTËS

There were three sisters who wrote novels—Anne (1820-49), Charlotte (1816-55), and Emily (1818-48). All, especially Emily, were also poets of some distinction. Charlotte wrote Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, but her most famous novel is Jane Eyre:

 

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: A poor orphan girl secures a job as governess to the ward of Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Manor, a place where strange noises tend to emanate from the attic. Jane and Rochester fall in love, but their wedding is stopped by the intervention of Mr. Mason, who announces that Rochester is, in fact, married to his sister, Bertha. And indeed he is, but she is mad and confined to the attic and watched over by the fearsome Grace Poole. Jane runs away and seeks refuge with her cousins, the Rivers; on the point of accepting a proposal of marriage from St. John Rivers, she thinks she hears Rochester calling her and insists on returning to Thornfield. There she finds that Bertha has broken out of her attic, set fire to the house, perished in the flames, and left Rochester blind, disfigured, and dependent. “Reader,” as she famously says, “I married him.”

 

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë: Although Anne wrote Agnes Gray, a story about the horrors of being a governess in Victorian England, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is slightly better known, perhaps for its public-television BBC series. This work could exemplify one of the first feminist novels, since it illustrates the inequities sometimes evident between men and women in marriage. The story involves the arrival of a mysterious new tenant, Helen Huntingdon, who with her young son moves to a small village in Yorkshire. A farmer falls in love with her, only to learn that she is still married to a wealthy man back in London. The husband becomes ill, inevitably from his life of debauchery, and eventually dies, leaving Helen free. You can likely guess what happens next.

 

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: This extremely dark tale of unrequited, misguided love and revenge oftentimes reaks with an uncomfortable intensity. Heathcliff is a wild orphan brought home to Wuthering Heights by kindly Mr. Earnshaw, Cathy’s father. The two fall passionately in love, but Cathy refuses to marry a nobody and instead marries their drippy neighbor, Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, in revenge, marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella, and cruelly mistreats her. Cathy dies in childbirth. Heathcliff goes a bit bonkers and ends up pretty much killing himself so as to be reunited with Cathy in death.

 

• CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70)

Love him or hate him, Dickens inspired many great films, and everyone knows what Dickensian means.

 

A Christmas Carol: The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge tries to ignore Christmas and is haunted by the ghost of his former partner, Marley, and by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come, who show him the error of his ways.

 

David Copperfield: Dickens’s favorite—the life story of a boy who is sent to boarding school by his evil stepfather, runs away to his eccentric aunt, becomes a lawyer, and then a writer. Sounds pretty dull, but really it is about growing up, learning from experience, and coming to terms with life. It’s full of colorful characters such as Mr. Micawber, always hoping that something will turn up; the ever so ’umble Uriah Heep; Aunt Betsy Trotwood; and her mad companion, Mr. Dick, who is obsessed with the execution of Charles I; not to mention the Peggotty family, the deeply drippy Dora, and the saintly Agnes.

 

Oliver Twist: About the boy from the workhouse who is kicked out after he “wants some more” food and finds his way into a gang of pickpockets led by Fagin. The novel contains considerably more misery and rather less singing and dancing than the musical version.

 

If you don’t remember much about Dickens, chances are most of the characters you do recall are from the ones previously mentioned from David Copperfield; the Artful Dodger, Nancy, the evil Bill Sikes, and Mr. Bumble the beadle from Oliver Twist; and Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol. But here are a few more stories that may ring bells:

 

The plot of Bleak House centers around the ongoing case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, which eventually eats up all the money that is being disputed; the Circumlocution Office, Dickens’s savage attack on civil service bureaucracy, appears in Little Dorrit; and Barnaby Rudge is set against the background of the Gordon Riots (anti-Catholic riots in London in 1780).

 

• SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a number of much longer poems. There isn’t room in this book to summarize all the plays, so here are—arguably—the 10 best known.

 

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Another one where everyone dies. Hamlet’s father, also Hamlet, has died in suspicious circumstances, and his widow, Gertrude, has married—with indecent haste—Hamlet senior’s brother, Claudius. The ghost of King Hamlet tells his son that he has been murdered by Claudius. Prince Hamlet then spends much of the play worrying about what to do and talking to himself—hence all the famous soliloquies. He has previously been attached to Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, the lord chamberlain, but he now rejects her (“Get thee to a nunnery”). Talking to his mother in her room, Hamlet realizes that someone is eavesdropping behind a wall hanging, and Hamlet stabs the individual, believing it to be Claudius. It is, in fact, Polonius. Ophelia goes mad and drowns herself. Her brother, Laertes, is determined to avenge his family, so Claudius arranges a fencing match in which Laertes will have a poisoned sword. Laertes wounds Hamlet; then there is a scuffle in which the two exchange swords and Hamlet wounds Laertes. Knowing that he is dying, Laertes confesses, Hamlet stabs Claudius, and Gertrude drinks poisoned wine that Claudius had prepared as a fallback for outing Hamlet. “Good night, sweet prince,” says his friend Horatio as he prepares to clear up the mess.

 

Hamlet contains more quotations than the other plays. For example, Polonius’s paternal advice to his son Laertes:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend;
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all—to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

 

And a bit of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy…

 

To be, or not to be; that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep! Perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Julius Caesar: A number of Roman citizens, notably Caesar’s close friend Marcus Brutus and his brother, Cassius, are worried that Caesar is becoming too powerful, so they kill him (“Et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar”). But that happens in Act III Scene I, only halfway through the play. The rest is about the fallout from the assassination: the vengeance wrought on the conspirators by Caesar’s supporters, led by Mark Antony; the conflict between Brutus and Cassius (the one who has “a lean and hungry look—he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”); the effect on them and their feelings of guilt; and their eventual defeat and suicide. And speaking of rabble-rousing, Antony’s funeral oration, which works the crowd up into a frenzy so that they will avenge the murder, runs fairly close to Henry V:

Friends, Romans, countrymen; lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him…

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man…

and so on and so forth, until the mob is fairly baying for Brutus’s blood.

 

King Lear: Lear is “the foolish, fond old man” who decides to retire and divide his kingdom among his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. The two eldest make fancy speeches about loving their father above all else; Cordelia refuses to play this game and is promptly exiled. Lear plans to spend half his time with Goneril and half with Regan, but these two wicked sisters have other ideas and soon kick him out. He wanders around in the rain, goes mad, meets up with Cordelia again, and then everyone dies. There is a subplot concerning the Earl of Gloucester’s bastard son Edmund, who plots against everyone and becomes betrothed to both Goneril and Regan (despite the fact that they are both married). They all die, too.

 

Macbeth: The Scottish play. Three witches prophesy that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor and subsequently king. When he is proclaimed Thane of Cawdor, he starts wondering about hurrying the second prophecy along. Egged on by his wife, he murders King Duncan and is proclaimed king in his place. And it’s all downhill from there. One murder leads to another, he is haunted by guilt (personified by the ghost of his friend Banquo, who appears at a banquet), Lady Macbeth goes mad and dies (after the famous “Out damned spot” hand-washing/sleepwalking scene), and Macbeth is finally killed in battle. Ultimately, Duncan’s son Malcolm is restored to the throne.

 

The Merchant of Venice: Shylock the Jewish moneylender hates Antonio the Christian merchant. When Antonio needs to borrow money from him to help out his friend Bassanio, Shylock makes him sign a bond promising that he will pay Shylock one pound of his own flesh should he fail to repay the loan. Bassanio takes the money and successfully courts the wealthy Portia. Antonio’s ships are lost at sea, and he is unable to pay Shylock, who claims his pound of flesh. Portia disguises herself as a lawyer and rescues Antonio by pointing out that, contractually, Shylock is entitled to take a pound of flesh but no blood—a logistical impossibility. Her speech beginning “The quality of mercy is not strained” comes from this scene. A happy ending—unless you are Shylock.

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The one about the fairies. Three plots interwoven: In a wood outside Athens, two pairs of young lovers brush up against the squabbling king and queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, and Oberon’s servant Puck. In the same wood a group of workmen, including Bottom the Weaver, are rehearsing the play Pyramus and Thisbe to perform at the forthcoming wedding of the Duke of Athens. Oberon has a magic potion that, when squeezed on the eyelids of someone who is asleep, makes that person fall in love with the first object he or she sees upon awakening. As a result, Titania falls in love with Bottom, whom Puck has given an ass’s head, and Puck confuses the young lovers so that they keep falling in and out of love with the wrong partners. But in the end “all is mended.”

 

Othello, the Moor of Venice: Othello is a successful general, but the problem is that he is black and has secretly married a white girl, Desdemona. The other problem is that Iago hates him, partly because Othello has promoted a young lieutenant, Cassio, over Iago’s head. Iago persuades Othello that Cassio is having an affair with Desdemona. Mad with jealousy (“the green-eyed monster”), Othello smothers Desdemona in her bed. Iago also tries to have Cassio murdered, but the plot fails, and letters proving Iago’s guilt and Cassio’s innocence are discovered. Othello realizes that he has murdered Desdemona for no reason and kills himself. Othello was the man who loved “not wisely but too well,” and it was Iago who said, “Who steals my purse steals trash.” (But he was lying, of course.)

 

This section ends with words from one famous sonnet—number 18—whose first four lines have provided titles for at least two novels:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Romeo and Juliet: The original star-crossed lovers. Romeo is a Montague, Juliet a Capulet, and the two families hate each other. Romeo and Juliet secretly marry. However, Juliet has already been commissioned to marry her cousin, Paris. To get out of this, Juliet comes up with one of those clever schemes that you just know will go wrong: She takes a potion that puts her into a coma for a couple of days so that everyone thinks she is dead. The message telling Romeo about this goes astray (of course), and he arrives at her tomb believing that she is dead. He poisons himself just before she wakes up, so Juliet, discovering him dead, stabs herself with his dagger.

 

The balcony scene is full of famous lines. For example, when Romeo lurks in the garden, Juliet appears on the balcony above and, talking to herself, says:

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?…
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.

And at the end of the scene, she says:

Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

The Taming of the Shrew: Katharina is too bad-tempered to secure a husband, but her father will not allow her younger (and better behaved) sister, Bianca, to accept any of her many suitors until Katharina is married. Petruchio comes along and accepts the challenge, more or less beating Kate into submission. Twenty-first-century feminists do not care for this play, although Cole Porter’s musical version, Kiss Me Kate, is wonderful.

 

Twelfth Night: Twins Viola and Sebastian become separated in a storm, and each believes the other dead. Viola disguises herself as a boy, Cesario, and enters the service of Duke Orsino, with whom she falls in love. Orsino, however, is in love with Olivia and uses Cesario as a messenger to woo her. Olivia—you guessed it—falls in love with Cesario, and it takes the reappearance of Sebastian to make everyone live happily ever after. The subplot concerns Olivia’s pompous steward, Malvolio, who is conned by Olivia’s uncle and his friends into believing that Olivia is in love with him and that she wishes to see him wearing yellow stockings and cross garters. The well-known saying “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” appears in the letter that Malvolio believes Olivia has written to him.

Other Notable British Authors

North American Authors

There is a countless number of American writers who have earned their rightful place in literary history. While it is tricky to capture all of them in one relatively brief chapter, here are some that many students have come to know very well.

 

• PEARL BUCK (1892-1973)

Winner of both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize, Buck wrote more than 100 titles, as well as short stories, plays, a book of verse, children’s books, biographies, and a cookbook—much while sitting in her office at her Bucks County, Pennsylvania farmhouse watching her eight children play outside her window. Brought to China from Virginia as a young girl, Buck lived among the missionaries and based much of her work on her travels to Asia. In addition to the best-selling The Good Earth, a few other works by Buck include Dragon Seed, East Wind: West Wind, and the House of Earth trilogy. She also founded the charitable organization Pearl S. Buck International, which helps children around the world who have been marginalized due to mixed heredity, disease, hunger, poverty, or other tragic circumstances.

 

• STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900)

Writer and journalist, Crane died at 28 years old and will forever be remembered for the required-reading novel, the Red Badge of Courage, which details the horrors of war experienced by a young soldier. This classic is based on memoirs and interviews with Civil War veterans.

 

• RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-82)

Essayist, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet, Emerson greatly influenced the transcendentalist movement of the mid-1800s. His associations include Henry David Thoreau (Walden Pond was on his property) and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his neighbor Louisa May Alcott. His collected essays included “Self-Reliance,” which warned people to avoid conformity and to follow their own ideas and instincts. “Nature,” “Circles,” and “The Poet” are a few of his other most successful pieces.

 

• WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

Known for his stream of consciousness, Faulkner’s literary technique depicts what is going on in the speaker’s head rather than simply relating the person’s dialogue with others. In his novel As I Lay Dying, Faulkner presents 15 different points of view. Other well-known novels include The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom; and The Unvanquished.

 

• F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the United States’ National Anthem. His six finished novels, including Tender Is the Night and This Side of Paradise and many short stories evoke the Jazz Age and his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Zelda Sayre. Like a fine wine, his masterpiece The Great Gatsby is about the futility and moral decay of the wealthy that gets even better with age. Fitzgerald died at 44, considering himself a failed writer. However, Gatsby continues as a best seller and is often required reading for many high school and college students.

 

• NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

Who could forget the Scarlet Letter’s all-too-human Hester Prynne, who—after being separated from her cool-hearted husband (Chillingworth)—has a passionate affair with her charismatic minister. The Puritans chide her and force her to wear a scarlet “A” upon her breast, advertising her sin. Hester dutifully (and wisely) protects Pastor Dimmesdale from public scorn, but his conscience catches up to him. The story warns of the scourge of sin and that people can be downright self-righteous. A few other examples from his published works include The House of the Seven Gables; a short-story collection, Twice-Told Tales, and the short stories “The Birthmark” and “Young Goodman Brown.”

 

• JOSEPH HELLER (1923-1999)

Although he is often regarded as one of the best post-World War II satirists, Heller’s career included stints as a blacksmith’s apprentice, a B-25 bombardier, and an advertising copywriter. However, his novel Catch-22 is one of the few whose title has created an idiom rather than employing an existing quotation. The plot centers on a group of American fighter pilots in Italy during World War II and their efforts to avoid flying suicidal missions. The problem is that the only way they can get out of flying missions is if they are crazy—but the moment they ask to be grounded because flying the missions is crazy, they are deemed to be entirely sane, and therefore fit to fly.

 

• ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

Remember the determined Santiago, the aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a marlin in the Gulf Stream? The Old Man and the Sea won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 and has been heavily analyzed in classrooms for its symbolism ever since. Hemingway, however, is posthumously quoted in a 1999 issue of Time (“An American Storyteller”) as saying, “No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in.... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough, they would mean many things.” Hemingway was frank and wickedly tough, evident in some of his other great works: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

 

• ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891-1960)

Once criticized for her cultural depictions and political views, Hurston’s work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, has grown into a seminal work for African-American and feminist writers, and it is a darn good read. The story relates the struggles of Janie Sparks, who in the end says, “Two things everybody got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” Hurston’s work grew from the Harlem Renaissance and was revived in the 1970s after an article in Ms. by Color Purple author Alice Walker.

 

• WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859)

Known for the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which tells of the unfortunate disappearance of Ichabod Crane one autumn night after being pursued by the infamous headless horseman (the ghost of a Hessian soldier who had his head blown off during the American Revolution). Irving also wrote the Grimm-influenced (some say stolen) Rip Van Winkle, where a henpecked husband who hates his honey-do list heads for the hills. He then takes the drink of some bowling ghosts and falls asleep for a mere 20 years, waking up to a changed geographical and political landscape, a foot-long beard, and a deceased wife. Rip, however, resumes his old walks and habits.

 

• HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)

Although born in New York City, James eventually settled in England, becoming a British subject shortly before his death. James often wrote books that crossed the continents. The Portrait of a Lady was adapted for film in 1996, directed by Jane Campion. The story involves a newly wealthy, young American woman who travels to Europe and becomes scammed into marriage by two U.S. expatriates. James’s other admired works include Washington Square, The Bostonians, and his shorter pieces, “The Aspern Papers,” and “The Turn of the Screw.”

 

• HARPER LEE (1926- )

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee was a childhood friend and next-door neighbor of novelist Truman Capote. In 1956 some close friends gave her a year’s salary for Christmas so she could take the time to write. Within that time she wrote one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. The novel depicts the story of a white lawyer in a Deep South town who defends a black man who is wrongly accused of raping a white girl.

 

• HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-91)

You either love him or hate him, but one thing is for sure: After you read Moby Dick, you will know how to tie several different knots. Melville’s immense detail and multileveled symbolism combine to make what is often called the epitome of American Romanticism (of epic proportions). The first chapter opens with the famous line “Call me Ishmael.” Then soon the reader is afloat on this vessel as it ventures forth, fighting to surmount both fate and nature. Melville wrote other works, such as Pierre and the unfinished Billy Budd.

 

• LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY (1874-1942)

Her works would become a favorite of young women around the world, and whose famous protagonist Anne Shirley once said, “Marilla, isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” Some other “Anne” books include: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, and Anne’s House of Dreams. In 1985 a miniseries based on her first novel was among one of the highest-rated programs of any genre to air on Canadian television and won several awards. The films starred Megan Follows as Anne and Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla Cuthbert.

 

• EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

Poe’s major success, The Raven, was published two years before the death of his first wife (his 13-year-old first cousin). After this unfortunate event and scandalous allegations of amorous indiscretions, Poe became dejected and began drinking. Two years later he was scraped off the streets of Baltimore, sick and delirious, and he died soon after. His wife’s death influenced his writing, such as in Annabel Lee. Poe has a long list of bone-chilling stories, including The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Pit and the Pendulum. Many of his tales were adapted for film in the 1960s and starred horror legend Vincent Price.

 

• J. D. SALINGER (1919-2010)

The reclusive Salinger’s biggest success is The Catcher in the Rye, the ultimate disaffected-teenager novel. It is told in the first person by sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, who loathes everything to do with his life and his parents’ “phony” middle-class values. Although the novel was written in 1951, it remains popular and sells approximately 250,000 copies a year.

 

• JOHN STEINBECK (1920-68)

While growing up Steinbeck worked as a hired hand on nearby ranches, which fostered his impressions of the California countryside and its people. These thoughts contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. The book tells the story of the Joad family, who after the Oklahoma dust bowl disaster of the 1930s abandon their land and head for what they imagine is “Promised Land” in California, only to find that life is no easier there. His novels Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row also achieved critical acclaim.

 

• HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-96)

Best known as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a violent antislavery novel (published in 1852, when this was the political hot potato in America). According to legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862 he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!” Her writing career spanned 51 years, during which she published 30 books and countless shorter pieces as well as raising seven children. A year after she and her family moved into their Hartford, Connecticut house, Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, moved into a house just across the lawn.

 

• HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-62)

Sometimes called the father of environmentalism, he stated, “Thank God men cannot fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” He retreated to the woodland, isolating himself from society and wrote Walden, an account of simple living in natural surroundings. He also wrote an essay on Civil Disobedience after being arrested for not paying his taxes, which he did to protest slavery and the Mexican-American War.

 

• MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

Drawing on his experience as a river pilot, this author’s pen name comes from a riverboat term for two fathoms or 12 feet when the depth of water is sounded; “Mark twain” means that it is safe to navigate. Although Twain was also a popular humorist, satirist, and lecturer, he is best known as the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his childhood in the Mississippi River port of Hannibal, Missouri, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a much more serious book—sometimes called the Great American Novel—that had the issue of slavery at its heart.

 

• BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856-1915)

A former slave, freed after the Civil War, this author and educator worked tirelessly through school. He later became a noted educator and major proponent of education and rights for African Americans, working to establish vocational schools so they could learn trades, obtain jobs, and bolster their standing in society. The details of his life can be found in his compelling autobiography and best seller, Up from Slavery.

 

• EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937)

She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921, for The Age of Innocence, which deals with upper-class society in New York City during the turn of the century, where marriage for connection was encouraged. Wharton could subtly poke fun at the upper classes, while displaying a warm, sympathetic tone. She had ample time and opportunity to observe her subjects, since her maiden name was Edith Newbold Jones, the wealthy family associated with the adage “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Some of her other notable works include The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and her unfinished work (finished in 1993 by Marion Mainwaring) The Buccaneers, which was adapted for Masterpiece Theatre in 1995—a series that was soon forgotten.

British Poets

The myths, legends, and romance of the major British poets have sparked millions of imaginations. The following list mentions just a handful of the most familiar ones.

 

• W(YSTAN) H(UGH) AUDEN (1907-73, English)

Shot to renewed fame 20 years after his death, thanks to the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, which is recited at the funeral, is taken from his “Twelve Songs.”

 

• ROBERT BURNS (1759-96, determinedly Scottish)

His birthday was January 25, and for some reason many people still celebrate the event by eating haggis and reciting his poetry. In addition to the wonderfully bloodthirsty “Address to a Haggis,” he also wrote “To a Mouse” (Wee sleekit, cow’rin’ tim’rous beastie and The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft a-gley) and the words of Auld Lang Syne.

 

• GEORGE GORDON BYRON, LORD BYRON

(1788-1824, English/Scottish)

The one who awoke one morning and found myself famous after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He led a wild life, left England after one scandal too many, lived in Italy, where he was friendly with Shelley, then fought for Greek insurgents against the Turks. He died at Missolonghi, in Greece, of rheumatic fever.

 

• GEOFFREY CHAUCER (c.1340-1400, English)

Chaucer is credited as being one of the first great poets to write in English rather than in French or Latin. Although his language is pretty unfamiliar to the uninitiated, he is best known for The Canterbury Tales, in which a party of outrageous pilgrims travel from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, London, to Canterbury Cathedral, where they tell stories to pass the time. The prologue presents a vivid portrait of 14th-century life; among the best-known tellers of tales are the Knight, the Miller, the Man of Law, and the Wife of Bath.

 

• SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834, English)

He wrote only two famous poems—one of them unfinished—but what successes they were: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (that’s the one about the wedding guest and the albatross) and “Kubla Khan” (In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree). His friend Wordsworth could have learned a useful lesson about quality versus quantity.

 

• JOHN DONNE (1572-1631, English)

The greatest of the metaphysical poets (a loose term for a group of 17th-century poets whose work investigated the world using intellect rather than intuition). His most famous line, “No man is an Island, entire of itself,” oft misquoted, is from a book of devotions rather than a poem.

 

• T(HOMAS) S(TEARNS) ELIOT (1888-1965,

American-born, worked in England) Author of “The Wasteland” (April is the cruellest month) and “The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock.”

 

• THOMAS GRAY (1717-71, English)

Gets a mention here because we all have read his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

If you wrote only one poem in your life, you probably would have been quite happy to have written that one.¹

 

• JOHN KEATS (1795-1821, English)

Another great Romantic, he’s the one who died at the intimidatingly young age of 26 of consumption in Rome—you can visit his house, located near the Spanish Steps. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms/ Alone and palely loitering?), “Ode to a Nightingale” (My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk), “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Much have I travelled in the realms of gold) and “To Autumn” (Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness).

 

• RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936, English)

Prolific chronicler of the soldier’s lot in South Africa and India, but best known for “If:”

If you can keep your head while all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

 

• JOHN MILTON (1608-74, English)

Best known for his epic poems, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which were composed in his later years while blind; Areopagitica, Milton’s treatise on censorship, also earned him recognition.

 

• PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822, English)

One of the great Romantic poets, married to Mary, the author of Frankenstein. Lived mostly in Europe, latterly Italy, where he drowned in a boating accident. Author of “Ode to a Skylark” (Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!), “Ozymandias” (Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!) and Adonais, an elegy on the death of Keats.

 

• EDMUND SPENSER (c.1552-99, English)

Author of The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I, and known to his peers as “the prince of poets.” His poem “Epithalamion” has 365 long lines, representing the sum of 52 weeks, 12 months, and 4 seasons of the annual cycle, and 24 stanzas, corresponding to the diurnal and sidereal hours.

 

• ALFRED LORD TENNYSON (1809-92, English)

Another prolific one. His great work is “In Memoriam,” written on the early death of his friend Arthur Hallam; but most people are probably more familiar with “Come into the Garden,” “Maud,” and “The Lady of Shalott”:

Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me!’ cried
The Lady of Shalott

 

• DYLAN THOMAS (1914-53, Welsh)

Famous drunkard, but you forgive him most things for having written “Under Milkwood” and enabling Richard Burton to record it for posterity.

 

• WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850, English)

The most important of the Lake Poets (the others were Coleridge and Robert Southey). I have to say, I think “prolix” rather than “prolific” is the mot juste for Wordsworth. He churned it out, and goodness he was dull. The often-quoted “Daffodils” (I wander’d lonely as a cloud) is one of his, as is the “Sonnet Written on Westminster Bridge” (Earth hath not anything to show more fair).

 

• W(ILLIAM) B(UTLER) YEATS (1865-1939, Irish)

Theosophist and Rosicrucian as well as poet and playwright; dedicated his early poems to Maud Gonne. Best known are “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree).

North American Poets

Although this is an extremely short list of extraordinary poets, the writers listed here captured the voice and history of their generations. Hopefully they will inspire you to seek out the many remarkable poets that followed in their footsteps.

 

• ANNE BRADSTREET (1612-72)

A puritan, she immigrated with her family in 1630 to the New World. Anne, who was used to an Earl’s manor, had to adjust to near-primitive living conditions. She struggled to take care of her home and raise eight children but still found time to write and became the first female writer to publish work in colonial America. Some notable poems include “The Prologue” and “To My Dear and Loving Husband.”

 

• EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

Dickinson spent a large part of her 55 years writing about death and immortality. After all, her home overlooked the Amherst, Massachusetts, burial ground, and since Emily was a bit of a recluse and spent a large part of her adult life caring for her ailing mother, she had plenty of time to contemplate life and death through her window. Fewer than a dozen of her poems were actually published during her lifetime. Some of her well-known poems include “Because I could not stop for Death,” “Success is counted sweetest,” and “A wounded deer”—leaps highest, which contains the line Mirth is the mail of Anguish.

 

• ROBERT FROST (1874-1963, American)

Probably second only to Whitman as “the great American poet,” Frost won the Pulitzer Prize three times. His works include “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (And miles to go before I sleep) and “The Road Not Taken” (Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by).

 

• HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

He is known for his lyric poetry—“Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Evangeline,” and “The Song of Hiawatha” (By the shore of Gitche Gumee, which, incidentally, is Lake Superior). Hiawatha may be the most mocked and parodied poem of all time, receiving reconstruction from agents such as Lewis Carroll (“Hiawatha’s Photographing”) and the producers of Saturday Night Live.

 

• WALT WHITMAN (1819-92, American)

The great American poet of the 19th century. His master-work is Leaves of Grass, a massive collection of short poems, including “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” both from the section “Memories of President Lincoln,” inspired by the president’s assassination.

International Authors

Most of us had teachers of English or general studies who encouraged us to broaden our horizons by reading some of the foreign “greats” in translation. Keeping this to a Top 10 has meant cheating a bit on the Greek tragedians and leaving out Horace, Ovid, Rabelais, Molière, Schiller, Balzac, Zola… and that’s before I really hit the 20th century. But I think these are the ones you are most likely to have read without knowing the original language.

 

• DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321, Italian)

Known for The Divine Comedy, Dante divided his epic into three parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatoria, and Paradiso. It narrates Dante’s journey through these three worlds, the first two guided by Virgil, the final by Beatrice, a woman with whom he had been madly in love since he was nine, although it seems they met only twice. Hell is depicted as having various circles, indicating degrees of suffering, depending on how bad you had been in life: the ninth and worst contained the poets.

 

• MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616, Spanish)

One of the most influential works of Spanish literature is Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The novel is about a man who becomes obsessed with books on chivalry and decides to go out into the world to do noble deeds. Toward this end, he imagines that a local village girl is the glamorous lady in whose name these deeds will be carried out, and he christens her Dulcinea del Toboso. His steed is actually a broken-down old horse called Rosinante, which means “previously a broken-down old horse.” Along with other foolish whims, he adopts Sancho Panza as his squire and goes around attacking windmills because he thinks they are giants.

 

• FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1821-81, Russian)

Often credited as a founder of 20th-century existentialism, Dostoevsky graduated as a military engineer. However, he soon resigned that career, began writing, and joined a group of utopian socialists. He was arrested and sentenced to death, but the punishment was commuted and he spent eight years in hard labor and as a soldier. His best-known works include Crime and Punishment, an account of an individual’s fall and redemption, The Brothers Karamazov, a tale of four brothers involved in their father’s brutal murder.

 

• GUSTAV FLAUBERT (1821-80, French)

One of the most important novels of the 19th century, Madame Bovary was attacked for its obscenity when it was published more than 150 years ago. The novel focuses on Madame Bovary—Emma—who is married to a worthy but dull provincial doctor, Charles. She longs for glamour and passion and has adulterous affairs, rebelling against the accepted ideas of the day. The novel served to inspire the beginnings of feminism.

 

• JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

(1749-1832, German)

Once called “Germany’s greatest man of letters,” Goethe is best known for his two-part drama Faust, the tragic play about a man who sells his soul to the devil—here called Mephistopheles—in return for worldly success. Surprisingly, he is saved by angels. Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was the inspiration for Goethe’s work. Goethe’s influence spread, extending across Europe, becoming a major source of inspiration in music, drama, poetry, and philosophy.

 

• HOMER (c. 9th century B.C., Greek)

The great epics the Iliad and the Odyssey are the basis of pretty much everything we know about the Trojan War and about Odysseus (Ulysses)’s 10-year journey to get home to Ithaca. A quick rundown on the Trojan War: Paris, prince of Troy, abducted Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, who was the King of Sparta (in Greece). Various Greek heroes—Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon—were pledged to fight to bring her back. They laid siege to Troy for 10 years before finally hitting on the idea of a wooden horse: Soldiers hid inside it, the Trojans were fooled into taking it within the city walls, the soldiers leaped out, and the Trojans were defeated. The Trojan hero was Paris’s older brother, Hector. Their parents were Priam and Hecuba, and their sister Cassandra was the one who made prophecies that no one believed. Then Odysseus set off for home, encountering Circe, Calypso, and the Cyclops Polyphemus on the way. Back home his wife, Penelope, had promised her suitors that she would marry one of them when she had finished the piece of weaving she was doing, but she secretly unraveled the day’s work every night.

 

• VICTOR HUGO (1802-85, French)

One of the most notable French Romantic writers, Hugo created his own version of the historical novel by combining historical fact with vivid, imaginative details. His great achievements were Notre-Dame de Paris, known to us as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and Les Miserables. The hunchback Quasimodo is the bell ringer at Notre-Dame, and the plot concerns his love for the Gypsy girl Esmeralda. Les Miserables, known to many because of its successful stage adaptations, is set in Paris in 1815, at the time of the Battle of Waterloo. The central character, Jean Valjean, is a reformed thief who is persecuted by the police agent Javert.

 

• SOPHOCLES (c. 496-406 B.C., Greek); EURIPIDES

(c. 480-406 B.C.); ARISTOPHANES (c. 448-380 B.C.) Oedipus Rex, also known as Oedipus the King, is the play about the man who accidentally married his mother. It is the first in Sophicles’s Oedipus Trilogy, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone. Medea, the play about the woman who murdered her children to avenge herself on their father is by Euripides, who lived around the same time. And while we’re at it, there was the comic playwright Aristophanes, who wrote Lysistrata, about the women who put a stop to the Peloponnesian War by refusing to have sex with their husbands.

 

• LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910, Russian)

Born into Russian nobility and widely regarded by fellow writers as one of the world’s greatest novelists, Tolstoy is best known for his epic, War and Peace. A rich tale of early 19th century czarist Russia under Alexander I, it discusses the absurdity and shallowness of war and aristocratic society. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the book he considered to be his first novel. Considered a true example of realist fiction, it centers on adultery and self-discovery while social changes storm through Russia.

 

• VIRGIL (70-19 B.C., Roman)

His most famous work is The Aeneid, the story of the Trojan prince Aeneas, the ancestor of the Roman people (also an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, who actually founded the city). Some of The Aeneid was inspired by Homer and relates to the story of the fall of Troy. Escaping from Troy, Aeneas eventually reached Italy but stopped off en route in Carthage, where he had an affair with the queen, Dido, who burned herself alive when he left her. The first words of the Aeneid are “Arma virumque cano”—“I sing of arms and the man”—which is where the title of George Bernard Shaw’s play comes from.