Perhaps the most famous opening lines from any nineteenth-century novel are the opening lines to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." These words are spoken by Mrs Bennet to Mr. Bennet on the news that a gentleman of fortune has just moved to Netherfield Park, a nearby estate. The Bennets begin this story with a peculiar problem: they have five unmarried daughters and no sons. Their estate is entailed, or restricted in inheritance, to Mr. Collins, a family cousin. Upon Mr. Bennet's death Mr. Collins will inherit the family lands, which will leave the Bennet daughters without a home or money. It becomes vital, therefore, that at least one...

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Elinor and Marianne, the Dashwood sisters and main characters of the novel, are introduced. The novel opens with a description of the line of inheritance of the Dashwood estate. Mr. John Dashwood, the half brother of the Dashwood sisters, is left controlling virtually the entire inheritance. He promises his father that he will take care of his half sisters. Mrs. John Dashwood shrewdly convinces her husband that his promise need not include any significant financial obligation to his sisters. Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood take over the residence in Norland after inheriting the estate, leaving Mrs. Henry Dashwood and her daughters feeling like visitors in their home. Elinor, Marianne, and the younger Margaret will have to rely on their charms in securing a husband for their future comfort and security.

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As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The work was based upon the novel Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility. As You Like It follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court to find safety and eventually love in the Forest of Arden with her cousin Celia and court jester, Touchstone. Historically, critical response has varied, with some critics finding the work of lesser quality than other Shakespearean works and some finding the play a work of great merit.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_You_Like_It)

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King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1603 and 1606, and is considered one of his greatest works. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king. It has been widely adapted for stage and screen, with the part of Lear being played by many of the world's most accomplished actors. There are two distinct versions of the play: The True Chronicle of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters, which appeared in quarto in 1608, and The Tragedy of King Lear, which appeared in the First Folio in 1623, a more theatrical version. The two texts are commonly printed in a conflated version, although many modern editors have argued that each version has its individual integrity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lear)

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Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young "star-cross'd lovers" whose untimely deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers. Shakespeare's use of dramatic structure, especially effects such as switching between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension, his expansion of minor characters, and his use of sub-plots to embellish the story, has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill. The play ascribes different poetic forms to different characters, sometimes changing the form as the character develops. Romeo, for example, grows more adept at the sonnet over the course of the play.

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Don Quixote of La Mancha (original Spanish: El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha) is a novel written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes created a fictional origin for the story based upon a manuscript by the invented Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli. Published in two volumes a decade apart (in 1605 and 1615), Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

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Robert Burns (25 January 1759 - 21 July 1796) was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a "light" Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these pieces, his political or civil commentary is often at its most blunt. He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and after his death became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism. A cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish Diaspora around the world, celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature.

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The stories, first published in 1902, are pourquoi stories, fantastic accounts of how various phenomena came about. A forerunner of these stories is "How Fear Came" in The Second Jungle Book (1895), in which Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes. The Just So Stories have a typical theme of a particular animal being modified from an original form to their current form by the acts of man, or some magical being. For example, the Whale has a tiny throat from a swallowed mariner who tied a raft in there to block the whale from swallowing others. The Camel has a hump given to him by a djinn as punishment for the camel refusing to work (the hump allows the camel to work longer between eating). The Leopard has spots painted on him by an Ethiopian (after the Ethiopian painted himself black). The Kangaroo gets its powerful hind legs, long tail, and hopping gait after being chased all day by a dingo, who was sent after the Kangaroo by a minor god who the Kangaroo had asked to make him different from all other animals.

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Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem of unknown authorship, dating as recorded in the Nowell Codex manuscript from between the 8th and the early 11th century, set in Denmark and Sweden. Commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf has been the subject of much scholarly study, theory, speculation, discourse, and, at 3182 lines, has been noted for its length. In the poem, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, battles three antagonists: Grendel, who has been attacking the resident warriors of a mead hall called Heorot in Denmark; Grendel's mother; and an unnamed dragon. The last battle takes place later in life, after returning to Geatland (modern southern Sweden), where Beowulf has become king. In the final battle, Beowulf is fatally wounded. After his death his retainers bury him in a tumulus in Geatland.

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Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece. Modern scholars refer to the myths and study them in an attempt to throw light on the religious and political institutions of Ancient Greece, on the Ancient Greek civilization, and to gain understanding of the nature of myth-making itself. Greek mythology is embodied explicitly in a large collection of narratives and implicitly in representational arts, such as vase-paintings and votive gifts. Greek myth explains the origins of the world and details the lives and adventures of a wide variety of gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, and other mythological creatures. These accounts initially were disseminated in an oral-poetic tradition; today the Greek myths are known primarily from Greek literature.

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Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci)

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Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death. The Republic is a Socratic dialogue by Plato, written in approximately 380 BC. It is one of the most influential works of philosophy and political theory, and Plato's best known work. In Plato's fictional dialogues the characters of Socrates as well as various Athenians and foreigners discuss the meaning of justice and examine whether the just man is happier than the unjust man by imagining a society ruled by philosopher-kings and the guardians. The dialogue also discusses the role of the philosopher, Plato's Theory of Forms, the place of poetry, and the immortality of the soul.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato_Republic)

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The Art of War is a Chinese military treatise that was written by Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC, during the Spring and Autumn period. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it has long been praised as the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time, and one of the basic texts on the subject. The Art of War is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy in the world. It has had a huge influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu recognized the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through a to-do list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a competitive environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Tzus_Art_of_War)

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Peter Pan: or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up (1904) is the title of Scottish playwright and novelist James M. Barrie's most famous play, and Peter and Wendy is the title of Barrie's 1911 novelization of it. Both tell the story of Peter Pan, a mischievous little boy who can fly, and his adventures on the island of Neverland with Wendy Darling and her brothers, the fairy Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, the Indian princess Tiger Lily, and the pirate Captain Hook. The play and novel were both inspired by Barrie's friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family. The novel follows the play closely, but includes a final chapter not part of the original play.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Wendy)

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends. The tale plays with logic in ways that have given the story lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense, and its narrative course and structure have been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre. The book is commonly referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland, an alternative title popularized by the numerous stage, film and television adaptations of the story produced over the years. Some printings of this title contain both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland)

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Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe. It was first published in 1719, and is sometimes considered to be the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, encountering Native Americans, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. This device, presenting an account of supposedly factual events, is known as a "false document" and gives a realistic frame story. The story was likely influenced by the real life Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived four years on the Pacific island called "Ma's a Tierra" (in 1966 its name was changed to Robinson Crusoe Island), Chile. However, the details of Crusoe's island were probably based on the Caribbean island of Tobago, since that island lies a short distance north of the Venezuelan coast near the mouth of the Orinoco river, and in sight of the island of Trinidad. It is also likely that Defoe was inspired by the Latin or English translations of Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, an earlier novel also set on a desert island. Another source for Defoe's novel may have been Robert Knox's account of his abduction by the King of Ceylon in 1659 in "An Historical Account of the Island Ceylon," Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons (Publishers to the University), 1911.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe)

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The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales around 1807, in response to a wave of awakened interest in German folklore that followed the publication of Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn"). By 1810 the Grimms produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. In 1812, the Brothers published a collection of 86 German fairy tales in a volume titled Kinder- und Hausma"rchen ("Children's and Household Tales"). They published a second volume of 70 fairy tales in 1814, which together make up the first edition of the collection, containing 156 stories.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm_The_Tales)

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The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories written by Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–4. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Vermont.The tales in the book (and also those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle." Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of an abandoned 'man cub' Mowgli who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The most famous of the other stories are probably "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", the story of a heroic mongoose, and "Toomai of the Elephants", the tale of a young elephant-handler. Kotick, The White Seal seeking for his people a haven where they would be safe from hunters, has been considered a metaphor for Zionism, then in its beginning. As with much of Kipling's work, each of the stories is preceded by a piece of verse, and succeeded by another. The title of each is given in italics in the list of stories below.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Book)

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Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships, is a novel by Irish author Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. The book became tremendously popular as soon as it was published. (John Gay said in a 1726 letter to Swift that "it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery"); since then, it has never been out of print.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver's_Travels)

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Reverend George Fyler Townsend (1814-1900) was the translator of the standard English edition of Aesop's Fables. Although there are more modern collections and translations, Townsend's volume of 350 fables introduced the practice of stating a succinct moral at the conclusion of each story, and continues to be influential. Several editions were published in his lifetime, and others since. Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620–560 BC), a slave and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, especially beast fables involving anthropomorphic animals. His fables are some of the most well known in the world. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Many stories included in Aesop's Fables, such as The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" was derived), The Tortoise and the Hare, The North Wind and the Sun, The Boy Who Cried Wolf and The Ant and the Grasshopper are well-known throughout the world.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop's_Fables)

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Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers, the jokes seem fresh and witty even today. The three men are based on Jerome himself and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who went on to become a senior manager in Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom he often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional, but "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog." The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This is just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Men_in_a_Boat)

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Moby-Dickis an 1851 novel by Herman Melville. The story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby Dick, a white sperm whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaleships know of Moby Dick, and fewer yet have encountered him. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg. Ahab intends to take revenge. In Moby-Dick, Melville employs stylized language, symbolism, and metaphor to explore numerous complex themes. Through the main character's journey, the concepts of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of gods are all examined as Ishmael speculates upon his personal beliefs and his place in the universe. The narrator's reflections, along with his descriptions of a sailor's life aboard a whaling ship, are woven into the narrative along with Shakespearean literary devices such as stage directions, extended soliloquies and asides. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick)

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Martin Eden (1909) is a novel by American author Jack London, about a struggling young writer. This book is a favorite among writers, who relate to Martin Eden's speculation that when he mailed off a manuscript, 'there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps,' returning it automatically with a rejection slip. While some readers believe there is some resemblance between them, an important difference between Jack London and Martin Eden is that Martin Eden rejects socialism (attacking it as 'slave morality'), and relies on a Nietzschean individualism. In a note to Upton Sinclair, Jack London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled, for not a single reviewer has discovered it."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Eden)

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (often shortened to Huck Finn) is a novel written by Mark Twain and published in 1884. It is commonly regarded as one of the Great American Novels, and is one of the first major American novels written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels. The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. By satirizing a Southern antebellum society that was already anachronistic at the time, the book is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature. The book has been popular with young readers since its publication and is taken as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn)

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, is a popular 1876 novel about a young boy growing up in the antebellum South on the Mississippi River in the town of St. Petersberg, based on the town of Hannibal, Missouri. The sales of Tom Sawyer were lukewarm at first. It initially sold less than a third as many copies as Twain's Innocents Abroad. By the time of Mark Twain's death, however, Tom Sawyer was both an American classic and a bestseller.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tom_Sawyer)

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The novel explains the tale of Hank Morgan, a 19th-century citizen of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval England at the time of the legendary King Arthur in AD 528. The story itself begins in a first person narrative in Warwick Castle, where a man details his recollection of a tale told to him by a "curious stranger" who is personified as a knight through his simple language and familiarity with ancient armor.

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The Prince and the Pauper is an English language novel by American author Mark Twain. It was first published in 1881 in Canada before its 1882 publication in the United States. The book represents Twain's first attempt at historical fiction. Set in 1547, the novel tells the story of two young boys who are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father in Offal Court, London, and Edward VI of England, son of Henry VIII of England.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_and_the_Pauper)

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The Last of the Mohicans is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in January 1826. It was one of the most popular English-language novels of its time. The Last of the Mohicans is widely read in American literature courses. This second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy is the best known. The Pathfinder, written 14 years later in 1840, is its sequel. Cooper named a principal character Uncas after a real person. Uncas was a Mohegan, not a Mohican, and Cooper's usage has helped to confuse the names of two tribes to the present day. When John Uncas, his last surviving male descendant, died in 1842, the Newark Daily Advertiser wrote "Last of the Mohegans Gone" lamenting the extinction of the tribe. The writer was not aware that Mohegans still existed then, as they do to the present day. The story takes place in 1757 during the Seven Years' War (known in America as the French and Indian War), when France and Great Britain battled for control of the North American colonies. During this war, the French often allied themselves with Native American tribes in order to gain an advantage over the British, with unpredictable and often tragic results.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans)

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The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely studied in colleges and universities across the western world. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into an insect.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis)

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Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce. It is one of the most important works of Modernist literature. Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyssey (e.g., the correspondences between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate June 16 as Bloomsday. Ulysses totals about 265,000 words from a vocabulary of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into 18 "episodes". Since publication, the book attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual "Joyce Wars." Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions—as well as its rich characterisations and broad humour, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel))

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Oliver Twist is the first novel in the English language to centre throughout on a child protagonist and is also notable for Dickens' unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives. The book's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress". An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public's attention to various contemporary evils, including the Poor Law that stated that poor people should work in workhouses/poorhouses, child labour and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of the time by surrounding the novel's serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of his hardships as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. Obviously, Dickens' own early youth—he was vulnerable, and a child laborer—must have also entered.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist)

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The Idiot (Russian: Идиот, Idiot) is a novel written by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and first published in 1868. It was first published serially in Russian in Russky Vestnik, St. Petersburg, 1868-1869.

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The Forsyte Saga is a series of three novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by John Galsworthy. They chronicle the vicissitudes of the leading members of an upper-middle-class British family. Only a few generations removed from their farmer ancestors, the family members are keenly aware of their status as "new money". The main character, Soames Forsyte, sees himself as a "man of property," by virtue of his ability to accumulate material possessions—but this does not succeed in bringing him pleasure.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forsyte_Saga)

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Les Miserables (1862) is a novel by French author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. It follows the lives and interactions of several French characters over a twenty-year period in the early 19th century, starting in 1815, the year of Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. The novel focuses on the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption. It examines the nature of law and grace, and expounds upon the history of France, architecture of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love. The story is historical fiction because it contains factual, historic events, including the Paris Uprising of 1832 (often mistaken for the much earlier French Revolution).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Miserables)

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Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero is a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in 1847-48, satirizing society in early 19th-century England. The book's title comes from John Bunyan's allegorical story The Pilgrim's Progress, first published in 1678 and still widely read at the time of Thackeray's novel. Vanity fair refers to a stop along the pilgrim's progress: a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity, which is meant to represent man's sinful attachment to worldly things. The novel is now considered a classic.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_Fair_(novel))

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The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging. The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered one of the last works of classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It deals with the artistic movement of the decadents, and homosexuality, both of which caused controversy when the book was published. However, in recent times, the book has been regarded as one of the modern classics of Western literature.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray)

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The Hound of the Baskervilles is a crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle wrote this story shortly after returning from South Africa where he had worked as a volunteer physician at the Langman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein. He was assisted with the plot by a 30-year-old Daily Express journalist called Bertram Fletcher Robinson (1870-1907). His ideas came from the legend of Richard Cabell who was the inspiration of the Baskerville legend. Squire Richard Cabell lived during the 1600s and had a passion for hunting and was what in those days described as a 'monstrously evil man'. He gained this reputation for amongst other things immorality and having sold his soul to the Devil. There was also a rumour that he had murdered his wife. On the 5th of July 1677 he died and was laid to rest in 'the sepulchre' but that was only the beginning of the story. The night of his internment saw a phantom pack of hounds come baying across the moor to howl at his tomb. From that night onwards he could be found leading the phantom pack across the moor usually on the anniversary of his death. If the pack were not out hunting they could be found ranging around his grave howling and shrieking. In an attempt to lay the soul to rest the villagers built a large building around the tomb and to be doubly sure a huge slab was placed on top of the grave to stop the ghost of the squire escaping.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_the_Baskervilles)

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his famous detective and illustrated by Sidney Paget. These are the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published as single stories in the Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892. The book was published in England on October 14, 1892 by George Newnes Ltd and in a US Edition on October 15 by Harper. The initial combined print run was 14,500 copies. The book was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 for occultism, although the book shows few to no signs of such material. Later, the embargo was lifted.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Sherlock_Holmes)

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"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the plot follows William Legrand, who was recently bitten by a gold-colored bug, as well as his servant Jupiter and an unnamed narrator. Legrand pulls the other two into an adventure after deciphering a secret message that will lead to a buried treasure. The story is often compared with Poe's "tales of ratiocination" as an early form of detective fiction. Poe became aware of the public's interest in secret writing in 1840 and asked readers to challenge his skills as a code-breaker. Poe took advantage of the popularity of cryptography as he was writing "The Gold-Bug" and the success of the story centers on one such cryptogram. The character of Jupiter has been criticized as racist from a modern perspective especially because he is given an accent in his often-comical dialogue. "The Gold-Bug" was an instant success and was the most popular and most widely-read of Poe's works during his lifetime. It also helped popularize cryptograms and secret writing.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold_Bug)

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"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been claimed as the first detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". C. Auguste Dupin is a man in Paris who solves the mysterious brutal murder of two women. Numerous witnesses heard a suspect, though no one agrees on what language was spoken. At the murder scene, Dupin finds a hair that does not appear to be human. As the first true detective in fiction, the Dupin character established many literary devices which would be used in future fictional detectives including Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Many later characters, for example, follow Poe's model of the brilliant detective, his personal friend who serves as narrator, and the final revelation being presented before the reasoning that leads up to it. Dupin himself reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter".
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murders_in_the_Rue_Morgue)

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he Lost World is a novel released in 1912 by Arthur Conan Doyle concerning an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon basin of South America where prehistoric animals (dinosaurs and other extinct creatures) still survive. The character of Professor Challenger was introduced in this book. The novel also describes a war between Native Americans and a vicious tribe of ape-like creatures.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_World_(Conan_Doyle_novel))

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Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". Traditionally considered a coming of age story, it is an adventure tale known for its superb atmosphere, character and action, and also a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality—as seen in Long John Silver—unusual for children's literature then and now. It is one of the most frequently dramatised of all novels. The influence of Treasure Island on popular perception of pirates is vast, including treasure maps with an "X", schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen with parrots on their shoulders.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island)

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The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells. When the novel was written in the late 19th century, Britain's scientific community was engulfed by debates on animal vivisection. Interest groups were even formed to tackle the issue: the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection was formed two years after the publication of the novel.

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The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H.G. Wells published in 1897. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who theorises that if a person's refractive index is changed to exactly that of air and his body does not absorb or reflect light, then he will be invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but cannot become visible again, becoming mentally unstable as a result.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Man)

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Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula. Dracula has been attributed to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel and invasion literature. Structurally it is an epistolary novel, that is, told as a series of diary entries and letters. Literary critics have examined many themes in the novel, such as the role of women in Victorian culture, conventional and conservative sexuality, immigration, colonialism, postcolonialism and folklore. Although Stoker did not invent the vampire, the novel's influence on the popularity of vampires has been singularly responsible for many theatrical, film and television interpretations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula)

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The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible conceived in 1604 and brought to fruition in 1611 by the Church of England. Printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, the first edition included schedules unique to the Church of England; for example, a lectionary for morning and evening prayer. This was the third such official translation into English; the first having been the Great Bible commissioned by the Church of England in the reign of King Henry VIII, and the second having been the Bishop's Bible of 1568. In January 1604, King James I of England convened the Hampton Court Conference where a new English version was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church of England. The king gave the translators instructions designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy. The translation was by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from the Textus Receptus (Received Text) series of the Greek texts. The Old Testament was translated from the Masoretic Hebrew text, while the Apocrypha were translated from the Greek Septuagint (LXX), except for 2 Esdras, which was translated from the Latin Vulgate.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorized_King_James_Version)

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The Constitution of the United States of America is the supreme law of the United States. It is the foundation and source of the legal authority underlying the existence of the United States of America and the Federal Government of the United States. It provides the framework for the organization of the United States Government. The document defines the three main branches of the government: The legislative branch with a bicameral Congress, an executive branch led by the President, and a judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court. Besides providing for the organization of these branches, the Constitution outlines obligations of each office, as well as provides what powers each branch may exercise. It also reserves numerous rights for the individual states, thereby establishing the United States' federal system of government. It is the shortest and oldest written constitution of any major sovereign state.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution)

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