Originally curated by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot as a complete liberal education in fifty volumes, the Harvard Classics gathers philosophy, science, literature, and history into a single indispensable library. Plato's dialogues and Marcus Aurelius's meditations sit alongside Dante's Divine Comedy, Francis Bacon's essays, Charles Darwin's scientific writing, and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, tracing the foundations of Western thought from ancient Greece to the modern age. Homer...

The second volume in this essential library gathers James Joyce's modernist vision, Mark Twain's American wit, Jules Verne's boundless imagination, Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure and suspense, Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic brilliance, and Bram Stoker's gothic terror alongside voices from Tolstoy to Tagore, Stendhal to Sienkiewicz. Ranging from French Enlightenment fiction to Victorian sensation novels, Russian realism to early global literature, this collection widens the canon begun in V...

If you were looking for the definitive Christmas anthology, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it! This book is everything you want Christmas to be — loving, warm and celebratory. Timeless and adorable, beautifully designed, "The Big Book of Christmas" is a great big stocky book — stuffed with novels, novellas, short stories, poems, carols and songs. Inside you'll find: · Novels, novellas and short stories from Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Andersen, O. He...

Becky Sharp leaves school by throwing the dictionary out of the carriage window, and proceeds to climb through a society that deserves her. Thackeray subtitled it a novel without a hero and meant it: the good are dull, the charming are ruinous, and Waterloo is fought in a single sentence offstage while the wives wait in Brussels. He drew the original illustrations himself.

Twelve months in the life of Bob Stubbs, a swindler with no talent for it, told by himself: the boots he never paid for at school follow him through the militia, a courtship, a debtor's prison and back. Thackeray wrote it for a comic annual, one chapter to a month, and it is the earliest sight of the voice he would use in Barry Lyndon — a scoundrel who thinks he is the injured party.

An Irish adventurer tells the story of his own life — duels, cards, the Seven Years' War, and a marriage to a rich widow — and is a liar in every sentence. Thackeray lost his own inheritance at the tables and wrote this before Vanity Fair, letting the scoundrel narrate himself into the ground. Kubrick filmed it, slowly and beautifully, and only made the cruelty clearer.

Becky Sharp leaves school by throwing the dictionary out of the carriage window and climbs, by charm and calculation, through a society that deserves her. Amelia Sedley is loyal past all sense. Thackeray called it a novel without a hero and meant it: the gaze is colder than Dickens's and considerably more adult. The Gilded Library volume carries full-page plates — ballrooms, the Waterloo encampment, society drawing rooms — and takes its decoration from the domino mask, the fan, the playing...

Arguably one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens is the author of such literary masterpieces as A Tale of Two Cities (1859), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), and The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1839), among many others. Dickens s indelible characters and timeless stories continue to resonate with readers around the world more than 130 years after his death. Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870.

“Very likely Miss Binny was right to a great extent. It is the pretty face which creates sympathy in the hearts of men, those wicked rogues. A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face.”Blonde, beautiful, and penniless Becky Sharpe will do whatever it takes to secure her position in life. Staying in London with naive but kind-hearted Amelia Sedley, the conniving Becky fails to entice Amelia’s wealthy brother and instea...

"Vanity Fair" is a social satire that offers a panoramic view of English society during the early 19th century. The novel follows the lives of two main characters, Rebecca "Becky" Sharp and Amelia Sedley, as they navigate through a world shaped by vanity, ambition, and social stratification.Rebecca Sharp, a resourceful and cunning young woman from a poor background, is determined to rise in society and achieve wealth and status. Amelia Sedley, on the other hand, comes from a wealthy family...

Compiled in one book, the essential collection of books by William Makepeace Thackeray:The Tremendous Adventures of Major GahaganBarry LyndonThe Bedford-Row ConspiracyThe Book of SnobsBurlesquesCatherine: A StoryThe Christmas BooksThe Fatal BootsThe Fitz-Boodle PapersNotes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand CairoGeorge CruikshankThe History of Henry Esmond, Esq.The History of PendennisThe Hi...

“I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century.Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit,...