If You Like ... Classics
What does it mean to call something "classic"? The term implies age or antiquity, but also implies the material is valuable. It can shape what comes in later time periods. Classic literature is usually widely acknowledged as having outstanding or enduring qualities. The following selections are but a few of the many examples of classics in literature.
Try some of the books and authors listed below.
- Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- by Mark Twain
- A humorous and nostalgic book depicting the carefree days of boyhood in a small Midwestern town during the mid-1800's.
- Anna Karenina
- by Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs entirely to the woman whose name it bears, whose portrait is one of the truest ever made by a writer.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- by Oscar Wilde
- The classic tale of a man who sells his moral health for the opportunity to retain his youth and good looks, and the portrait that reveals his own corruption to him.
- Pride and Prejudice
- by Jane Austen
- A delightful novel about "how girls catch husbands." What will happen to sister Lydia, will the arrogant Lady Catherine de Burgh's intrigues be foiled, will sister Jane marry Mr. Bingley and especially, will Elizabeth, cured of her prejudice, and Mr. Darcy, cured of his pride, fall into each other's arms?
- The Scarlett Letter
- by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The story of Hester Prynne-found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeking husband-possesses a reality heightened by Hawthorne's pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine.
- Tale of Two Cities
- by Charles Dickens
- Set in the late eighteenth century against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Filled with adventure and love, revolution and terror, it transports the reader to a time of political upheaval and solutions by guillotine.
- Tess of the d'Ubervilles
- by Thomas Hardy
- Hardy's bleak, relentless tale of an innocent country girl's brief, perilous journey on our blighted planet is not for the faint of heart. Born into a weak family, seduced by an unscrupulous admirer, and beset by a series of tragic coincidences, courageous Tess surrenders herself to the crushing force of fate with heartbreaking simplicity.
- To the Lighthouse
- by Virginia Woolf
- The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between male and female principles.
- Treasure Island
- by R .L. Stevenson
- An adventure of pirates, buried treasure, mutiny and deceit, meet Billy Bones, Blind Pew, Black Dog and the charming buccaneer, Long John Silver.
- Villette
- by Charlotte Bronte
- Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. A dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as strikingly modern psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness.