Signet Classics | ||
---|---|---|
![]() | ![]() | [ 0001 ] Constant, Benjamin. Adolphe and the Red Notebook. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. 0451500016. Translated From The French By Carl Wildman & Norman Cameron. Introduction By Harold Nicolson. The Very First Signet Classic. 160 pages. paperback. CD1. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In these two remarkable works, a brilliant, vain, long-suffering Frenchman describes the first twenty years of his life and their culmination in a tortured love affair with an older, possessive woman of the world. Benjamin Constant attempted to conceal the fact that these two books were autobiographical. But to his familiars, it was clear that he himself was Adolphe. And in the intimate account of his strange liaison with EllEnore, he may well have been protesting against his inexorable bondage to his fiery, demanding mistress, Madame de Staël. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a champion of liberalism and the author of the History of Religion. But posterity remembers him as the man who bared the anatomy of a destructive passion in the story of Adolphe. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (25 October 1767 - 8 December 1830), or simply Benjamin Constant, was a Swiss-French politician and writer on politics and religion. He was the author of a partly biographical psychological novel, Adolphe. He was a fervent liberal of the early 19th century who influenced the Trienio Liberal movement in Spain, the Liberal Revolution of 1820 in Portugal, the Greek War of Independence, the November Uprising in Poland, the Belgian Revolution, and Liberalism in Brazil and Mexico. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0002 ] Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. Afterword by George P. Elliott. 224 pages. paperback. CD2. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Here is a light-hearted excursion into boyhood, a nostalgic return to the simple, rural Missouri world of Tom Sawyer and his friends Huck Finn, Becky and Aunt Pofly. It is a dreamlike world of summertime and hooky, pranks and punishments, villains and desperate adventure, seen through the eyes of a boy who might have been the young Mark Twain himself. There is sheer delight in Tom Sawyer-even at the darkest moments affection and wit permeate its pages. For adults it recreates the vanished dreams of youth. For younger readers it unveils the boundaries of tantalizing horizons to still to come. And for everyone else it reveals the mind and heart of one of America's greatly loved writers. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0003 ] Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. 0451500032. Introduction By C.M. Woodhouse. 128 pages. paperback. CD3. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This remarkable book has been described in many ways - as a masterpiece. a fairy story. a brilliant satire. a frightening view of the future. A devastating attack on the pig - headed, gluttonous and avaricious rulers in an imaginary totalitarian state, it illuminates the range of human experience from love to hate, from comedy to tragedy. 'A wise, compassionate and illuminating fable for our time. The steadiness and lucidity of Orwell's wit are reminiscent of Anatole France and even of Swift.' - NEW YORK TIMES. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0004 ] Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness & the Secret Sharer. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451500040. Introduction By Albert J. Guerard. 160 pages. paperback. CD4. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The dark places of the human soul - this is the region that Joseph Conrad so brilliantly explores. In the steaming jungles of the Congo or the vast reaches of the sea, it is man's capacity for good and for evil that is his enduring theme. Heart of Darkness tells of a powerful European, Kurtz, who reverts to awful savagery in an isolated native trading post. The Secret Sharer describes the terrible conflict of a young captain who is torn between his duty to his ship and his loyalty to a young officer with whom he identifies himself after the murder of a mutinous crew member. Compelling, vivid, exotic, suspenseful, these are among the half - dozen greatest short novels in the English language. 'To make you hear, to make you feel, above all to make you see' - this was first and last, the aim of Conrad. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, J. G. Ballard, John le CarrE, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0005 ] Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. 0451500059. Afterword By George P. Elliott. 288 pages. paperback. CD5. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - He has no mother, his father is a brutal drunkard, and he sleeps in a hogshead. He's Huck Finn, a homeless waif, a liar and thief on occasion and a casual rebel against respectability. But on the day that he encounters another fugitive from trouble, a runaway slave named Jim, he also finds for the first time in his life love, acceptance and a sense of responsibility. And it is in the exciting and moving story of these two outcasts fleeing down the Mississippi on a raft, that a wonderful metamorphosis occurs. The boy nobody wants becomes a human being with a sense of his own destiny and the courage to choose between violating the code of the conventional and betraying the person who needs him most. Rich in color, humor and the adventurous frontier experience of the Mississippi, this great novel vividly recreates the world, the people and the language that Mark Twain knew and loved from his own years on the riverboats. 'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.' - Ernest Hemingway. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0006 ] Stevenson, Robert Louis. Kidnapped. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500067. Afterword By Gerard Previn Meyer. 239 pages. paperback. CD6. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This glorious passport to romance and high adventure has delighted generations of readers. It is the story of young David Balfour, an orphan, whose miserly old uncle cheats him out of his inheritance and schemes to have him kidnapped, shanghaied, and sold into slavery. But justice triumphs - after a spirited odyssey which includes a shipwreck, a hazardous journey across Scotland with a dare - devil companion, intrigues, narrow escapes and desperate fighting. Rich in action and characterization, this exhilarating novel was considered by Stevenson to be his finest work of fiction. Henry James called Kidnapped, 'Stevenson's best book.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850 and became one of the world's most popular writers. He was novelist, essayist, and poet - master of a widely acclaimed style. His special literary talent has given his classic stories of adventure (TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and DAVID BALFOUR, among others) a lasting place in the annals of English literature. Equally enduring are his compelling story of THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE and his collection of poems for children, A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0007 ] Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. 0451500075. Afterword By Horace Gregory. 415 pages. paperback. CD7. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The rural tranquillity of the heather - covered English countryside is the setting for this moving novel of conflicting aspirations and tragic destiny. Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to the village of his birth, idealistically inspired to improve the life of the men and women of Egdon Heath. But his plans are upset when he falls in love 'with a passionately beautiful, darkly discontented girl, Eustacia Vye, who longs to escape from her provincial surroundings. Their stormy marriage explodes in a violent tragedy which eventually frees Yeobright to pursue his dream of service. A book of classic dimension and heroic design, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE is the forerunner of the twentieth - century psychological novel - poetic, compassionate, vivid in its associations, universal in its meanings. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Hardy (June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin. Most of his fictional works - initially published as serials in magazines - were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. As T. S. Eliot put it, 'The work of Thomas Hardy represents. a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs. at times his style touches sublimity.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0008 ] Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. 0451500083. Foreword By Leo Marx. 259 pages. paperback. CD8. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - An ardent young woman, her cowardly lover and her aging, vengeful husband - these are the central characters in this stark drama of the conflict between passion and convention in the harsh, Puritan world of seventeenth - century Boston. Tremendously moving, rich in psychological insight, this tragic novel of shame and redemption reveals Hawthorne's concern with the New England past and its influence on American attitudes. From his dramatic illumination of the struggles between mind and heart, dogma and self - reliance, he fashioned one of the masterpieces of fiction. 'The one American literary work which comes as near to perfection as is granted a man to bring his achievements.' - Arnold Bennett. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a ‘w' to make his name ‘Hawthorne' in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0009 ] Faulkner, William. Unvanquished. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. 0451500091. Foreword By Carvel Collins. 192 pages. paperback. CD9. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Set against the backdrop of the chaos of the Civil War, this is the magnificent story of the proud Sartoris family, who lived with violence in order to survive. But it is particularly the account of how young Bayard Sartoris, well tutored in killing, found the wisdom to decide that there had been enough bloodshed, and the courage to face the enemy alone - and unarmed. This is one of the most powerful works of America's Nobel Prize - winning author, one which lends insight into his other books and illuminates Faulkner's credo: 'Man is tough. Nothing - war, grief, hopelessness, despair - can last as long as man himself can last; man himself will prevail over all his anguishes, provided he will make the effort to stand erect on his own feet by believing in hope and in his own toughness and endurance.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962), also known as Will Faulkner, was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of written media, including novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life, and Holly Springs/Marshall County. Faulkner is one of the most important writers in both American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0010 ] Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York. 1959. Signet/New American Library. 0451500105. Foreword By Geoffrey Moore. 320 pages. paperback. CD10. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - There are few more convincing, less sentimental accounts of passionate love than Wuthering Heights. This is the story of a savage, tormented foundling, Heathcliff, who falls wildly in love with Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of his benefactor, and the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other. A book of immense power and strength, it is filled with the raw beauty of the moors and an uncanny understanding of the terrible truths about men and women - an understanding made even more extraordinary by the fact that it came from the heart of a frail, inexperienced girl who lived out her lonely life in the moorland wildness and died a year after this great novel was published. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emily Jane Brontë (30 July 1818 - 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her solitary novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0011 ] Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500113. Afterword By Arthur Zeiger. paperback. CD11. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A novel of intense power and intrigue, JANE EYRE has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman's quest for freedom. Having grown up an orphan in the home of her cruel aunt and at a harsh charity school, Jane Eyre becomes an independent and spirited survivor-qualities that serve her well as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him whatever the consequences or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving her beloved? AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charlotte Brontë (21 April 1816 - 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0012 ] James, Henry. The Ambassadors. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500121. Afterword By R.W. Stallman. 384 pages. paperback. CD12. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Henry James considered this book to be his most perfect work of art. The ambassadors of the title are the emissaries sent by Mrs. Newsome, a wealthy New England widow, to restore to the home town and the family business her son Chad who has lingered too long in Paris, reputedly detained by a sordid liaison. Lambert Strether, the first of the envoys and the novel's strait - laced hero, embarks on the mission only to find himself caught up in a romantic intrigue, the outcome of which will radically change the direction and purpose of his life. Since its publication in 1903, The Ambassadors has come to be regarded as a masterpiece of American fiction because of its remarkable technical structure, its profound moral significance, and its perceptive contrast of New World conscience and Old World culture. This Signet Classic edition of The Ambassadors reproduces the 1903 Methuen text, which is the only one Henry James ever saw through the press. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0013 ] Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 045150013x. Translated From The Russian By Aylmer Maude.Afterword By David Magarshack. 304 pages. paperback. CD13. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes the stories: FAMILY HAPPINESS, THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH, THE KREUTZER SONATA,& MASTER AND MAN. Combining detailed physical description with perceptive psychological insight, Leo Tolstoy realistically sweeps aside the sham of surface appearances to lay bare man's intimate gestures, acts, and thoughts. Murder and sacrifice. greed and devotion. lust and affection. vanity and love - one by one, in this volume of great stories, Tolstoy dissects the basic drives, emotions and motives of average people searching for self - knowledge and spiritual perfection. Chekhov said, 'Of authors my favorite is Tolstoy.' And Turgenev 'marveled at the strength of his huge talent. It sends a cold shudder even down my back, though you know my back has become thick and coarse. He is a master, a master.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0014 ] Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500148. Foreword By Marcus Cunliffe. 320 pages. paperback. CD14. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is Jonathan Swift's bitter and devastating satire, the fantastic tale of the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, an honest, blunt English ship's surgeon. His first voyage is to the land of Lilliput, where the people are only six inches high. His second, by contrast, to the land of Brobdingnag where the people are sixty feet high. Further adventures bring Gulliver to an island that floats in the sky and to a land where horses are endowed with reason and beasts are shaped like men. A book that has the rare merit of appealing to both the very mature and the very young, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is a brilliant narrative - realistic, profound, terrible; a fascinating fairy tale of marvelous travels; a model of English style and masterly prose. Thirty illustrations by Charles Brock, and Five Maps of Gulliver's Journeys. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 - 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms - such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, MB Drapier - or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0015 ] Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451500156. Afterword By Edgar Johnson. 378 pages. paperback. CD15. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The storming of the Bastille the death carts with their doomed human cargo. the swift drop of the guillotine blade - this is the French Revolution that Charles Dickens vividly captures in his famous work, A Tale of Two Cities. With dramatic eloquence, he brings to life a time of terror and treason, a starving people rising in frenzy and hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent regime. With insight and compassion, he casts his novel of unforgettable scenes with unforgettable characters: the sinister Madame Defarge, knitting her patterns of death; the gentle Lucie Manette, unswerving in her devotion to her broken father; the heroic Sydney Carton, who gives his life for the love of a girl who would never be his. '[Dickens is] a genius born once in a hundred years.' - Leo Tolstoy. it renders the red phantasmagoria of revolution rushing past in hideous pageant, the terror and horror of helpless suffering and sacrifice, the grandeur of renunciation. Dickens's revolutionary vision is creative not destructive. It transcends anger and rebellion in hope. and love !' - Edgar Johnson. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0016 ] Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500164. Foreword By R.W. Stallman. 224 pages. paperback. CD16. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A pioneer in the realistic school of American fiction, and a forerunner of Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane probed the thoughts and actions of trapped or baited men fighting the destructive forces in nature, in other human beings, and in themselves. Here published complete from the original manuscripts is Crane's masterpiece, one of the great war novels of all time - The Red Badge of Courage. together with four of his best - known short stories. Outstanding for their psychological portrayal of violent emotions keyed in quiet tension, they reveal the insight and narrative skill of 'one of the clearest cases of genius in American fiction.' - Carl Van Doren. Includes - THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, and The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, The Upturned Face, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 - June 5, 1900) was an American author. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation. The eighth surviving child of Methodist Protestant parents, Crane began writing at the age of four and had published several articles by the age of 16. Having little interest in university studies, he left school in 1891 to work as a reporter and writer. Crane's first novel was the 1893 Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, generally considered by critics to be the first work of American literary Naturalism. He won international acclaim in 1895 for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without any battle experience. In 1896, Crane endured a highly publicized scandal after appearing as a witness in the trial of a suspected prostitute, an acquaintance named Dora Clark. Late that year he accepted an offer to travel to Cuba as a war correspondent. As he waited in Jacksonville, Florida, for passage, he met Cora Taylor, the madam of a brothel, with whom he began a lasting relationship. En route to Cuba, Crane's ship sank off the coast of Florida, leaving him and others adrift for several days in a dinghy. Crane described the ordeal in ‘The Open Boat‘. During the final years of his life, he covered conflicts in Greece and lived in England with Cora, where he befriended writers such as Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Plagued by financial difficulties and ill health, Crane died of tuberculosis in a Black Forest sanatorium at the age of 28. At the time of his death, Crane was considered an important figure in American literature. After he was nearly forgotten for two decades, critics revived interest in his life and work. Crane's writing is characterized by vivid intensity, distinctive dialects, and irony. Common themes involve fear, spiritual crises and social isolation. Although recognized primarily for The Red Badge of Courage, which has become an American classic, Crane is also known for his poetry, journalism, and short stories such as ‘The Open Boat', ‘The Blue Hotel‘, ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky‘, and The Monster. His writing made a deep impression on 20th-century writers, most prominent among them Ernest Hemingway, and is thought to have inspired the Modernists and the Imagists. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0017 ] Jimenez, Juan Ramon. Platero and I. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500172. Translated From The Spanish By William H. and Mary M. Roberts. Introduction By William H. Roberts. 128 pages. paperback. CD17. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - He's the children's playmate, the gray goat's companion, and the poet's cherished friend. Small and downy soft, the donkey named Platero romps through the pages of a book that has captured the hearts of readers everywhere. Written by Juan Ramon JimEnez, the 1956 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Platero and I has been translated into the main languages of Western Europe as well as Hebrew and Basque. Like the great Spanish classic Don Quixote, it has found favor with the young, who delight in the adventures of the merry little donkey and the sad poet, and with their elders, who look beyond the narrative to see what the writer has to say about man and his world. Drawings by Baltasar Lobo. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Ramon JimEnez Mantecon (24 December 1881 - 29 May 1958) was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. One of JimEnez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the French concept of ‘pure poetry.' JimEnez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in Andalucia, on 24 December 1881. He studied law at the University of Seville, but he declined to put this training to use. He published his first two books at the age of eighteen, in 1900. The death of his father the same year devastated him, and a resulting depression led to his being sent first to France, where he had an affair with his doctor's wife, and then to a sanatorium in Madrid staffed by novitiate nuns, where he lived from 1901 to 1903. In 1911 and 1912, he wrote many erotic poems depicting romps with numerous females in numerous locales. Some of them alluded to sex with novitiates who were nurses. Eventually, apparently, their mother superior discovered the activity and expelled him, although it will probably never be known for certain whether the depictions of sex with novitiates were truth or fantasy. The main subjects of many of his other poems were music and color, which, at times, he compared to love or lust. He celebrated his home region in his prose poem about a writer and his donkey called Platero y Yo (1914). In 1916 he and Zenobia got married in the United States. Zenobia became his indispensable companion and collaborator. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he and Zenobia went into exile in Cuba, the United States, and Puerto Rico, where he settled in 1946. JimEnez was hospitalized for eight months due to another deep depression. He later became a Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. The university later named a building on campus and a living-and-learning writing program in his honor. He was also a professor at the University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Florida. While living in Coral Gables he wrote: ‘Romances de Coral Gables'. In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature; three days later, his wife died of ovarian cancer. JimEnez never got over this loss, and he died two years afterwards, on 29 May 1958, in the same clinic where his wife had died. Both of them are buried in Spain. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0018 ] Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451500180. Afterword By Elizabeth Bowen.Includes The Original Illustrations. 224 pages. paperback. CD18. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Spanning three and a half centuries of boisterous, exuberant adventure in England, in Constantinople, with aristocrats and gypsies - first as a man and then as a woman - Orlando's story is a wild farce, a humorous history, a gay romance filled with the delightful experiences of one of the most fascinating and fantastic characters ever to rule the realm of fiction. David Daiches said: 'Virginia Woolf can afford to rest her claims on her novels, which show her to be one of the half - dozen novelists of the present century whom the world will not easily let die.' Rebecca West called Orlando 'a poetic masterpiece of the first rank' and Elizabeth Bowen found it 'one of the most high spirited books I know. a book for those who are young in a big way.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adeline Virginia Woolf (nEe Stephen; 25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.' Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0019 ] Shaw, George Bernard. Plays. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500199. Foreword By Eric Bentley. 447 pages. paperback. CD19. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, & Man and Superman. George Bernard Shaw demanded truth and despised convention. He punctured hollow pretensions and smug prudishness - sugar - coating his criticism with ingenious and irreverent wit. In Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, and Man and Superman, the great playwright satirizes accepted attitudes toward: woman's place in society, military heroism, marriage, the pursuit of man by woman. From a social, literary, and theatrical standpoint, these four plays are among the foremost dramas of the ages - as, intellectually stimulating as they are thoroughly enjoyable. 'My way of joking is to tell the truth: it is the funniest joke in the world.' - G. B. Shaw. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Shaw, George Bernard. (Born July 26, 1856 ). .. George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 - 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Issues which engaged Shaw's attention included education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege. He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council. In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively. Shaw turned down all other awards and honours, including the offer of a knighthood. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0020 ] London, Jack. The Call of the Wild and Selected Stories. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500202. Foreword By Franklin Walker. 176 pages. paperback. CD20. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: THE CALL OF THE WILD, and Diable - A Dog; An Odyssey of the North; To the Man on Trail; To Build a Fire; Love of Life. Out of the white wilderness, out of the Far North, Jack London, one of America's most popular authors, drew the inspiration for his robust tales of perilous adventure and animal cunning. Swiftly paced, vividly written, the six stories included here deal with the main theme of London's work - the law of the club and the fang, man's instinctive reversal to primitive behavior when pitted against the brute force of nature. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Griffith ‘Jack' London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories ‘To Build a Fire‘, ‘An Odyssey of the North', and ‘Love of Life'. London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposE The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0021 ] Eliot, George. Silas Marner. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500210. Afterword By Walter Allen. 190 pages. paperback. CD21. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Wrongly accused of a heinous theft that had been committed by his best friend, the gentle linen weaver, Silas Marner, goes into exile to become a miserly recluse. In the rustic village of Raveloe he finds redemption and spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love for an abandoned child who appears mysteriously one day in his isolated cottage. A classic beloved by every generation, George Eliot's heartwarming novel of a miser and a little child combines the charm of a fairy tale with the humor and pathos of realistic fiction. Silas Marner is a tale rich in the understanding of human nature. and a vivid revelation of the undercurrents of sheltered rural life - suspicion of the outsider, hatred of the unfamiliar. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0022 ] Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500229. Foreword by Horace Gregory. Original Illustrations by John Tenniel. 238 pages. paperback. CD22. Cover: John Tenniel. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A very real little girl named Alice follows a remarkable rabbit down a rabbit hole and steps through a looking - glass to come face to face with some of the strangest adventures and some of the oddest characters in all literature. The crusty Duchess, the Mad Hatter, the weeping Mock Turtle, the diabolical Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire - Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee - each one is more eccentric, and more entertaining, than the last. And all of them could only have come from the pen of Lewis Carroll, one of the few adults ever to enter successfully the children's world of make - believe - a wonderland where the impossible becomes possible, the unreal, real. where the heights of adventure are limited only by the depths of imagination. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 - 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems ‘The Hunting of the Snark‘ and ‘Jabberwocky‘, all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies in many parts of the world (including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand) dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0023 ] Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500237. Introduction By Gay Wilson Allen. 431 pages. paperback. CT23. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - These are the incomparable poems of one of America's greatest poets - an exuberant, passionate man who loved his country and wrote of it as no other has ever done. Singer, thinker, visionary and citizen extraordinary, this was Walt Whitman. Thoreau called Whitman 'probably the greatest democrat that ever lived' and Emerson judged Leaves of Grass as 'the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.' The text of this Signet Classic edition of Leaves of Grass is that of the 'Death - Bed' or ninth edition, which was published in 1892. The content and grouping of poems is that authorized by the poet for the final and complete edition of his masterpiece. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter ‘Walt' Whitman (May 31, 1819 - March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and - in addition to publishing his poetry - was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle. Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men. Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0024 ] Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500245. Foreword By J.H. Plumb. 240 pages. paperback. CD24. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Bring out your dead! The ceaseless chant of doom echoed through a city of emptied streets and filled grave pits. For this was London in the year 1665, the Year of the Great Plague. In 1721, when the Black Death again threatened the European Continent, Daniel Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague rear to alert an indifferent populace to the horror that was almost upon them. Through the eyes of a saddler who had chosen to remain while multitudes fled, the master realist vividly depicted a plague - stricken city. He re - enacted the terror of a helpless people caught in a tragedy they could not comprehend: the weak preying on the dying, the strong administering to the sick, the sinful orgies of the cynical, the quiet faith of the pious With dramatic insight he captured for all time the death throes of a great city. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660 to 24 April 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain, and, along with others such as Richardson, is among the founders of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0025 ] Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Ox-Bow Incident. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500253. Afterword By Walter Prescott Webb. 224 pages. paperback. CD25. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This is a searing study of mob justice. The story takes place in the Old West, but it could happen anywhere, anytime that men of action let their anger goad them into taking the law into their own hands. Published in 1940, this powerful narrative was immediately hailed as a work of art. 'The Ox - Bow Incident is a triumph of restraint and workmanship. The tenseness that builds and eddies and comes back stronger is beautifully geared to the temper of each central character and the shifting emotions of the mob, as doubt, anger, stubbornness, physical cold, pity and revulsion hold them in turn,' said Max Gissen in the New Republic. Ben Ray Redman described it in The Saturday Review as 'A sinewy, masculine tale that progressively tightens its grip on the reader.' And Clifton Fadiman summed up the verdict of all the critics when he called this modern classic 'a masterpiece.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (August 3, 1909 - November 10, 1971) was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels and short stories. As a writer, he taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0026 ] Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000-1887. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500261. Foreword By Erich Fromm. 222 pages. paperback. CD26. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The hero is anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life. The time is tomorrow. The place is a Utopian America. This is the backdrop for Edward Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty - first century - from a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty. Translated into more than twenty languages, and the most widely read novel of its time, Looking Backward is more than a brilliant visionary's view of the future. It is a blueprint of the 'perfect society,' a guidebook that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age. John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks, in separate surveys conducted in 1935, listed Edward Bellamy's novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 - May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle-like tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of over 160 ‘Nationalist Clubs‘ dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0027 ] Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 045150027x. Afterword By J. Sherwood Weber. 384 pages. paperback. CD27. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This devastating indictment of Victorian values presents an ironic and incisive portrait, of a determined, young man in revolt against father, religion, society, self. In describing Ernest Pontifex's flight to freedom, Samuel Butler illustrated the emotional and intellectual experiences of every artist who educates himself through trial and error. He created a novel that was to inspire, in spirit and form, the works of such writers as Somerset Maugham, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe. George Bernard Shaw was deeply influenced by Butler's ideas on religion and money. In his preface to Major Barbara, Shaw recorded this debt and called Butler 'a man of genius' who was 'in his own department, the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Butler (4 or 5 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0028 ] Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500288. Foreword by F.R. Leavis. 448 pages. paperback. CT28. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Set in a small South American state, a twilight country of shadowy sierra and misty campo, this is Joseph Conrad's magnificent story of revolution, deception, and self - betrayal. The theme is the struggle of man fighting his greatest enemy - himself. The agent of destruction is stolen silver. With inexorable insight the master storyteller shows how the fates of Gould, the empire builder; Nostromo, the incorruptible and vain man of the people; Decoud, the voice of skeptical intelligence; Dr. Monygham, the outcast, are mirrored in the shining treasure that haunts their hearts and challenges their honor. This dramatic tale of high adventure is considered by many to be Conrad's masterpiece. F. R. Leavis writes in his Foreword, 'Conrad, I think, was right in regarding it as his greatest creation, and it seems to me one of the world's great novels.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, J. G. Ballard, John le CarrE, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0029 ] Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500296. Afterword By R.P. Blackmur. 383 pages. paperback. CD29. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This Signet Classic collection of Edgar Allan Poe's macabre stories of men caught in the clutch of mysterious or supernatural forces, moving irrevocably toward imminent destruction, includes: Fourteen tales of terror, imagination, and suspense - - THE BALLOON - HOAX, MS FOUND IN A BOTTLE, A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM, THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, THE PURLOINED LETTER, THE BLACK CAT, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO, THE ASSIGNATION, THE TELL - TALE HEART, DIDDLING, THE MAN THAT WAS USED UP, and Poe's only full - length novel, NARRATIVE OF A. GORDON PYM, herewith making its first appearance in a paperback selection of the celebrated author's work. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to ‘a Bostonian'. Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845 Poe published his poem ‘The Raven‘ to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years after its publication. He began planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0030 ] Smollett, Tobias. Humphry Clinker. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 045150030x. Foreword By Monroe Engel. 350 pages. paperback. CD30. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - With the sharp sensitivity of 'a man without skin' Tobias Smollett humorously attacked the frivolity and foibles of eighteenth - century England. Humphry Clinker is his mirthful tale of a tour by coach and four through cities and countryside. Five people embark on the journey: the crusty eccentric, Squire Bramble; his husband - hunting sister, Tabitha; her maid, Winifred; and Bramble's youthful niece and nephew,. Lydia and Jery. En route they are joined by Humphry Clinker, an honest Wiltshire lad of tattered cloth and empty purse. As misadventure follows misadventure, each character reveals his true self by giving his own conflicting view of the incidents, places, and people encountered along the way. The result is an entertaining and realistic picture of that wonderful age when gentlemen duelled, ladies swooned, and servants rose from rags to riches. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 - 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), which influenced later novelists such as Charles Dickens. George Orwell admired Smollett very much. His novels were amended liberally by printers; a definitive edition of each of his works was edited by Dr. O. M. Brack, Jr. to correct variants. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0031 ] Cather, Willa. The Troll Garden. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500318. Afterword By Katherine Anne Porter. 152 pages. paperback. CD31. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes - FLAVIA AND HER ARTISTS, THE SCULPTOR'S FUNERAL, THE GARDEN LODGE, 'A DEATH IN THE DESERT', THE MARRIAGE OF PHAEDRA, A WAGNER MATINEE, and PAUL'S CASE. In the stories that comprise THE TROLL GARDEN, her first book, Willa Cather evokes the devastated, romantic dreams that haunt her characters. Artists, inveterate sentimentalists, hungering beauties, and demon - ridden ascetics find themselves torn between the need to confess and keep secret their private aspirations. Involved with the hope that destroys the spirit, their lives reflect both the impoverished materialism and the deadly idealism of the Plains country, of the fashionable East, and of London at the turn of the century. 'She is exactly at the center of her own mystery, where she belongs. For certainly here is a genius who simply will not cater to our tastes for drama, who refuses to play the role in any way we have been accustomed to seeing it played.' - Katherine Anne Porter. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0032 ] Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500326. Afterword By Perry Miller. 255 pages. paperback. CD32. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A sturdy individualist and a lover of nature, Henry David Thoreau was typical of his time and place - an epitome of the Yankee spirit. In March, 1845, he set out to live life in a new way. Borrowing an ax, he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived until September, 1847. Walden is a record of that experiment in simple living. In this fascinating work Thoreau describes his Robinson Crusoe existence, bare creature comforts but rich in contemplation of the wonders of nature and the ways of man. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience is Thoreau's classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty. One of the most famous essays ever written, it came to the attention of Gandhi and formed the basis for his passive resistance movement. 'No truer American existed than Thoreau.' - Emerson Also included in this Signet Classics edition is a representative selection of Thoreau's poetry. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and ‘Yankee' love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau is sometimes cited as an anarchist, and though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government - 'I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government' - the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: ‘'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.' Richard Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity, noting that Thoreau's ‘sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0033 ] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500334. Translated From The Russian By Constance Garnett.Edited & With A Foreword By Manuel Komroff. 701 pages. paperback. CT33. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV - Dostoyevsky's passionate concern for people and his intense desire to grasp the meaning of life led him to explore the secret depths of man's struggles and sins. Noiction or thought was ever too corrupt or too inhuman for his understanding. The Brothers Karamazov was his last and greatest work. This extraordinary novel tells the dramatic story of four brothers - Dmitri, pleasure - seeking, impatient, unruly. Ivan, brilliant and morose. Alyosha, gentle, loving, honest. , and the illegitimate Smerdyakov, sly, silent, cruel. Driven by intense passion, they become involved in the brutal murder of their own father, one of the most loathsome characters in all literature. 'Dostoyevsky paints like Rembrandt, and his portraits are artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe that Dostoyevsky would stilt be the greatest of all novelists.' - AndrE Gide. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. VICTOR TERRAS is a professor of Slavic languages and chairman of the Department of Slavic languages at Brown University. He has also taught at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. Among his many publications as THE YOUNG DOSTOEVSKY, and translations of Dostoevsky's Notebooks for THE POSSESSED and A RAW YOUTH. EDWARD WASIOLEK is chairman of the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, and Avalon Foundation Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He edited and translated Dostoevsky's Notebooks for CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and edited the Notebooks for THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED, and A RAW YOUTH. He is the author of DOSTOEVSKY: THE MAJOR FICTION, coauthor of NINE SOVIET PORTRAITS, and author or editor of numerous other works. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0034 ] Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451500342. Newly Translated From The Russian & With A Foreword By David Magarshack. 808 pages. paperback. CQ34. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Tolstoy's genius - for viewing social classes in the largest possible context and for sketching the subtlest human gestures becomes most evident in Anna Karenina. To this novel he brought his troubling conviction that at his moments of most intense experience Man is closest to Death. This is the double drama of Anna and of Levin. Sensual, rebellious, Anna renounces respectable marriage and fine position for a passionate involvement which offers a taste of freedom and a trap for destruction. Levin, an eccentric and melancholy young nobleman, surrenders his individuality to live as a peasant. Applauded as the greatest novel of modern social realism, Anna Karenina contains the nucleus of Tolstoy's program for nonviolence and abstention from worldly riches - a program based on a personal interpretation of the Gospels that made him one of the, world's most venerated teachers. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0035 ] Voltaire. Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500350. Newly Translated From The French & With An Introduction By Donald M. Frame. 352 pages. paperback. CD35. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The savage contempt with which Voltaire derided the bureaucracies of his day and his gift for creating exotic panoramas find their perfect merger in these satirical stories. With ruthless wit the master of social commentary dissects science and spiritual faith, ethics and legal systems, love and human vanity. Includes: CANDIDE, ZADIG, MICROMEGAS, THE WORLD AS IT IS, MEMNON, BABABEC AND THE FAKIRS, HISTORY OF SCARMENTADO'S TRAVELS, PLATO'S DREAM, ACCOUNT OF THE SICKNESS, CONFESSION, DEATH, AND APPARITION OF THE JESUIT BERTHIER, STORY OF A GOOD BRAHMAN, JEANNOT AND COHN, AN INDIAN ADVENTURE, INGENUOUS, THE ONE - EYED PORTER, MEMORY'S ADVENTURE, COUNT CHESTERFIELD'S EARS AND CHAPLAIN GOUDMAN. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 - 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0036 ] Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500369. Foreword By Robert P. Downs. 351 pages. paperback. CD36. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In some of the most harrowing scenes ever written in modern literature, Upton Sinclair vividly depicts factory life in Chicago in the first years of the twentieth century. The horrors of the slaughter houses, their barbarous working conditions. the crushing poverty, the disease, the depravity, the despair - he reveals all through the eyes of Jurgis Rudkus, a young immigrant who has come to the New World to build a home for himself, his fiancEe, and her family. Published in 1906, THE JUNGLE aroused the indignation of the public and forced a government investigation which led to the passage of the pure food laws. It also established its young author as a fearless crusader for the rights Of the working man - one of the world's leading spokesmen for freedom, equality and humanity. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 - November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposE of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the free press in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him 'a man with every gift except humor and silence.' In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, but his campaign was defeated decisively. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0037 ] Chekhov, Anton. Selected Stories. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451500377. Newly Translated From The Russian By Ann Dunnigan.Foreword By Ernest J. Simmons. 287 pages. paperback. CD37. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of the world's great masters of the short story, Anton Chekhov wrote about everyday life as he saw it - with humor, insight, and honesty. In this lies his genius: He portrayed the Russian people as they really were, not as he wanted them to be. This Signet Classic presents twenty Chekhov stories, including twelve of his early tales which make their first appearance in English in Thus paperback collection. The Confession * He Understood * At Sea * Surgery * Ninochka * A Cure for Drinking * The Jailer Jailed * The Dance Pianist * The Milksop * The Nincompoop * Marriage in Ten or Fifteen Years * In Spring * Agafya * The Kiss * The Father * In Exile * Three Years * The House with the Mansard * Peasants * The Darling AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife', he once said, ‘and literature is my mistress.' Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a ‘theatre of mood' and a ‘submerged life in the text.' Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0038 ] Thomas, Dylan. Adventures in the Skin Trade. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500385. Afterword By Vernon Watkins. 192 pages. paperback. CD38. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of the twentieth century's most gifted writers, Dylan Thomas created a vital, lusty, antic world of truly memorable characters. This Signet Classic offers a distinguished selection of his work - twenty stories plus all of his famous unfinished novel, ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE. The title piece relates the adventures of Samuel Bennet, a young innocent embarked on a wild pilgrimage through modern London. The stories range in theme from life and love to nature and madness, but all are written with the extravagant humor, the brilliant imagery, the magic awareness of the true poet. The New York Times wrote of ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE: 'The human warmth keeps bubbling up through the satire. Thomas' last work of fiction, in addition to its intrinsic interest, has a meaningfulness comparable to that of Keats' letters and Yeats' memoirs.' The New York Herald Tribune found it a 'vein of pure gold.' And The Saturday Review called Dylan Thomas 'a genius.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 - 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and 'And death shall have no dominion', the 'Play for Voices', Under Milk Wood, and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death in New York City. In his later life he acquired a reputation, which he encouraged, as a 'roistering, drunken and doomed poet'. Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. An undistinguished pupil, he left school at 16, becoming a journalist for a short time. Although many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager, it was the publication of 'Light breaks where no sun shines', in 1934, that caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937. Their relationship was defined by alcoholism and was mutually destructive. In the early part of his marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth, settling in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne. Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult, which resulted in his augmenting his income with reading tours and broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention and he was used by the Corporation as a populist voice of the literary scene. In the 1950s, Thomas travelled to America, where his readings brought him a level of fame, and his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in America cemented Thomas's legend, and he recorded to vinyl works such as A Child's Christmas in Wales. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma from which he did not recover. Thomas died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales where he was buried at the village churchyard in Laugharne. Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language. He has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century and noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and imagery. Thomas's position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed. He remains popular with the public, who find his work accessible. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0039 ] Parkman, Francis. The Oregon Trail. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451500393. Foreword By A.B. Guthrie Jr. 288 pages. paperback. CD39. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - More than a century ago, a young Easterner named Francis Parkman set out to explore life in the uncivilized West. With his friend and companion Quincy Adams Shaw, he traveled up the Oregon Trail to the camps of the Pawnee and the Sioux. This book is the fascinating journal of that hazardous experience. It is an authentic record of life on the trail, an eyewitness account of the Mormons and outlaws, trappers and Indians, pioneers and adventurers who tried to conquer the frontier back in the days when America was young. Historian Henry Steele Commager wrote: ‘THE OREGON TRAIL appeared in 1849, and with its publication Parkman was launched upon his career as a storyteller without peer in American letters. It is the picturesqueness, the racy vigor, the poetic eloquence, the youthful excitement, that give THE OREGON TRAIL its enduring appeal, recreating for us, as perhaps does no other book in our literature, the wonder and beauty of life in a new world that is now old and but a memory.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francis Parkman, Jr. (September 16, 1823 - November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0040 ] Gogol, Nicolai. The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500407. Newly Translated From The Russian By Andrew R. MacAndrew. Afterword By Leon Stilman. 238 pages. paperback. CD40. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - NIKOLAI GOGOL is universally regarded as the father of Russian realism. His stories are rooted in commonplace events; his characters are the underdog and the insignificant. A romantic at heart, he used a startling blend of broad comedy and weird fantasy to expose the stupidity, coarseness, and meanness of life. This Signet Classic includes five of Gogol's most famous stories: THE DIARY OF A MADMAN, THE NOSE, THE CARRIAGE, THE OVERCOAT, and a full - length historical romance: TARAS BULBA. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0041 ] Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500415. Afterword By Kingsley Amis. 240 pages. paperback. CD41. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Disease is a crime punishable by imprisonment. Machines are considered dangerous; they have been destroyed and banished from the land. This is the way of the world in Erewhon, the imaginary country of simple, straightforward people that was created by Samuel Butler to serve as a foil for his attack on 'modern' life and thought. With wit and imagination the master satirist lashed out at evolution, medicine, education, justice. And paradoxically he presented several sides of each issue in a many - sided tale of adventure, ideas, escape. As Kingsley Amis points out in his Afterword to this Signet Classic, EREWHON is the first modern Utopian romance, a novel which directly anticipates Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and Orwell's 1984. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Butler (4 or 5 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0042 ] Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Idylls of the King. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500423. Foreword By George Barker. 320 pages. paperback. CD42. Cover: Pucci. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'With regal melancholy and a superb sense of craft, Tennyson's poems evoke Past and Present - the Isle of the Lotos-Eaters, heraldic Camelot, his own twilit English gardens - seeking to reconcile the Victorian zeal for public progress with private despair. Using his own eloquence or masks of mythic figures, Tennyson was the stylist most imitated by poets of his day - praised over all the rest for his vigorous portrayals of the 'general conscience' of statesmen and common men alike.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (6 August 1809 - 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as 'Break, Break, Break', 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', 'Tears, Idle Tears' and 'Crossing the Bar'. Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister, but died from a brain haemorrhage before they could marry. Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, 'Ulysses', and 'Tithonus'. During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success. A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including 'Nature, red in tooth and claw', ''Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all', 'Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die', 'My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure', 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield', 'Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers', and 'The old order changeth, yielding place to new'. He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0043 ] Wells, H. G. Tono-Bungay. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500431. Foreword By Harry T. Moore. 352 pages. paperback. CD43. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Mischievous, stimulating, aromatic, attractive, Tono - Bungay is a patent medicine. It brings a quick fortune to a conscience - ridden scientist and his uncle, a lovable Satan of early mass production. Anti it launches them on a series of semicomic, sometimes grotesque adventures in gray, anonymous, turn - of - the - century London - adventures which culminate in the downfall of their product empire and a flight from creditors by night in a strange and experimental airship. Alternating between vaudevillian gusto and the economic incisiveness of high satire, Tono - Bungay merges the traditional character chronicle with the modern novel of social invective. Henry James described its author's style as one of 'robust pitch' and lauded Wells for possessing an eye and ear comparable to Dickens'. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herbert George ‘H. G.' Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called ‘The Father of Science Fiction', as are Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of ‘Journalist.' Most of his later novels were not science fiction. Some described lower-middle class life (Kipps; The History of Mr Polly), leading him to be touted as a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0044 ] Hardy, Thomas. Far From the Madding Crowd. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 045150044x. Afterword By James Wright. 382 pages. paperback. CD44. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in far From the madding crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes Bathsheba, the young mistress of Weatherbury Farm, fall victim to her amorous caprices. He serves her through one marriage to a handsome, corruptly sentimental sergeant. Selflessly altruistic, he sees her through another betrothal to her compulsive, puritanical neighbor - as unaware as she of the stroke of Fate that will effect their ultimate union. Published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD won Hardy immediate success; it combines an architecturally perfect plot with the philosophical overtones that were to set the theme for all his later works. The text of this Signet Classic is set from Hardy's revised final version of FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, published in 1912 in the authoritative Wessex edition. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Hardy (June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin. Most of his fictional works - initially published as serials in magazines - were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. As T. S. Eliot put it, 'The work of Thomas Hardy represents. a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs. at times his style touches sublimity.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0045 ] Kuprin, Alexander. The Duel and Selected Stories. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500458. Newly Translated From The Russian & With An Afterword By Andrew R. MacAndrew. 256 pages. paperback. CD45. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The frenzied, often fatal, attempts of sensitive men to escape their pointless rounds in the cities, garrisons, and far - flung reaches of Tsarist Russia are the central theme of The Duel and these selected stories. Praised by Communist and Western critics alike for exposing the universal abyss, Kuprin also indicts those trapped inside it - too worn to respond to one another's cries for love, capable at best of minor self - improvements at the expense of fellow sufferers. 'How he can write!. he should never pay attention to anybody's advice but just keep writing in his own way.' - Leo Tolstoy. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin (7 September [O.S. 26 August] 1870 in the village of Narovchat in the Penza Oblast - August 25, 1938 in Leningrad) was a Russian writer, pilot, explorer and adventurer who is perhaps best known for his story The Duel (1905). Other well-known works include Moloch (1896), Olesya (1898), ‘Junior Captain Rybnikov‘ (1906), ‘Emerald' (1907), and The Garnet Bracelet (1911) (which was made into a 1965 movie). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0046 ] Saint-Exupery, Antoine De. Night Flight. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500466. Translated From The French By Stuart Gilbert.Foreword By Andre Gide. 128 pages. paperback. CD46. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In a novel of rare beauty and power, Saint - ExupEry charts the perilous world of pioneer aviation. Night Flight is the story of hazardous flights made by night through the dangers of darkness and the destructive splendor of sudden Andean storms. It is a story of men who risk their lives to deliver mail in flimsy crates. Fabien, the youthful pilot, who sees in flying a chance for heroic action. Rivière, his superior, who believes that man's salvation lies not in freedom but in the acceptance of duty. 'Aviation, like the exploration of uncharted lands has its early heroic age and Night Flight, which describes the tragic adventure of one of these pioneers of the air, sounds, naturally enough, the authentic epic note.' - AndrE Gide AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antoine de Saint-ExupEry (officially Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint ExupEry 29 June 1900 - 31 July 1944) was a French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and also won the U.S. National Book Award. He is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight. Saint-ExupEry was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa and South America. At the outbreak of war, he joined the French Air Force (ArmEe de l'Air), flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised from the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany. Following a 27-month hiatus in North America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, he joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, although he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared over the Mediterranean on his last assigned reconnaissance mission in July 1944, and is believed to have died at that time. Prior to the war, Saint-ExupEry had achieved fame in France as an aviator. His literary works - among them The Little Prince, translated into over 250 languages and dialects - posthumously boosted his stature to national hero status in France. He earned further widespread recognition with international translations of his other works. His 1939 philosophical memoir Terre des hommes became the name of a major international humanitarian group, and was also used to create the central theme (Terre des hommes - Man and His World) of the most successful world's fair of the 20th century, Expo 67 in Montreal, Canada. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0047 ] Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500474. Afterword By Denham Sutcliffe. 544 pages. paperback. CT47. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Moby Dick is the epic saga of a one legged fanatic, Captain Ahab, who swears vengeance on the mammoth white whale who has crippled him. The first American novel to win a place in the literature of the world, it has been called a realistic story of whaling, a romance of unusual adventure and weird characters, a symbolic allegory, a drama of heroic determination and conflict. John Masefield wrote, 'Moby Dick brought all of the magic, the sadness, the wild joy of many waters into my life.'. The Atlantic Monthly called this book 'the greatest of American novels.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). When asked which of the great American writers he most admired, Vladimir Nabokov replied: ‘When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom I did not read as a boy.' Around his twentieth year he was a schoolteacher for a short time, then became a seaman when his father met business reversals. On his first voyage he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for a time. His first book, an account of that time, Typee, became a bestseller and Melville became known as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals'. After Omoo, the sequel to his first book, Melville began to work philosophical issues in his third book, the elaborate Mardi (1849). The public indifference to Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man, the last work of fiction published during his lifetime. During his later decades, Melville worked at the New York Customs House and privately published some volumes of poetry in editions of only 25 copies. When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the ‘Melville Revival' at the occasion of the centennial of his birth that his work won recognition. In 1924, the story Billy Budd, Sailor was published, which Melville worked on during his final years, and left in manuscript at his death. The single most Melvillean characteristic of his prose is its allusivity. Stanley T. Williams said ‘In Melville's manipulation of his reading was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0048 ] Adams, Henry. Democracy. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500482. Foreword By Henry D. Aiken. 192 pages. paperback. CD48. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Vote - buying and fixed elections, slanderous competition, preposterous graft. this is the Washington of the l87O's which Henry Adams reveals in his famous novel. Democracy is the story of two people who aspire to power. Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, a wealthy society widow, wants to align herself with the great lawmakers whom she idealizes. Instead, she becomes involved with Silas Ratcliffe, the most powerful man in the Senate, a leader whose political maneuvers are surpassed only by his courtship tactics. Here is an incisive exposE of corruption - in individuals and in government, an entertaining caricature of government life which may be seen to have its application even today. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0049 ] Bromfield, Louis. The Farm. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500490. Afterword By Russell Lord. 351 pages. paperback. CT49. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Set in the heart of the great, romantic wilderness called the Western Reserve, The Farm brings into permanent focus the joys, frustrations, and rewards of men and women who live close to the: soil. It spans the lives of four generations of Americans: from the idealistic and impulsive Colonel MacDougal, who builds the farm and makes it prosper, to his guilt - ridden descendant, Johnny, who leaves the farm to journey forth and fight in World War I. It is a story of courage, passion, and folly - a story of those who force the land to yield and flourish, and those who turn away from its harvest only to be deceived and corrupted by industry and city. Largely autobiographical, this novel was published in 1933. The New York Times found it 'an honest book, a deeply felt book and a valuable record for this generation and for those which are to come.' Herschel Brickell wrote that it was 'one of the solidest and most genuinely important books the author has written.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Bromfield (December 27, 1896 - March 18, 1956) was an American author and conservationist. He gained international recognition, winning the Pulitzer Prize and pioneering innovative scientific farming concepts. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0050 ] Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500504. Newly Translated From The Russian By George Reavey.Foreword By Alan Hodge. 208 pages. paperback. CD50. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The publication of Fathers and Sons enraged old and young, reactionaries, romantics, and radicals. Unlike its predecessors, it attacked all social classes through its portrait of the blatant nihilist, Bazarov, who makes a practice of exposing self - deception in those around him. On a visit to the Kirsanov estate, Bazarov's scathing comments, his dark example, threaten the integrity of each of his hosts: the old landowner, Nicholas, who prides himself on his mistress, a former peasant, the old man's decadent brother, Paul, who prides himself on his fashionable lack of purpose; and Arcady, Nicholas' intellectual on, who prides himself on his understanding of Bazarov's motivation. Widely criticized by Russia's radical press, Turgenev won the acclaim of Flaubert, Maupassant and Henry James for being the first author to use psychological character studies instead of elaborate plot, and the first to create the modern revolutionary type, the 'outsider.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (November 9, 1818 - September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0051 ] Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500512. Afterword By Murray Krieger. 319 pages. paperback. CD51. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - With this book Joseph Conrad set the style for a whole class of literature - the novel of the outcast from civilization finding refuge in the tropics. The natives of Patusan in the Far East worship the bold young Englishman by the name of 'Lord Jim', but he despises himself. Tortured by an act of cowardice and desertion that wrecked his career in the Merchant Service years before and tormented by his ideal of what an officer should be, he has fled from scandal farther and farther East. It is only here in remote Patusan, filling a post given him by the trader Stein, that he at last finds the will to cease sacrificing himself on the altar of conscience. He becomes a part of life again by accepting the 'destructive element within himself.' And he follows his star to the end - marrying the beautiful half - caste, Jewel, defending Patusan against the evil 'Gentleman Brown.' This is a story of dramatic action and psychological penetration, a work which the critic Morton Dauwen Zabel calls an example of Conrad's 'central theme. , the grip of circumstances that enforce self - discovery and its cognate, the discovery of reality or truth.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, J. G. Ballard, John le CarrE, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0052 ] Roberts, Elizabeth Madox. The Great Meadow. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500520. Afterword By Willard Thorp. 208 pages. paperback. CD52. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The trek of the American pioneer toward the wilderness in the 1770's is the theme of The Great Meadow. This dramatic story centers on a young married couple from Virginia who settle in the untamed Boone country of Kentucky. With meticulous detail Elizabeth Madox Roberts presents a factual record of frontier life - its common day chores, its simple folk, its constant perils. With aesthetic feeling she captures the color and rhythm of native idioms and dialect, putting a poet's touch to every lyrical word and phrase. 'Working in material that is native to the core, master of a style perfect for the uses to which it is put, Elizabeth Madox Roberts is giving to her work a universal value.' - N. Y. Times AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Already a poet with two collections to her name, Elizabeth Madox Roberts had established herself as a novelist with the publication and immediate success of The Time of Man (1926). That novel, along with The Great Meadow, represents the pinnacle of Roberts's critical and commercial success as a writer. Beyond its partial setting in Virginia, The Great Meadow constitutes an important work of the Southern Literary Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. In that sense, Roberts's poetic realism should be considered alongside the more celebrated modernist innovations of such southern writers as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Robert Penn Warren. Roberts's influence on Warren was especially noteworthy, and he wrote of both Roberts and The Great Meadow with high praise. Though rarely read or taught today, The Great Meadow has attracted scholarly attention from feminist, regionalist, and folkloric critics, all of whom appreciate Roberts's creation - within the conventional structure of the novel - a space for female difference and individuality. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0053 ] Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500539. Afterword By Eleanor M. Tilton. 285 pages. paperback. CD53. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - What is love? beauty? human communication? What is important in life and where should it be sought? These are the issues - the underlying themes - set forth by the Autocrat each morning on Beacon Hill. With wit and deviltry, he teases and lectures his fellow breakfasters on such varied subjects as quacks, the simple pleasures, mutual admiration societies, the poverty of logic, the evils of specialized learning, the superiority of aristocrats over self - made men. Dr. Holmes was the most brilliant conversationalist in Boston, the 'Hub of the Universe,' and his essays explored the limitless range of his freethinking mind. He provided an elaborate portrait of the New England liberal intelligence in reaction against itself, the first such self - examination in American letters. This collection, The Autocrat of the Breakfast - Table, made its initial appearance in the first issues of the Atlantic Monthly and was largely responsible for that magazine's early success. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841 - March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932, and as Acting Chief Justice of the United States January–February 1930. Noted for his long service, his concise and pithy opinions and his deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for his 'clear and present danger' opinion for a unanimous Court in the 1919 case of Schenck v. United States, and is one of the most influential American common law judges, honored during his lifetime in Great Britain as well as the United States. Holmes retired from the Court at the age of 90 years, 309 days, making him the oldest Justice in the Supreme Court's history. He also served as an Associate Justice and as Chief Justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and was Weld Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, of which he was an alumnus. Profoundly influenced by his experience fighting in the American Civil War, Holmes helped move American legal thinking towards legal realism, as summed up in his maxim: 'The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.' Holmes espoused a form of moral skepticism and opposed the doctrine of natural law, marking a significant shift in American jurisprudence. As he wrote in one of his most famous decisions, his dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), he regarded the United States Constitution as 'an experiment, as all life is an experiment' and believed that as a consequence 'we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.' During his tenure on the Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, he supported efforts for economic regulation and advocated broad freedom of speech under the First Amendment. These positions as well as his distinctive personality and writing style made him a popular figure, especially with American progressives, despite his deep cynicism and disagreement with their politics. His jurisprudence influenced much subsequent American legal thinking, including judicial consensus supporting New Deal regulatory law, and influential schools of pragmatism, critical legal studies, and law and economics. He was one of only a handful of justices to be known as a scholar; The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Holmes as one of the three most cited American legal scholars of the 20th century. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0054 ] Romains, Jules. The Death of a Nobody. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500547. Translated From The French By Desmond MacCarthy & Sidney Waterlow.Afterword By Maurice Natanson. 125 pages. paperback. CD54. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The subject of this modern classic is not a man. 'It is an event,' says Jules Romains, who is considered 'the French Dos Passos.' The event starts with the death of Jacques Godard, a man of no importance. It unfolds through his brief survival in the minds of others - the porter of his tenement in Paris, his fellow lodgers, a few acquaintances, his old father, who comes up from the country for the funeral, a young stranger who feels that the dead pass into 'a great soul that cannot die.' The event expresses Romains's belief in 'collective beings,' the famous theory of 'Unanimism.' In dramatizing his theory, Romains developed an advanced motion - picture technique when films were in their infancy, a technique of group portraits and sudden shifts from scene to scene that keeps this work far ahead of conventional novels. Here, Romains explores the ideas and the devices used in his twenty - seven - volume masterpiece, Men of Good Will, which AndrE Maurois calls 'the boldest attempt to describe completely his own time that any French novelist has made since Balzac.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jules Romains, born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule (August 26, 1885 - August 14, 1972), was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement. His works include the play Knock ou le Triomphe de la mEdecine, and a cycle of works called Les Hommes de bonne volontE (Men of Good Will). Jules Romains was born in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil in the Haute-Loire but went to Paris to attend first the lycEe Condorcet and then the prestigious Ecole normale supErieure. He was close to the Abbaye de CrEteil, a utopian group founded in 1906 by Charles Vildrac and RenE Arcos, which brought together, among others, the writer Georges Duhamel, the painter Albert Gleizes and the musician Albert Doyen. He received his agrEgation in philosophy in 1909. In 1927, he signed a petition (that appeared in the magazine Europe on April 15) against the law on the general organization of the nation in time of war, abrogating all intellectual independence and all freedom of expression. His name on the petition appeared with those of Lucien Descaves, Louis Guilloux, Henry Poulaille, SEverine... and those of the young Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre from the Ecole normale supErieure. During World War II he went into exile first to the United States where he spoke on the radio through the Voice of America and then, beginning in 1941, to Mexico where he participated with other French refugees in founding the Institut Français d'AmErique Latine (IFAL). A writer on many varied topics, Jules Romain was elected to the AcadEmie française on 4 April 1946, occupying chair 12 (of 40). He served as President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers from 1936 to 1941. In 1964, Jules Romains was named citizen of honor of Saint-Avertin. Following his death in Paris in 1972, his place in the AcadEmie française was taken by Jean d'Ormesson. Jules Romains is remembered today, among other things, for his concept of Unanimism and his cycle of novels in Les Hommes de bonne volontE (The Men of Good Will), a remarkable literary fresco depicting the odyssey over a quarter century of two friends, the writer Jallez and politician Jerphanion, who provide an example in literature of Unanimism. Romains originally considered unanimism to mean an opposition to individualism or to the exaltation of individual particularities; universal sympathy with life, existence and humanity. In later years, Romains defined it as connected with the end of literature within 'representation of the world without judgment',[this quote needs a citation] where his social ideals comprise the highest conception of solidarity as a defense of individual rights. The Red Envelope catalog company, in their 2007 Holiday catalog, surprisingly featured Les Createurs on the cover in a photograph, showing a female model playfully frustrated with her husband, a male model posing as a detached intellectual, half-heartedly helping her to decorate the Christmas tree, while his attention is focused on reading Les Createurs. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0055 ] Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500555. Afterword By Harvey Swados. 317 pages. paperback. CD55. Cover: Kossin. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A storm at sea. a doomed ship. a sole survivor. here is Daniel Defoe's immortal tale of a young merchant seaman cast ashore on an uninhabited tropical island, destined to spend twenty - four years in isolated loneliness. But more than a story of man against nature, Robinson Crusoe is a penetrating study of a universal problem - man against himself. In this great work Defoe introduces us to an immature Crusoe, floundering as aimlessly through life as he later is to flounder helplessly in the grip of a savage sea. We share his struggle for survival; feel his despondence at hearing no human sound but the echo of his own despairing prayers; suffer his hostility toward a God he feels has unjustly forsaken him. And at the end of his long ordeal we witness a rebirth: We see a mature Robinson Crusoe who has doggedly conquered his environment and rekindled his faith in his Saviour. a Robinson Crusoe who has finally mastered himself. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660 to 24 April 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain, and, along with others such as Richardson, is among the founders of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0056 ] Tolstoy, Leo. The Cossacks and the Raid. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500563. Newly Translated From The Russian By Andrew R. MacAndrew.Afterword By F.R. Reeve. 224 pages. paperback. CD56. Cover: Dillon. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - To read Tolstoy's early sketch, The Raid, and his first novel, The Cossacks, is to enter the workshop of a great writer and thinker. In The Raid Tolstoy explores the nature of courage itself, a theme central to War and Peace. In The Cossacks he sets forth all the motifs of his whole future life and his work. The hero is a young man - about - town who has squandered half his fortune - and his life - and retires to the desultory existence of a regiment stationed in mountainous Cossack country, where he takes part in the daily life of a Cossack village. But his love for the beautiful Maryanka precipitates a conflict between the belief that 'Happiness lies in living for others' and a passion that sweeps self - abnegation aside. As Romain Rolland says,' The full force of Tolstoy's descriptive powers is already expressed in this splendid [novel] and Tolstoy's realism shows itself with equal force in depicting human character.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0057 ] Caldwell, Erskine. Georgia Boy. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500571. Afterword By Robert Cantwell. 152 pages. paperback. CD57. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Erskine Caldwell has provided modern literature with a unique and memorable gallery of characters - some earthy, some funny, some tragic. His book Georgia Boy is a classic of American boyhood that will stand alongside Hemingway's My Old Man and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hilariously entertaining and unerringly accurate, it shows family life through the eyes of twelve - year - old William Stroup as he views the antics of Morris, his shrewd and shiftless father, Martha, his hard - working, sharp - tongued mother, Handsome Brown, his easygoing friend and the Stroup's trouble - prone yardboy. One of Erskine Caldwell's funniest canvasses of the rural South, Georgia Boy displays the keen insight into human nature that has made the author America's most popular storyteller. 'He is a rare phenomenon these days, an original American humorist, with a gift Jo; selecting his material from indigenous sources, and like all writers of the first rank he has an instinct for converting a casual episode into a symbol that carries profound meaning.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erskine Caldwell (born Dec. 17, 1903, Coweta county, Ga., U.S. - died April 11, 1987, Paradise Valley, Ariz.) U.S. author. Caldwell became familiar with poor sharecroppers through his father's missionary work. Fame arrived with TOBACCO ROAD (1932), a controversial novel whose title became a byword for rural squalor; adapted as a play, it ran more than seven years on Broadway. GOD'S LITTLE ACRE (1933), also a best-seller, featured a cast of hopelessly poor degenerates. Like his other novels and stories about the rural Southern poor, they mix violence and sex in grotesque tragicomedy. He also wrote the text for documentary books with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, whom he married. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0058 ] Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of Seven Gables. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 045150058x. Afterword By Edward C. Sampson. 287 pages. paperback. CD58. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'God will give him blood to drink!' An evil house, cursed through the centuries by a man who was hanged for witchcraft, haunted by the ghosts of its sinful dead, wracked by the fear of its frightened living. Four Pyncheons play a part inside the blighted house: Hepzibah, an elderly recluse; Clifford, her feeble-minded brother; Phoebe, their young country cousin. and Jaffrey, a devil incarnate whose greedy quest for secret wealth is marked by murder and terrible vengeance from a restless grave. Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are imbued with a mixture of the actual and the imaginary, and THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES is an enduring example. The puritanical Colonel Pyncheon is the embodiment of Hawthorne's own great grandfather, a judge at the Salem witch trials; the gloomy, gabled house typifies his own depressing home. It is this masterful blending of the spiritual and symbolic that allows Hawthorne's haunted house to stand firm where many a weaker one has fallen. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a ‘w' to make his name ‘Hawthorne' in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0059 ] Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500598. Afterword By Caroline G. Mercer. 314 pages. paperback. CD59. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Two sisters of opposing temperaments who share the pangs of tragic love provide the theme for Jane Austen's dramatically human narrative, Sense and Sensibility. Elinor, practical and conventional, is the perfection of sense. Marianne, emotional and sentimental, is the embodiment of sensibility. To both comes the sorrow of unhappy love. Elinor desires a man who is promised to another. Marianne loses her heart to a scoundrel who jilts her. Their mutual suffering brings a closer understanding between the two sisters - and true love finally triumphs when sense gives way to sensibility, and sensibility gives way to sense. Jane Austen's authentic representation of early nineteenth - century middle - class provincialism, written with forceful insight and gentle irony, makes her novels the enduring works on the mores and manners of her time. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is ‘famously scarce', according to one biographer. Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned ‘the greater part' of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of ‘good quiet Aunt Jane'. Scholars have unearthed little information since. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0060 ] Bierce, Ambrose. In the Midst of Life and Other Stories. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500601. Afterword By Marcus Cunliffe. 256 pages. paperback. CP60. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - DEATH! From a hangman's noose. , a sniper's bullet. a serpent's venom a dead man's touch. The critics called him 'Bitter Bierce,'described him as'a scoffer and scorner who wrote his tales of horror with a sort of fiendish delight.' In the Midst of Life is a collection of twenty.six of his unique tales of horror. Ambrose Bierce - praised and damned for over half a century as a cynic, a wit, a misanthrope and a demon - wrote of soldiers at war and civilians without peace. With biting humor he placed his characters in a setting of the real and natural, and then with a sardonic twist he confronted them with the terror of the unreal and supernatural. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (born June 24, 1842; assumed to have died sometime after December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. Today, he is probably best known for his short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ and his satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto ‘Nothing matters' and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work all earned him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce'. Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited descriptions, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0061 ] Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 045150061x. Afterword By Irvin Ehrenpreis. 319 pages. paperback. CD61. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - An innocent's odyssey among the status - seekers, Joseph Andrews is the hilarious tale of a poverty - stricken, flagrantly handsome footman adrift in a world of blustering, powdered wigs and robbers, amorous dowagers and rough - and - tumble innkeepers. Joseph is squired by Parson Adams - a Sancho Panza with a passion for brawls - through a maze of bedroom farces and mistaken identities to find himself suddenly and irrevocably acceptable. The cornerstone of our realistic fiction, historically precise about eighteenth - century country manners, Henry Fielding's novel is an extravaganza of mortal affectations and vanities. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 - 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones. Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement, having founded (with his half-brother John) what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners, using his authority as a magistrate. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0062 ] Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500628. Afterword By J.H. Plumb. 192 pages. paperback. CD62. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The sweetness of a pastoral poem and the spice of a vivacious comedy mark the enduring charm of The Vicar of Wakefield. With artful skill and delicious humor Oliver Goldsmith describes the trials and triumphs that befall a simple village vicar and shows, in a series of climactic surprises, how unswerving faith is rewarded - and villainy vanquished. 'There was no kind of writing that he did not practice, nor did he touch any but to adorn it.' - Samuel Johnson. 'With that sweet story Goldsmith found entry into every castle and hamlet in Europe.' - Thackeray. '. the influence [Goldsmithl exercised upon me, just at the chief point of my development, cannot be estimated.' - Goethe. 'The most exquisite of all romance in miniature.' - Lord Byron. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728 - 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). He also wrote An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. He is thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the source of the phrase 'goody two-shoes'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0063 ] Tolstoy, Leo. Resurrection. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500636. Translated From The Russian By Vera Traill.Foreword by Alan Hodge. 431 pages. paperback. CT63. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - RESURRECTION - Tolstoy's final novel - is a joint embodiment of his vast, objective awareness of human suffering and his lifelong burden of unrealized ideals. It traces the conflict of pride and affection between Kätusha, a prostitute charged with murder, and her first lover, Nekhludov, who now must judge her. Through his attempts to alter the course of her fate, Nekhludov discovers a similarity between the self - centered, legal values of Katusha's accusers and the nature of his own altruism. He discovers the hypocrisy of his own atonement - and begins the journey to resurrection. ~'The Homeric, the timeless epic vein was strong in Tolstoy, as perhaps in no other artist in the world.' - Thomas Mann. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0064 ] Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500644. Newly Translated From The German By Daphne Hardy.Foreword By Peter Viereck. 223 pages. paperback. CD64. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Focused on the era of the Moscow trials, Darkness at Noon describes an aging Bolshevik's total loss of perspective when faced by the new regime's inquisitors. At given intervals, Rubashov leaves the rumor - ridden limbo of his prison cell for interrogation - or else is appeased with gifts - first by the reproachful ironist, Ivanov, then by his remote and sadistic colleague, Gletkin. The machine of guilt is brought fully to bear; and, in a nightmarish moment of failing logic, Rubashov makes his preposterous and fatal confession. 'The book reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most have made it into a polemical tract. from his European angle [Koestler] can see such things as purges and mass deportations for what they are. ' George Orwell. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arthur Koestler (5 September 1905, Budapest - 3 March 1983, London) was an author of essays, novels and autobiographies. Koestler was born in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His early career was in journalism. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating anti-totalitarian novel, DARKNESS AT NOON, which propelled him to international fame. Over the next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize ‘for outstanding contribution to European culture' and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, three years later, with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia in its terminal stages. He committed suicide along with his wife in 1983 in London. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0065 ] Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500652. Afterword By Marcus Cunliffe. 334 pages. paperback. CD65. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Like ALICE IN WONDERLAND, AESOP'S FABLES, and GRIMM'S FAIRY TALES, THE JUNGLE BOOKS is a work that strikes our imagination first when we are young and grows in richness and meaning with our own experience. In particular, the tales of Mowgli illustrate this fact and bear out T. S. Eliot's remark that 'Kipling knew something of the things which are underneath, and of the things which are beyond the frontier.' Mowgli, lost in the deep jungle as a child, is adopted into a family of wolves. Hunted by Shere Khan, the Bengal tiger, Mowgli is allowed to run with the wolf pack under the protection of Bagheera, the black panther, and of Baloo, the brown bear who teaches wolf cubs The Law of the Jungle. Through many legendary adventures, Mowgli evolves from a vengeful member of the pack to a just and compassionate human being who at last returns to join - perhaps to lead - his own kind. Tales of Mowgli are interspersed with other jungle stories of equal imagination and significance. Somerset Maugham calls Kipling '. our greatest short story writer,' and it is in THE JUNGLE BOOKS, he says, that Kipling's 'great and varied gifts find their most brilliant expression.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888). His poems include 'Mandalay' (1890), 'Gunga Din' (1890), 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings' (1919), 'The White Man's Burden' (1899), and 'If - ' (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting 'a versatile and luminous narrative gift'. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: 'Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.' In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George Orwell called him a 'prophet of British imperialism'. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: 'He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0066 ] Gogol, Nicolai. Dead Souls. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500660. Newly Translated From The Russian By Andrew R. MacAndrew. Foreword by Frank O'Connor. 279 pages. paperback. CP66. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - DEAD SOULS describes the gambits of a quixotic opportunist in provincial Russia who sets out to buy deceased serfs at a low cost from their owners. Chichikov requires evidence of 'property,' since he wishes to marry an heiress, and is able to amass the 'souls' because their owners must pay taxes on them until they are officially declared dead in the rolls of the next census. An affable and personable business man, he is wined and dined in luxurious mansions and humble crofts, proclaimed a man of standing, and thought to be odd and delightful. Gogol's panorama of fraudulence is lasting allegory and aligns him with Swift, Voltaire, Balzac, and Dickens as one of the world's arch - satirists. 'Dead Souls provides an attentive reader with. that Gogolian gusto and wealth of weird detail which lift the whole thing to the level of a tremendous epic poem. ' - Vladimir Nabokov. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0067 ] Hughes, Richard. A High Wind in Jamaica or the Innocent Voyage. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500679. Foreword By Vernon Watkins. 192 pages. paperback. CP67. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The eternally fascinating theme of children captured by pirates gains a new psychological dimension in the nightmarish, sometimes weirdly amusing, novel A High Wind in Jamaica. What do the young prisoners think and feel, how do they react when one of their group is coerced by the pirate captain? When one falls to his death by accident? When another murders a hostage from a plundered vessel? Who are the victors and who the victims? The values dividing the world of children and adults are cast in an ever more eerie light as Richard Hughes charts the amorality inherent among the innocent on this macabre and desperate voyage. Rebecca West called A High Wind in Jamaica 'a hot draught of mad, primal fantasy and poetry.' Ford Madox Ford considered it 'the best thing that has come out of Wales or the British Empire since the [first] war.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE (19 April 1900 - 28 April 1976) was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays. He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica. He was educated first at Charterhouse School and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford during 1922. A Charterhouse schoolmaster had sent Hughes's first published work to the magazine The Spectator during 1917. The article, written as a school essay, was an unfavorable criticism of The Loom of Youth, by Alec Waugh, a recently published novel which caused a furore for its account of homosexual passions between British schoolboys in a public school. At Oxford he met Robert Graves, also an Old Carthusian (graduate of Charterhouse), and they co-edited a poetry publication, Oxford Poetry, during 1921. Hughes's short play The Sisters' Tragedy was being staged in the West End of London at the Royal Court Theatre by 1922. He was the author of the world's first radio play, Danger, commissioned from him for the BBC by Nigel Playfair and broadcast on 15 January 1924. Hughes was employed as a journalist and travelled widely before he married, during 1932, the painter Frances Bazley. They settled for a period in Norfolk and then during 1934 at Castle House, Laugharne in south Wales. Dylan Thomas stayed with Hughes and wrote his book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog whilst living at Castle House. Hughes was instrumental in Thomas relocating permanently to the area. He wrote only four novels, the most famous of which is The Innocent Voyage (1929), or A High Wind in Jamaica, as Hughes renamed it soon after its initial publication. Set in the 19th century, it explores the events which follow the accidental capture of a group of English children by pirates: the children are revealed as considerably more amoral than the pirates (it was in this novel that Hughes first described the cocktail Hangman's Blood). During 1938, he wrote an allegorical novel In Hazard based on the true story of the S.S. Phemius that was caught in the 1932 Cuba hurricane for 4 days during its maximum intensity. He wrote volumes of children's stories, including The Spider's Palace. During World War II, Hughes had a desk job in the Admiralty. He met the architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, and Jane's and Max's children stayed with the Hughes family for much of that time. After the end of the war, he spent ten years writing scripts for Ealing Studios, and published no more novels until 1961. Of the trilogy The Human Predicament, only the first two volumes, The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), were complete when he died; twelve chapters, less than 50 pages, of the final volume are now published. In these he describes the course of European history from the 1920s through World War II, including real characters and events - such as Hitler's escape after the abortive Munich putsch - as well as fictional. Later in life Hughes relocated to Ynys in Gwynedd. He was churchwarden of Llanfihangel-y-traethau, the village church, where he was buried when he died at home in 1976. Hughes was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in the United States, an honorary member of both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) during 1946. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0068 ] Twain, Mark. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451500687. Foreword By Edmund Reiss. 256 pages. paperback. CD68. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes the stories: THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY, THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CONNECTICUT, THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT, LUCK, THE £1,000,000 BANKNOTE, THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG, THE FIVE BOONS OF LIFE,& WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL?. THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER is that rarity in the work of Mark Twain - a novelette in which the author turns his sardonic, free - wheeling wit to the problem of Eternal Evil in a distant time and place. In the other eight stories presented here Twain debunks his Gilded Age; he ransacks the back yards of daily life and fable to find his notorious, sometimes preposterous, metaphors. He is as apt to deal with the great minds of the law hunting a wayward elephant as with a man who has a bank - note no one can cash. 'Mark Twain transcends all other American humorists. There is always. the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully open and deliciously shrewd.' - William Dean Howells. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0069 ] Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500695. Afterword By James Wright. 285 pages. paperback. CD69. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD is Charles Dickens' brilliant contribution to the field of crime and detection. Against a background of opium dens, nocturnal graveyard visits, and moldering monastic crypts, he weaves a tightly knit plot centered on the ominous disappearance of young Edwin Drood. Suspected of foul murder are John Jasper, a drug-addicted choirmaster who hungers after Drood's fiancEe, and Neville Landless, a Ceylonese who had previously quarreled violently with the missing man. For psychological interest, for mastery of scene, tone, and characterization, this last work of Dickens remains unsurpassed. The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished at the author's death; its solution has challenged the imagination of generations of readers. 'Certainly one of the most beautiful of his works, if not the most beautiful of all.' - Longfellow.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0070 ] Pushkin, Alexander. The Queen of Spades and Other Tales. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500709. Translated From The Russian By Ivy & Tatiana Litvinov.Foreword By George Steiner. 319 pages. paperback. CP70. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Virtually all of the great Russian writers - Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol, Pasternak - have acknowledged these stories among their permanent models. Describing the clash of wills, baroque courtships, and lightning chases over the steppes, Pushkin single - handedly stormed an age of barbaric and imitative literature. His brooding soldiers, fragile ladies, perversely benevolent Cossacks, and paranoid gamblers act out their pageants of persecution and lust against the Gothic silence of frontier Russia. In Pushkin we have a writer who, brimming over with impressions of life, strove to portray them in prose and poetry with the utmost truth and realism, achieving his goal with all the brilliancy of genius.' Maxim Gorky. Contains - THE QUEEN OF SPADES, THE TALES OF IVAN BELKIN: The Shot, Blizzard, The Undertaker, The Postmaster, Lady Into Lassie, DUBROVSKY, THE CAPTAIN'S DAUGHTER. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (6 June [O.S. 26 May] 1799 - 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1837) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin was born into Russian nobility in Moscow. His matrilineal great grandfather - Abram Gannibal - was brought over as a slave from what is now Eritrea and had risen to become an aristocrat. Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. While under the strict surveillance of the Tsar's political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was serialized between 1825 and 1832. Notoriously touchy about his honour, Pushkin fought as many as twenty-nine duels, and was fatally wounded in such an encounter with Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès. Pushkin had accused D'Anthès, a French officer serving with the Chevalier Guard Regiment of attempting to seduce the poet's wife, Natalya Pushkina. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0071 ] Meredith, George. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500717. Afterword By Norman Kelvin. 476 pages. paperback. CT71. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This novel tackles with vigor and wit one of the greatest Victorian - and Modern - themes: the struggle of intelligence to work out a harmony between man and nature, and between man and woman. The ground for the struggle is the disastrous attempt of a father to play the role of Providence. Sir Austin Feverel, who has been disappointed in love, tries to protect his son from the same fate, training him to be a nearly perfect human being and even planning to arrange his ideal marriage. But Richard's love for Lucy, a beautiful, devoted girl whom his father rejects, helps him find the freedom to elope with her and to see the proud and cynical world of Sir Austin for what it is. More than a century ago Thee' London Times called this novel '. a powerful book. penetrative in its depth of insight and rich in its variety of experience This Signet edition of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel follows Meredith's own revision of 1878. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Meredith, OM (12 February 1828 - 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two years. He read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry. He collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. He married Edward Peacock's widowed sister Mary Ellen Nicolls in 1849 when he was twenty-one years old and she was twenty-eight. He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, published to some acclaim in 1851. In 1856 he posed as the model for The Death of Chatterton, a hugely popular painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis (1830–1916). His wife ran off with Wallis in 1858; she died three years later. The collection of 'sonnets' entitled Modern Love (1862) came of this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first 'major novel'. He married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey. He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by nature. His writing was characterised by a fascination with imagery and indirect references. He had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on Comedy (1877) is still quoted in most discussions of the history of comic theory. In The Egoist, published in 1879, he applies some of his theories of comedy in one of his most enduring novels. Some of his writings, including The Egoist, also highlight the subjugation of women during the Victorian period. During most of his career, he had difficulty achieving popular success. His first truly successful novel was Diana of the Crossways published in 1885. Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a publisher's reader. His advice to Chapman and Hall made him influential in the world of letters. His friends in the literary world included, at different times, William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Cotter Morison, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and J. M. Barrie. His contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle paid him homage in the short-story The Boscombe Valley Mystery, when Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson during the discussion of the case, 'And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow.' Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, implies that Meredith, along with Balzac, is his favourite novelist, saying 'Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning'. In 1868 he was introduced to Thomas Hardy by Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall the publishers. Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it would be attacked by reviewers and destroy his hopes of becoming a novelist. Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another 'with a purely artistic purpose' and more of a plot. Meredith spoke from experience; his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudie's circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies. Hardy continued to try and publish the novel: however it remained unpublished, though he clearly took Meredith's advice seriously. Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. In 1909, he died at his home n Box Hill, Surrey. He is buried in the cemetery at Dorking, Surrey. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0072 ] Harte, Bret. The Outcasts of Poker Flat and Other Tales. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500725. Introduction By Wallace Stegner. 301 pages. paperback. CD72. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The glorious fringe - inhabitants of Gold Rush California - the slick gamblers, the impetuous but soft - hearted dance - hall girls, the mining camp eccentrics - are immortal - ized in these classic chronicles of the Far West of the nineteenth century. Includes - The Right Eye of the Commander, M'liss: an Idyl of Red Mountain, The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, Tennessee's Partner, The Idyl of Red Gulch, Brown of Calaveras, Miggles, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar, Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands, Wan Lee the Pagan, A Passage In the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst, An Ingenue of the Sierras, & A ProtEgEe of Jack Hamlin's. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francis Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 - May 5, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, fiction, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been most often reprinted, adapted, and admired. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0073 ] Roosevelt, Theodore. The Rough Riders. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500733. Afterword By Lawrence Clark Powell. paperback. CD73. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - We Are Coming! There was a war to be fought with Spain in 1898,. and so they volunteered. Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees from the newly tamed Indian Territory. Cowpunchers, stage drivers, government scouts from the Great Plains states. Riflemen, trappers, miners from the Rocky Mountain West. As Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders they rode and fought to fame and glory at Las Guasimas, Santiago. and San Juan Hill. More than a chronicle of a war and men in battle, The Rough Riders endures as a living record of a time, a personality, and a legend. Reading it, we become witnesses to a young America emerging as a great power. a dynamic Roosevelt rushing to fulfill his destined place in her future. , and the cowboy hero's last glorious fling in tribute to her colorful past. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Theodore 'T.R.' Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 - January 6, 1919) was an American politician, author, naturalist, soldier, explorer, and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the Progressive Party insurgency of 1912. He is known for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his 'cowboy' persona and robust masculinity. Growing up, Roosevelt was a sickly child who suffered from asthma. To overcome his physical weakness, he embraced a strenuous life. He was home-schooled and became an eager student of nature. He attended Harvard College, where he studied biology, boxed, and developed an interest in naval affairs. He quickly entered politics, determined to become a member of the ruling class. In 1881, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where he became a leader of the reform faction of the GOP. His book, The Naval War of 1812 (1882), established him as a learned historian and writer. When Roosevelt's first wife, Alice, died two days after giving birth in February 1884 and when his mother died the same day in the same house, he was heartbroken and in despair. Roosevelt temporarily left politics and became a cattle rancher in the Dakotas. When blizzards destroyed his herd, he returned to New York City politics, running in and losing a race for mayor. In the 1890s, he took vigorous charge of the city police as New York City Police Commissioner. By 1897, under President William McKinley, Roosevelt was, in effect, running the Navy Department. When the war with Spain broke out in 1898, he helped form the famous Rough Riders, a combination of wealthy Easterners and Western cowboys. He gained national fame for his courage during the war in Cuba. Roosevelt then returned to United States and was elected Governor of New York. He was the GOP nominee for Vice President with William McKinley, campaigning successfully against radicalism and for prosperity, national honor, imperialism (regarding the Philippines), high tariffs and the gold standard. Roosevelt became President after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. He was inaugurated at age 42, making him the youngest person to become president, and the first President to receive full-time Secret Service protection (although this was not at his request). He tried to move the GOP toward Progressivism, including trust busting and increased business regulation. In November 1904, he was reelected in a landslide against conservative Democrat Alton Brooks Parker. Roosevelt called his domestic policies a 'Square Deal', promising a fair deal to the average citizen while breaking up monopolistic corporations, holding down railroad rates, and guaranteeing pure food and drugs. He was the first president to speak out on conservation, and he greatly expanded the system of national parks and national forests. By 1907, he propounded more radical reforms, which were blocked by the conservative Republicans in Congress. His foreign policy focused on the Caribbean, where he ordered the construction of the Panama Canal and guarded it. There were no wars, but his slogan, 'Speak softly and carry a big stick' was underscored by expanding the navy and sending the Great White Fleet on a world tour. He negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. At the end of his second term, Roosevelt supported his close friend, William Howard Taft, for the 1908 Republican nomination. After leaving office, he toured Africa and Europe, and on his return in 1910, his friendship with President Taft ended as a result of disputes on the issues of progressivism and personalities. In the 1912 presidential election, Roosevelt tried to block Taft's renomination, but failed. He then launched the Progressive ('Bull Moose') Party that called for progressive reforms, which split the Republicans, and captured almost 25 percent of all votes cast in the 1912 Presidential election. This allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the White House and Congress, while the Taft conservatives gained control of the GOP for decades. Roosevelt then led a major expedition to the Amazon jungles and contracted several illnesses. From 1914 to 1917, he campaigned for American entry into World War I, and reconciled with the GOP leadership. He was the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the 1920 presidential election, but his health collapsed and he died in 1919. Roosevelt has consistently been ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents. His face adorns Mount Rushmore alongside those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0074 ] Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography and Other Writings. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500741. Edited & With An Introduction By L. Jesse Lemisch. 350 pages. paperback. CD74. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Availing himself of the best texts and the latest scholarship in the field, L. Jesse Lemisch presents in this Signet Classic a lively and authentic portrait of Benjamin Franklin, the whole man. Seen through his own eyes and through the eyes of others, here is Franklin the public figure: scientist, inventor, educator, diplomat, politician, humorist. and Franklin the private person: father, husband, friend. Richard B. Morris, Chairman of the History Department of Columbia University, wrote about this book, 'I think that Mr. Lemisch has brought together an extraordinarily interesting collection of material about an extraordinary person. He has done it so skillfully that the reader will easily obtain a fully rounded portrait of the many - sided Franklin, notably the moralist, humanitarian, scientist, and unconventional human being. The notes are lively, balanced, and informative, and heighten the interest in the text.' The Signet Classic edition of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY uses the definitive Farrand text. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705]– April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He facilitated many civic organizations, including a fire department and a university. Franklin earned the title of ‘The First American' for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, ‘In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.' To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin ‘the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.' Franklin, always proud of his working class roots, became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies. He was also partners with William Goddard and Joseph Galloway the three of whom published the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British monarchy in the American colonies. He became wealthy publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and The Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin gained international renown as a scientist for his famous experiments in electricity and for his many inventions, especially the lightning rod. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. For many years he was the British postmaster for the colonies, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network. He was active in community affairs, colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he freed his slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists. His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, have seen Franklin honored on coinage and money; warships; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0075 ] Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Tales. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 045150075x. Afterword By Willard Thorpe. 336 pages. paperback. CT75. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Contains - BILLY BUDD, The Piazza, Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Lightning - Rod Man, The Encantadas, The Bell - Tower, The Town - Ho's Story. Herman Melville's short stories, somewhat neglected during his lifetime, today are considered to be among the small masterpieces of American fiction. His imagination is inventive, ironic, and extraordinarily attuned to our times. His settings and themes are various: the limits of artistic creation; the opposition of innocence and evil; fear of isolation; the inviolate sanctity of the human heart; the fearfulness of and fascination with the 'enchanted isles'; the ferocity of the white whale; Calvinist hell - fire and damnation. Melville's stories, like his great novel Moby - Dick, are unique in narrative method, profound in theme, and full of delights at all levels. This collection includes not only Billy Budd (in a reading text based on the famous Harvard edition), but also all of The Piazza Tales, as well as 'The Town - Ho's Story' from Moby - Dick. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). When asked which of the great American writers he most admired, Vladimir Nabokov replied: ‘When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom I did not read as a boy.' Around his twentieth year he was a schoolteacher for a short time, then became a seaman when his father met business reversals. On his first voyage he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for a time. His first book, an account of that time, Typee, became a bestseller and Melville became known as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals'. After Omoo, the sequel to his first book, Melville began to work philosophical issues in his third book, the elaborate Mardi (1849). The public indifference to Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man, the last work of fiction published during his lifetime. During his later decades, Melville worked at the New York Customs House and privately published some volumes of poetry in editions of only 25 copies. When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the ‘Melville Revival' at the occasion of the centennial of his birth that his work won recognition. In 1924, the story Billy Budd, Sailor was published, which Melville worked on during his final years, and left in manuscript at his death. The single most Melvillean characteristic of his prose is its allusivity. Stanley T. Williams said ‘In Melville's manipulation of his reading was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0076 ] Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500768. Foreword By F.R. Leavis. 510 pages. paperback. CT76. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The English Midlands at the turn of the eighteenth century is the setting for George Eliot's moving novel of three unworldly people trapped by unwise love. Adam Bede, a simple carpenter, loves too blindly; Hetty Sorrel, a coquettish beauty, loves too recklessly; and Arthur Donnithorne, a dashing squire, loves too carelessly. Betrayed by their innocence, vanity, and imprudence, their foolish hearts lead them to a tragic triangle of seduction, murder, and retribution. With emotional sincerity and intellectual integrity, George Eliot probes deeply into the psychology of commonplace people caught in the act of uncommon heroics. Alexandre Dumas called this novel 'the masterpiece of the century.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0077 ] Gissing, George. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500776. 189 pages. paperback. CP77. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In this thinly disguised autobiography, social critic George Gissing introduces his own scholarly passions, experience of poverty, and ironic judgments of technological England and those whose learning permits them no place in it. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft reveals Gissing's dissenting opinions on a curious variety of antique and modern subjects. His startlingly personal pessimism and hope combine to empower his every observation on slum life in London, Roman culture, contemporary ethics, cooking, children and Eastern religions with wisdom grounded in realism - proving he is not the withdrawn humanist his friends have thought him. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft re-established the art of memoir-writing as an important modern literary form. With a Foreword by V. S. Pritchett. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Robert Gissing (22 November 1857 - 28 December 1903) was an English novelist who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. Gissing also worked as a teacher and tutor throughout his life. He published his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, in 1880. His best known novels, which are published in modern editions, include The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), and The Odd Women (1893). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0078 ] Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Elsie Venner. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500784. Afterword By Miriam R. Small. 367 pages. paperback. CT78. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Elsie Venner is seized by maniacal angers, sudden trances, fits of loneliness, and the compulsion to wander on The Mountain. She is pitied, mistrusted, or sullenly accepted by those who attribute her nature to the snake bite her mother received before her birth. It is this lack of understanding, plus the confused reactions shown by Bernard Langdon, the young and withdrawn schoolmaster who becomes her single passion, that cause her to struggle fiercely, pathetically, against her illness. Dr. Holmes's novel has become the acknowledged prototype of the Brahmin's rational indictment of Predestination. It is an eerie Gothic tale of old New England, a treasury of half - true, twilit conjectures about the psyche before the time of Freud. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841 - March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932, and as Acting Chief Justice of the United States January–February 1930. Noted for his long service, his concise and pithy opinions and his deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for his 'clear and present danger' opinion for a unanimous Court in the 1919 case of Schenck v. United States, and is one of the most influential American common law judges, honored during his lifetime in Great Britain as well as the United States. Holmes retired from the Court at the age of 90 years, 309 days, making him the oldest Justice in the Supreme Court's history. He also served as an Associate Justice and as Chief Justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and was Weld Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, of which he was an alumnus. Profoundly influenced by his experience fighting in the American Civil War, Holmes helped move American legal thinking towards legal realism, as summed up in his maxim: 'The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.' Holmes espoused a form of moral skepticism and opposed the doctrine of natural law, marking a significant shift in American jurisprudence. As he wrote in one of his most famous decisions, his dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), he regarded the United States Constitution as 'an experiment, as all life is an experiment' and believed that as a consequence 'we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.' During his tenure on the Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, he supported efforts for economic regulation and advocated broad freedom of speech under the First Amendment. These positions as well as his distinctive personality and writing style made him a popular figure, especially with American progressives, despite his deep cynicism and disagreement with their politics. His jurisprudence influenced much subsequent American legal thinking, including judicial consensus supporting New Deal regulatory law, and influential schools of pragmatism, critical legal studies, and law and economics. He was one of only a handful of justices to be known as a scholar; The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Holmes as one of the three most cited American legal scholars of the 20th century. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0079 ] Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500792. Afterword By Charles Shapiro. 301 pages. paperback. CD79. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Murdering the Innocent! Facts, Facts, Facts. Teach these children facts, not fancies. Sense, not sentimentality Conformity not curiosity Proof and demonstration, not poetry and drama. On this bleak tenet is run the Gradgrind model day school in HARD TIMES. No other work of Dickens presents so relentless an indictment against the callous greed of the Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy as this fiercest of his novels. With savage bitterness Dickens unmasks the hellish industries that imprisoned the bodies of the helpless labor class and the equally satanic institutions that shackled the development of their minds. ‘Carlyle never voiced a more burning denunciation of the dismal science of classical economic theory.' - Edgar Johnson. ‘This is Karl Marx, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter, rising up against civilization itself as a disease. ‘ - G. Bernard Shaw. With an Afterword by Charles Shapiro. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0080 ] O'Flaherty, Liam. The Informer. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500806. Afterword By Donagh MacDonagh. 189 pages. paperback. CP80. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This is Liam O'Flaherty's great novel of a troubled Ireland divided by the chaos of Civil War in the 1920's. It is the story of an informer, damned with the curse of his country's unforgivable sin, hunted by the shadowy executioners of an outlawed revolutionary organization. Two characters dominate this tragedy of betrayal and retribution: Gypo Nolan, the hulking oaf of a giant who, under stress of poverty, discloses the whereabouts of the wanted Frankie McPhillip for the paltry twenty - pound reward; and Dan Gallagher, the egotistical commandant of the militant organization that has sworn to hunt down and kill the unknown informer. Through the fogbound Dublin slum streets they re - enact the eternal drama of man pitted against man. A classic of modern literature, The Informer treats a recurrent theme in Irish folklore, ballad, and story. the abhorrent outcast who betrays a cause or a people to the enemy. The violence of O'Flaherty's own youth is reflected in his harshly realistic image of an Irish Republic at war with itself, suffering the birth pangs of newly gained independence, beset by the self - destructive forces of misguided idealism and anarchy. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Liam O'Flaherty (28 August 1896 - 7 September 1984) was a significant Irish novelist and short story writer and a major figure in the Irish literary renaissance. Like his brother Tom Maidhc O'Flaherty (also a writer), he was involved for a time in left-wing politics. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0081 ] Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500814. Afterword By Richard Sullivan. 400 pages. paperback. CT81. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This is Richard Wright's extraordinary novel - stark, vehement, deeply moving - about a young Negro who is hardened by life in the slums and whose every effort to free himself proves hopeless. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman's death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder. and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime. He realizes his full individuality only through the confrontation of death. NATIVE SON is among the first American works of fiction to portray an existential hero in the process of self. transcendence, and is one of the lasting novels of the politically conscious, post-Depression years. 'It is not merely a book but a deep experience.' - The New Yorker. 'Certainly NATIVE SON declares Richard Wright's importance, not merely as the best Negro writer, but as an American author as distinctive as any of those now writing.' - New York Times. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 - November 28, 1960) was an African-American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. Many believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century. Wright was born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, and lived in the South until 1927, when he moved to Chicago. He later resided in New York City, and died in Paris as an expatriate. Among his many works are NATIVE SON, BLACK BOY, THE OUTSIDER, SAVAGE HOLIDAY, and LAWD TODAY! |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0082 ] Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500822. Afterword By Joann Morse. 334 pages. paperback. CD82. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The romantic clash of two opinionated young people provides the sustaining theme of pride And prejudice. Vivacious Elizabeth Bennet is fascinated and repelled by the arrogant Mr. Darcy, whose condescending airs and acrid tongue have alienated her entire family. Their spirited courtship is conducted against a background of assembly - ball flirtations and drawing - room intrigues. Jane Austen's famous novel captures the affectations of class - conscious Victorian families with matrimonial aims and rivalries. Her people are universal; they live a truth beyond time, change, or caricature. George Eliot called Jane Austen 'the greatest artist that has ever written,' and Sir Walter Scott wrote of her work, 'There is a truth of painting in her writings which always delights me.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is ‘famously scarce', according to one biographer. Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned ‘the greater part' of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of ‘good quiet Aunt Jane'. Scholars have unearthed little information since. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0083 ] Tomlinson, H. M. The Sea and the Jungle. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500830. Afterword By Albert J. Guerard. 254 pages. paperback. CP83. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Losing a wager, Tomlinson gains his freedom from a Fleet Street sinecure to ship as a purser on an ocean - going tramp bound for Brazil and some two thousand miles up the Rio Madeira. Monstrous storms and calm on the high seas, silent and sun - baked ports of call, brooding, equatorial rain forests - these provide the actual and moral landscapes against which the author's embittered shipmates relive their grotesque, half - legendary adventures. The Sea and the Jungle has become a classic of travel literature since its publication in 1912: it fuses exact and abundant natural description of some of the world's outlying reaches with striking meditations on subjects ranging from modern commerce to solitude. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Major Tomlinson (21 June 1873 - 5 February 1958) was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea. He was born and died in London. Tomlinson was brought up in Poplar, London. He worked as a shipping clerk, and then as a reporter for the Morning Leader newspaper; he travelled up the Amazon River for it. In World War I he was an official correspondent for the British Army, in France. In 1917 he returned to work with H. W. Massingham on The Nation, which opposed the war. He left the paper in 1923, when Massingham resigned because of a change of owner and political line. His 1931 book Norman Douglas was one of the first biographies of that scandalous but then much admired writer. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0084 ] Cable, George Washington. Old Creole Days. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500849. Foreword By Shirley Ann Grau. 216 pages. paperback. CP84. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Flamboyant New Orleans at the turn of the eighteenth century is the setting of Old Creole Days. With sensitive insight George W. Cable captured the romance and flavor of the French Quarter; with unvarnished realism he portrayed its populace - honey - colored quadroon mistresses, Mississippi rivermen, gentleman gamblers, rawboned Yankees, autocratic Creole landowners. Louisiana - born he was the first of the Southern writers to treat objectively such taboo subjects as color barriers and miscegenation. A milestone in American literature, his book was as vehemently denounced in the South as it was highly acclaimed in the North and abroad. Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of Scribner's Magazine, where - George Washington Cable's stories first were published, wrote, 'With the possible exception of Hawthorne and Poe, Cable is the greatest figure in American fiction.' And the poet John Green leaf Whittier cited Cable as 'the writer whom we have so long waited to see come up in the South.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Washington Cable (October 12, 1844 - January 31, 1925) was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He has been called ‘the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century, as well as the first modern southern writer.' In his treatment of racism, mixed-race families and miscegenation, his fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner. He also wrote articles critical of contemporary society. Due to hostility against him after two 1885 essays encouraging racial equality and opposing Jim Crow, Cable moved with his family to Northampton, Massachusetts. He lived there for the next thirty years, then moved to Florida. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0085 ] Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500857. Foreword By Henry Steele Commager.Drawings By Norah Hamilton. 320 pages. paperback. CT85. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Twenty Years at Hull - House is Jane Addams's graphic account of her famed settlement house in Chicago's West Side slums. Covering the years 1889 to 1909, a time when America was fired with fear of subversives and suspicion of foreigners, this book stands as the immortal testament of a woman who lived and worked among the immigrant settlers, the sweat - shop toilers, the unwed mothers, the hungry, the aged, the sick, to show them in practice what others merely preached: the true concept of American democracy. 'She discerned and revealed the beauty of the cultural life and spiritual value of the immigrant at the time when nothing was so despised and unconsidered in American life as the foreigner.' - Frances Perkins, U. S. Secretary of Labor, 1933 - 1945. 'For the helpless, young and old, for the poor, the unlearned, the stranger, the despised, you have urged understanding and then justice.' - Dr. Marian Parks, former President of Bryn Mawr College. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 - May 21, 1935) was a pioneer American settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped turn America to issues of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0086 ] Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451514529. Afterword By Willard Thorp. 477 pages. paperback. CT86. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - SISTER CARRIE is an epic of city life, of transient idealists besieged by industrialism and its anonymity. It specifically treats of two people, at once attracted and repelled by their vastly different backgrounds, who, in the course of involvement, are led into wholly unexpected areas of experience. Provincial and naïve, Carrie becomes involved with Hurstwood, a respectable Chicago tavern manager twice her age, who alienates himself from his family. Out of despair he resorts to theft, is compelled to flee, and cannot obtain employment. Carrie, in turn, becomes a chorus girl and later, under the dubious glow of her fame as an actress, their tragedy crystallizes. Theodore Dreiser makes major symbolic use of nineteenth - century urban conventions - in which New York and Chicago are themselves likened to twin malignant deities, H. L. Mencken wrote of this foremost naturalistic novel, 'Its outstanding merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness and fervour. ' Ford Madox Ford observed: '. in my mind, the idea of Sister Carrie [exists] as a goldenish spot in the weariness of the world.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 - December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0087 ] James, Henry. The Marriages and Other Stories. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500873. Foreword By Eleanor M. Tilton. 364 pages. paperback. CD87. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes - The Marriages, The Real Thing, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, The Two Faces, The Papers, Julia Bride, The Pension Beaurepas, The Point of View, Fordham Castle. From The Marriages and others of these rarely anthologized stories, it is clear that Henry James 'delights in the vulgarities he is falsely rumored to deplore.' These are two - edged parables of a sophisticated ironist who was as apt to disparage what readers expected him to praise as he was to create a context in which certain unlikely people gained sudden dignity. As Eleanor M. Tilton suggests, Henry James is both amused and amusing. He 'disconcerts the moralists because he brings an inquiring eye to bear closely upon contemporary folly, error, and wickedness as if these were canvasses to be authenticated for a collector eager to acquire - at the proper price - the true, the rare, and the most representative.' Ford Madox Ford wrote: 'Mr. James' work is the exact mirror of the world as he knows it - of the world as we know it.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0088 ] Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pathfinder. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500881. Afterword By Robert E. Spiller. 443 pages. paperback. CP88. Cover: Pucci. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Vigorous, self - reliant, amazingly resourceful and moral, James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo towers over and above the author's majestic descriptions of early frontier life, Indian raiders, and defenseless outposts. He the prototype of the Western hero; his vision of man in a natural context and his hatred of' middle - class hypocrisy give him his stature as a faultless arbiter of wilderness justice. He is no less adept at judging his own feelings of love - divided as they are between the woman whom he protects on a hazardous journey and the deep woods that sustain him in his beliefs. A rapid, climactic narrative, The Pathfinder is among the finest examples of epic action literature. '. the examples [Cooper] has given in his glorious fictions, of heroism, honor, and truth, of large sympathies between man and man. shall live through centuries to come. ' - William Cullen Bryant. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0089 ] LaFayette, Madame de. The Princess of Cleves. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 045150089x. Newly Translated From The French & With A Foreword By Walter J. Cobb. 191 pages. paperback. CD89. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Rumors bestir and reputations tremble in the sumptuous sixteenth - century court of Henri II. Against this lavish decadence, two of baroque literature's most exquisite lovers - the Princess of Clèves and the Duc de Nemours - enact their masque of devotion, singular confessions, and eccentric renunciation. Tortuously delicate, Madame de La Fayette's detailed romance reverberates with understated intrigue and brazenly forthright portraits. Widely circulated in French court circles, The Princess of C/eves heralded two main streams in literature - the psychological novel and the roman a clef. Jean Cocteau wrote, 'Read The Princess of Clèves; read and study it. In it you will find an illustration of Nietzsche's aphorism: 'Soundlessly, on doves' feet, they make their way amongst us - the ideas that change the face of the earth.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (baptized 18 March 1634 - 25 May 1693), better known asMadame de La Fayette, was a French writer, the author of La Princesse de Clèves, France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in literature. Christened Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, she was born in Paris to a family of minor but wealthy nobility. At 16, de la Vergne became the maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from Gilles MEnage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. MEnage would lead her to join the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de ScudEry. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, had died a year before, and the same year her mother married Renaud de SEvignE, uncle of Madame de SEvignE, who would remain her lifelong intimate friend. In 1655, de la Vergne married Francois Motier, comte de La Fayette, a widowed nobleman some eighteen years her senior, with whom she would have two sons. She accompanied him to country estates in Auvergne and Bourbonnais although she made frequent trips back to Paris, where she began to mix with court society and formed her own successful salon. Some of her acquaintances included Henrietta of England, future Duchess of Orleans, who asked La Fayette to write her biography; Antoine Arnauld; and the leading French writers Segrais and Huet. Earlier on, during the Fronde, La Fayette had also befriended theCardinal de Retz. Settling permanently in Paris in 1659, La Fayette published, anonymously, La Princesse de Montpensier in 1662. From 1665 onwards she formed a close relationship with Francois de La Rochefoucauld, author of Maximes, who introduced her to many literary luminaries of the time, including Racine and Boileau. 1669 saw the publication of the first volume of Zaïde, a Hispano-Moorish romance which was signed by Segrais but is almost certainly attributable to La Fayette. The second volume appeared in 1671. The title ran through reprints and translations mostly thanks to the preface Huet had offered. La Fayette's most famous novel was La Princesse de Clèves, first published anonymously in March 1678. An immense success, the work is often taken to be the first true French novel and a prototype of the early psychological novel. The death of La Rochefoucauld in 1680 and her husband in 1683 led La Fayette to lead a less active social life in her later years. Three works were published posthumously: La Comtesse de Tende (1718), Histoire d'Henriette d'Angleterre (1720), and Memoires de la Cour de France (1731). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0090 ] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground/White Nights/The Dream of a Ridiculous Man & Selections From the House of the Dead. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500903. Newly Translated From The Russian & With An Afterword By Andrew R. MacAndrew. 240 pages. paperback. CP90. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, WHITE NIGHTS, THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN, and SELECTIONS FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD. In this Signet Classic volume can be seen Dostoyevsky's evolving outlook on man's fate. The works presented here were written at distinct periods in the author's life, at decisive moments in his groping for political philosophy and a religious answer. The characters are representative of the human hearts he probed with such surprising insight. They include a whole range of tormented people - from the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying a human life to the irritating, anxious antihero of NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, a man who both craves and despises affection. Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky as 'an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul' and NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND as 'an awe - and terror - inspiring example of this sympathy.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. VICTOR TERRAS is a professor of Slavic languages and chairman of the Department of Slavic languages at Brown University. He has also taught at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. Among his many publications as THE YOUNG DOSTOEVSKY, and translations of Dostoevsky's Notebooks for THE POSSESSED and A RAW YOUTH. EDWARD WASIOLEK is chairman of the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, and Avalon Foundation Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He edited and translated Dostoevsky's Notebooks for CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and edited the Notebooks for THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED, and A RAW YOUTH. He is the author of DOSTOEVSKY: THE MAJOR FICTION, coauthor of NINE SOVIET PORTRAITS, and author or editor of numerous other works. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0091 ] Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500911. Foreword By Eleanor M. Tilton. 328 pages. paperback. CT91. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - With his portrait of George F. Babbitt, the conniving, prosperous real - estate man from Zenith, Sinclair Lewis created one of the ugliest, but most convincing, figures in American fiction - the total conformist. Babbitt's demons are power in his community and the self - esteem he can only receive from others. In his attempts to reconcile these aspirations, he is loyal to whoever serves his need of the moment: time and again he proves an opportunist in business practice and in domestic affairs. Outwardly he conforms with 'zip and zowie,' is a 'big booster' before the public eye; inwardly he converges day by day upon the utter emptiness of his soul - too filled with rationalizations and sentimentality to sense his own corruption. Babbitt gives consummate expression to the glibness and irresponsibility of the hardened, professional social climber. H. G. Wells said of this novel: 'I wish I could have written Babbitt.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 - January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded ‘for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.' His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, ‘[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0092 ] Lewis, Sinclair. Arrowsmith. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150092x. Afterword By Mark Schorer. 440 pages. paperback. CT92. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Martin Arrowsmith's singular, if somewhat ascetic, devotion to science affords Sinclair Lewis his most dramatic opportunity to portray an American whose work becomes his life. Forced to give up successive sinecures - instructor in medicine, small - town doctor, research pathologist - by obstacles ranging from public ignorance to the publicity - mindedness of a great foundation, Arrowsmith becomes virtually isolated as a seeker after truth. Even so, Lewis' poignant thesis would seem to be that American idealism cannot beget true tragedy, because its adherents lack a sympathetic audience and their stumbling - blocks are, for the most part, petty. Observing the Nobel Prize - winning author's double gifts for satire and realism, E. M. Forster said, 'He has lodged a piece of a Continent in the world's imagination' and AndrE Maurois proclaimed him 'a great novelist.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 - January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded ‘for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.' His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, ‘[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0093 ] Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451500938. Afterword By Mark Schorer. 440 pages. paperback. CT93. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The lonely predicament of Carol Kennicott, caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness, reflects the position in which America's turn - of - the - century, 'emancipated woman' found herself. Carol's dilemma is intensified by the fact that lives in the small, self - satisfied, Midwestern town of Gopher Prairie. An allegory of exile and return, Main Street attacks the drab complacency and ingrown mores of those who resist change, who are under the illusion that they have chosen their tradition. Carol's ostracism, however, results more from her own guilt at 'crusading' than from her rejection by those whom she would have changed. Maxwell Geismar lauded this work as 'a remarkable diary of the middle- class mind in America.' Its author was hailed by John Galsworthy for having written 'a most searching and excellent piece of work; a feather in the cap of literature.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 - January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded ‘for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.' His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, ‘[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0094 ] Bligh, Captain William. The Mutiny on Board H.M.S. Bounty. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451500946. Afterword By Milton Rugoff. 240 pages. paperback. CP94. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The most celebrated mutiny in the annals of the sea and the subsequent 3,600-mile South Sea voyage in an open boat were recorded by William Bligh, the Bounty's beleaguered master, amidst all the perils he underwent. A resentful crew, ravaging storms, savages, uncharted archipelagoes - elements of high adventure in themselves - are merely stages leading up to the anxiety-charged ordeal to come. In this deeply personal, yet objective narrative based upon his ship's log, Bligh documents the voyage of the Bounty and his relationship to his men - thereby posing the endlessly debated question of what manner of man he really was: sadistic disciplinarian of sensitive youth? Or a stern but just captain, a superb seaman, the victim of a rash young man made frantic by the loss of an island paradise? AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vice Admiral William Bligh, FRS, RN (9 September 1754 - 7 December 1817) was an officer of the British Royal Navy and a colonial administrator. A historic mutiny occurred during his command of HMS Bounty in 1789; Bligh and his loyal men made a remarkable voyage to Timor, after being set adrift in the Bounty's launch by the mutineers. Fifteen years after the Bounty mutiny, he was appointed Governor of New South Wales in Australia, with orders to clean up the corrupt rum trade of the New South Wales Corps, resulting in the so-called Rum Rebellion. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0095 ] Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500954. Afterword By A. Alvarez. 416 pages. paperback. CT95. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Thomas Hardy's deterministic art achieves fanatic intensity and raw perfection in the char. acterization of Jude Fawley, an impoverished stonemason who aspires to the ministry. Throughout his agonized existence, the cloistered halls and facades of Christminster, where Jude would study, sadistically invite him to rid himself of ignorance. His failure to fulfill the opposite expectations of the two women he loves and the violent deaths of his children thwart him in his ideal and point his destruction. Concerned with the annihilation of innocence, Jude the Obscure is a raging indictment of Victorian society. The censure attending its appearance was almost without precedent in the history of English literature. D. H. Lawrence detected 'a constant revelation. , a great background, vital and vivid. This is the wonder of Hardy's. novels, and gives them their beauty.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Hardy (June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin. Most of his fictional works - initially published as serials in magazines - were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. As T. S. Eliot put it, 'The work of Thomas Hardy represents. a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs. at times his style touches sublimity.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0096 ] Prevost, Abbe. Manon Lescaut. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500962. Newly Translated From The French & With An Introduction By Donald M. Frame. 191 pages. paperback. CP96. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Written by a monastic priest who re - entered the world, Manon Lescaut is the story of a naive courtesan's tried and tested love for a young theologian who becomes gambler, thief and murderer in order to protect her. The AbbE PrEvost's sparse, meticulous style traces the lovers' flights through shadowy inns, side streets, Parisian prisons - only to resolve their passion with tragic impact in a lonely Louisiana field outside a penal colony. Manon Lescaut was banned by the Church but resulting publicity made it the talk of Europe. Later adaptations as opera by Massenet and Puccini insured the romance's popularity and influence on world romantic literature for over two hundred years. 'Manon Lescaut is a unique achievement. Against the turgid background of contemporaneous French prose romance it stands out with the 1~rightness of a gem. It belongs to its author's time - and work - yet towers over them.' - Donald M. Frame. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antoine Francois PrEvost d'Exiles (1 April 1697 - 23 December 1763), usually known simply as the AbbE PrEvost, was a French author and novelist. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0097 ] Marco Polo. The Travels of Marco Polo. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500970. A Modern Version Of The Famous Marsden-Wright Translation From The Italian.Edited & With An Introduction By Milton Rugoff. 302 pages. paperback. CD97. Cover: Kessler. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Perhaps the longest and most remarkable journey ever undertaken was that of young Marco Polo, who set out from Venice in 1271 and wandered into the unknown East as far as Cathay. When he returned twenty - five years later he told such a tale - of the vast empire and dazzling court of Kublai Khan, of terrible deserts and great mountain ranges, of yogis and pearl divers and cannibals, of men who offered their wives to visitors, of the Old Man of the Mountain with his hashish - drugged 'Assassins,' of stones that burned and streams of jade -. that few believed him. Today we know that Marco's account is not only an amazing narrative of strange experiences, but the richest and most reliable picture of the Near East, India, and the Orient of the Middle Ages. This Signet Classic edition is the most thoroughly annotated popular edition ever published of The Travels of Marco Polo. The text is a complete1y modern version of the famous Marsden - Wright translation. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marco Polo (September 15, 1254 - January 8–9, 1324) was a Venetian merchant traveller whose travels are recorded in Livres des merveilles du monde (Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, c. 1300), a book that introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned the mercantile trade from his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, who travelled through Asia, and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, returning after 24 years to find Venice at war with Genoa; Marco was imprisoned and dictated his stories to a cellmate. He was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Marco Polo was not the first European to reach China (see Europeans in Medieval China), but he was the first to leave a detailed chronicle of his experience. This book inspired Christopher Columbus and many other travellers. There is a substantial literature based on Polo's writings; he also influenced European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Fra Mauro map. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0098 ] Thoreau, Henry David. A Week On the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500989. Foreword By Dennis Sutcliffe. 341 pages. paperback. CT98. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Composed largely at Walden Pond from early journals and notes of a trip made with his brother some years earlier, Henry Thoreau's apprentice work wholly reveals his life - obsession with the theme of self - sufficiency. Pages of soaring description of wildlife and woodland living are. merely points of departure for fiery, often exuberant polemics on the need for moral fortitude in a society based on utilitarianism. Platonic ideals and mutability, the Bhagavad - Gita and Christian dogma, highly personal notes on economics and satire, are only a few of the meditative counterpoints engendered by intense contemplation of nature. Throughout this rebellious tract filled with hyperboles of youth emerging into manhood, Thoreau implicitly voices his refusal to live out a life of 'quiet desperation.' Americas ~ foremost example of the free spirit, he stands in every sense, as Emerson described him, 'a bachelor of nature.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and ‘Yankee' love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau is sometimes cited as an anarchist, and though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government - 'I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government' - the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: ‘'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.' Richard Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity, noting that Thoreau's ‘sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0099 ] Tarkington, Booth. Alice Adams. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451500997. Afterword By Gerard Previn Meyer. 239 pages. paperback. CP99. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Alice Adams has been called Booth Tarkington's greatest book. A Pulitzer Prize winner, it is a novel of a vain young girl's desperate efforts to surmount the barriers of small - town provincial snobbery. Unfortunately for Alice's social ambitions, her family is poor and undistinguished. When aristocratic Arthur Russell meets and falls in love with her, Alice contrives endless lies to conceal from him the Adams's true economic status. Pressured by his affection for his daughter and the incessant nagging of his wife, Virgil Adams exchanges his security as an employee for the uncertain risks of an independent manufacturer. More than the simple story of shallow social climbing, Alice Adams is the poignant study of an American family searching for its identity in a fluctuating society. Few writers of American fiction, have surpassed Tarkington's acute understanding of human nature. With consummate art he defines the character of urban. Midwest America after the First Great War - its native humor, warmth, conventions, and prejudices. Sinclair Lewis wrote of Tarkington, •. one of the American talents which are not merely agreeable but worth the most exact study. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869 - May 19, 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner and John Updike. Although he is little read now, in the 1910s and 1920s he was the U.S.'s greatest living author. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0100 ] Orwell, George. 1984. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451501004. Afterword By Erich Fromm. 269 pages. paperback. CP100. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and George Orwell's 1984 are the great modern classics of 'Negative Utopia' - not dramas of what life might be. but nightmares of what it is becoming. The world of 1984 is one in which eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity, in which the Party keeps itself in power by complete control over man's actions and his thoughts. As the lovers Winston Smith and Julia learn when they try to evade the Thought Police, and then join the underground opposition, the Party can smash the last impulse of love, the last flicker of individuality. But let the reader beware: 1984 is more than a satire of totalitarian barbarism. 'It means us, too,' says Erich Fromm in his Afterword. It is not merely a political novel but also a diagnosis of the deepest alienation in the mind of Organization Man. George Orwell writes with a swift clean style that has come down from Defoe. Like Defoe, he creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing - from the first sentence to the last four words. words which might stand as the epitaph of the twentieth century. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0101 ] Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451501012. Afterword By Perry Miller. 381 pages. paperback. CP101. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Published in 1820, Washington Irving's celebrated SKETCH BOOK has proved as enduring as the enchanted Kaatskill Mountains he immortalized. From these masterpieces in miniature have emerged such universal figures of American fiction and fantasy as Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Sage, storyteller, wit, Washington Irving touched on many subjects and treated each with a master's hand. Included in his volume are tales of romance, vignettes on bygone English customs, travel pictures, reflections on historic landmarks, essays on the American Indian, biographical discourses, and literary musings. Fresh in theme, bewitching in style, and superb in craftsmanship, his stories earned Washington Irving his place as father of American literature. Thackeray called Washington Irving the 'first ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 - November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories 'Rip Van Winkle' (1819) and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' (1820), both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors and the Alhambra. Irving served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. He continued to publish regularly - and almost always successfully - throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Francis Jeffrey, and Charles Dickens. As America's first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0102 ] Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451501020. 496 pages. paperback. CP102. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of the great novelist's most popular works, Oliver Twist is also the purest distillation of Dickens' genius. This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse, runs away to London where he is captured by thieves and finally escapes, is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. Oliver Twist presents sonic of the most sinister characters in Dickens: the master thief, Fagin; the leering Artful Dodger; the murderer, Bill Sikes. along with some of his most sentimental and comical characters. Only Dickens could mix terror with farce with pathos with piety in one unified work. Only Dickens could give us nightmare and daydream together. '. Oliver Twist, amidst all the accouterments of a novel, has the primitive appeal of a fairy tale; it forms one of those basic stories that are not forgotten because they were partly familiar before they were read, being the stuff of young dreams and fears.' Edward Le Comte. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0103 ] Chateaubriand, Francois-Rene de. Atala & Rene. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501039. Newly Translated From The French & With A Foreword By Walter J. Cobb. 127 pages. paperback. CD103. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - These strange and charming romances, Atala and RenE, are the most influential works of the solitary genius who has been called 'the true founder of romanticism in France.' Originally planned as two episodes in a longer work, they form a perfect fictional whole. In Atala, the tale of a young Indian adventurer and a Christianized Indian princess, Chateaubriand explores 'the harmonies the Christian religion with the scenes of nature and the passions of the human heart.' The story of RenE, a Frenchman whose melancholy drives him to the depths of the American forest, illustrates. 'the terrible consequences of impassioned love and solitude. ' For all the sweep of action, the extravagant emotional style, the fantastic scenery, the importance of these stories lies in their ideas. With Atala and RenE, Chateaubriand began to lead the emerging romantic movement toward an especially poetic kind of Catholicism, a sympathy with nature, and a preoccupation with melodramatic and romantic egos. As Walter J. Cobb says, 'With Chateaubriand, a new dawn was breaking.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois-RenE, vicomte de Chateaubriand (4 September 1768 - 4 July 1848) was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature. Descended from an old aristocratic family from Brittany, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition and in an age when a significant part of the intelligentsia was turning against the Church, authored the GEnie du christianisme in defence of the Catholic faith. It is his autobiography MEmoires d'outre-tombe ('Memoirs from Beyond the Grave'', published posthumously 1848–1850), however, that is nowadays generally considered his most accomplished work. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0104 ] Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451501047. Foreword By Richard Chase. 271 pages. paperback. CP104. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This Signet Classic is the first generally available paperback edition at any price of the entire Specimen Days - Walt Whitman's most neglected masterpiece. In the spontaneous prose of this great work Walt Whitman reveals himself as prophetic explorer of the Open Road, printer, editor, wound - dresser in Civil War hospitals, brilliant abstractionist of Nature and teeming cities, critic of morals and literature. The emerging portrait is that of a man with huge and relentless spirit who advocates endurance in the face of despair, robust tenderness in opposition to pettiness. In these pages - vast, American, informed - the reader cannot but catch the extent to which even the smallest occasion is a point of departure for Whitman's mystique of camaraderie, his total immersion in life, his thundering, almost blasphemous defiance of death. to begin to understand Whitman is to under - stand him in his contradictions. His inner opposition, his ambiguities, his wit, like his democratic faith, his optimism, and his belief in the self, are native to the man as they are to America. For the8e reasons one cherishes Watt Whitman - and takes him to be in a real sense 'the spokesman for the tendencies of his country.' - RICHARD CHASE. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter ‘Walt' Whitman (May 31, 1819 - March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and - in addition to publishing his poetry - was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle. Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men. Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0105 ] James, Henry. The Madonna of the Future and Other Early Stories. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501055. Foreword By Willard Thorp. 284 pages. paperback. CD105. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes the stories - THE MADONNA OF THE FUTURE, The Story of a Year, My Friend Bingham, The Story of a Masterpiece, A Light Man, At Isella, The Last of the Valerii, Four Meetings. The 'work sheet' of James's maturation into one of the most polished stylists of world literature, these stories reveal the author's early concern with artists, travelers, idealists - here and abroad - who act out of guilt and renunciation, perversity, or a deeply private amorality. The eight stories that comprise this Signet Classic collection are printed here as they appeared in their first magazine publication, as the early readers of James's fiction first saw them. The Nation wrote of Henry James when he had published his first six stories, '[He is] the best writer of short stories in America. He is never common place, never writes without knowing what he wants to do, and never has an incident or character that is not in some way necessary to the production of such effects as he aims at.' Ezra Pound commented that 'there was emotional greatness. titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit less specifically powerful than the proverbial 'doom of the house' - Destiny, Deus ex machina - of great traditional art.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0106 ] Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501063. Foreword By Louis Auchincloss. 288 pages. paperback. CT106. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In this Pulitzer Prize - winning novel, Edith Wharton has written the story of an affable conformist whose marriage of convenience cannot extinguish his passion for another woman. and whose moral limitations make both women seem unreal to him. Handsome, affluent, with great promise as a lawyer, Newland Archer's interest in his cold, beautiful, and conventional wife gradually flags. His attraction to Countess Ellen Olenska - bizarre and challenging, separated from her husband - becomes the single threat to his secure position in high society, and, at the same time, leads him to question the values of that society. The Age of Innocence is a highly sophisticated inquiry into the totems and taboos of nineteenth - century New York elite circles and their crippling effect on natural inclinations. Of the author, whose lifelong preoccupation lay with this facet of society, Edmund Wilson wrote: 'Her tragic heroines and heroes are. passionate or imaginative spirits, hungry for emotional and intellectual experience, who find themselves locked into a small closed system, and either destroy themselves by beating their heads against their prison or suffer a living death in resigning themselves to it. Out of these themes she got a sharp pathos all her own.' Louis Auchincloss calls The Age of Innocence 'The finest of her novels. , painted with a richness of color and detail that delights the imagination. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones, January 24, 1862 - August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0107 ] Saltykov-Shchedrin,M. The Golovlovs. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451501071. Newly Translated From The Russian By Andrew R. MacAndrew.Afterword By William E. Harkins. 317 pages. paperback. CT107. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Rated 'among the very greatest novels in the world' by Arnold Bennett, The Golovlovs is one of the last - translated, but highest - ranking, realistic novels of nineteenth - century Russia. The vicious circle of greed, self - pity and hypocritical repentance perpetuated by Anna Petrovna, her children, and her children's children in pursuit of money brings disaster to bear on Golovlovo, the gray, half - ruined estate where family and servants conspire against their mistress. Anna's venomous relationship with her sons casts early implications of the ruin to follow, in which every offender grows strangely sympathetic. One by one, and with curious reversals of character, the Golovlovs fall prey to fantasy, drink, insanity, and moral disintegration, dispensing hatred, wit, and hideous flatteries. The Golovlovs is a 'novel of the generations,' which describes the fall of a house with all the scope and insight of artworks ranging from those that dealt with the House of Atreus to the novels of Thomas Mann and William Faulkner. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (27 January 1826 - 10 May 1889), was a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov, he acted as editor of the well-known Russian magazine, Otechestvenniye Zapiski, until it was banned by the government in 1884. His best known work is the novel The Golovlyov Family (1876). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0108 ] Fielding, Henry. Jonathan Wild. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 045150108x. Foreword By J.H. Plumb. 222 pages. paperback. CP108. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The outrages that Jonathan Wild commits against the simple, virtuous Heartfree epitomize one of the most villainous but memorably comic figures in literature. Wild is methodically evil: his thefts and vices, violence and grand deceptions, are merely steppingstones in his progress toward 'greatness.' In writing about this sublime blackguard, Henry Fielding drew on his knowledge of London's Gin Lane, where he served as magistrate, on legends surrounding an actual archcriminal, and on the figure of the King's minister, Sir Robert Walpole, that nemesis whom Pope, Swift, and Gay lampooned in their greatest works. Jonathan Wild is perhaps the Enlightenment's most ironic pageant of corruption - the book in which Fielding's dormant theme that 'greatness' and 'goodness' have no part in each other gleams with polished bitterness and gallows humor. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 - 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones. Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement, having founded (with his half-brother John) what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners, using his authority as a magistrate. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0109 ] McGuffey, William Holmes. McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader-1879 Edition. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501098. Foreword By Henry Steele Commager. 364 pages. paperback. CT109. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The influence that McGuffey's Eclectic Readers exerted on the minds of American schoolchildren for the better part of a century has, in recent years, been debated in such diverse quarters a; scholarly treatises and the popular press. Extolling the Hamiltonian view of democracy, the Calvinistic approach to theology, and Blackstone's legal ideas on property, no truer index to the beliefs and goals of a generation of aspiring young Americans can be found. Of this famous selection of moral pronouncements and extracts, Hamlin Garland once said: 'I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers. I got my first taste of Shakespeare.' This Signet Classic is reprinted from the 1879 edition of McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Holmes McGuffey (September 23, 1800 - May 4, 1873) was a college professor president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks. An estimated 122 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960[citation needed], placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0110 ] Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501101. Afterword By Walter Allen. 336 pages. paperback. CD110. Cover: Max?. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The blind energies and defiant acts that bring an ambitious man to power can also destroy him. This is the theme that Thomas Hardy explores through his portrait of his greatest and most tragic hero - Michael Henchard, the self - driven grain merchant of Casterbridge. From his drunken sale of his wife and baby at a country fair to his subjugation of a farming village, Henchard's life is an epic attempt to bring the world to heel as he hides, even from himself, all vestiges of emotional vulnerability. 'Michael Henchard dominates the novel, is the novel, to an extent unparalleled by any character in Hardy's other fiction,' writes Walter Allen. 'He is a figure of commanding stature. He seems to contain all nature within himself, as a great bull might be said to do. This almost animal impercipience separates him from Shakespeare's tragic heroes, though in one respect he has affinities with Macbeth. External nature seems to join in the fight against him, but it is nature interpreted by superstition. The superstition is made credible by its poetic quality; and the poetry enhances our apprehension of Henchard's tragic fate.' And T. S. Eliot wrote, 'The work of Thomas Hardy represents. a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs. at times his style touches sublimity.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Hardy (June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin. Most of his fictional works - initially published as serials in magazines - were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. As T. S. Eliot put it, 'The work of Thomas Hardy represents. a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs. at times his style touches sublimity.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0111 ] Twain, Mark. Life On the Mississippi. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 045150111x. Afterword By Leonard Kriegel. 382 pages. paperback. CD111. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Life on the Mississippi is at once a romantic history of a mighty river; an autobiographical account of Twain's early steamboat days; a storehouse of humorous anecdotes and sketches. It is the raw material from which Mark Twain wrote his finest novel - Huckleberry Finn. It is an epochal record of America's growth, a stirring remembrance of her vanished past. And it earned for its author his first recognition as a serious writer. '[This is] a book to be ranked with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as one of the indisputably great works in the Twain canon. a book that measures the American future by the boundaries of the American past, a bridge between the world of Thomas Jefferson and the world of John D. Rockefeller.' - Leonard Kriegel. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0112 ] Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451501128. Afterword By Murray Kreiger. 346 pages. paperback. CD112. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Henry James wrote of The Marble Faun: 'Hawthorne has done few things more beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between his immature and dimly - puzzled hero, with his clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely - seeing feminine nature of Miriam. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but. the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes and the ecstatic wandering, afterward, of the guilty couple through the 'bloodstained streets of Rome,' it would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative productions of our day.' The cosmopolitanism of this novel foreshadows one of the most important themes in our literature - the 'international theme' which was 40 later dominate the work of Henry James. Of all Hawthorne's fiction, The Marble Faun clearly dispels the myth of Hawthorne's unwavering Puritan morality. It projects the author's fascination with the eternal struggle between, in Murray Krieger's words, 'the unfeeling virtue of moral severity and the yielding grace of faulty humanity. the profound conflict between the limited claims of American moralism and of European aestheticism.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a ‘w' to make his name ‘Hawthorne' in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0113 ] Disraeli, Benjamin. Coningsby. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501136. Foreword By Asa Briggs. 480 pages. paperback. CT113. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Composed by a master diplomat who, in an. hour of defeat, possessed the drive and ability to fashion a work of art, Coningsby stands first in the thorny genre of the English political novel. It juxtaposes the romantic and cynical mind focused on the intrigues of government; it gains its power from two contrasted figures who grow in dimension specifically through the novel's historical elements rather than through conventional romantic portraiture. Pragmatic and fair - minded Harry Coningsby is a man who seeks reform; the enigmatic Sidonia, who possesses surpassing wealth and lacks the right to vote (although he advises kings), serves as a corrective to Coningsby's ends by questioning his means. Spanning the years from the first reform bill to the General Election of 1841, Disraeli's novel explores the default of Whigs and Tories to the new Conservative Party, the young lawmakers who have harnessed the best of ancient, chivalric tradition and current strategy to the goal of modern diplomacy. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, FRS, (21 December 1804 - 19 April 1881) was a British Conservativepolitician and writer, who twice served as Prime Minister. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the glory and power of the British Empire. He is, at 2015, the only British Prime Minister of Jewish birth. Disraeli was born in London. His father left Judaism after a dispute at his synagogue; young Benjamin became an Anglican at the age of 12. After several unsuccessful attempts, Disraeli entered the House of Commons in 1837. When the Conservatives gained power in 1841, Disraeli was given no office by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. In 1846, Peel split the party over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, which imposed a tariff on imported grain. Disraeli clashed with Peel in the Commons. The Conservatives who split from Peel had few who were adept in Parliament, and Disraeli became a major figure in the party, though many in it did not favour him. When Lord Derby, the party leader, thrice formed governments in the 1850s and 1860s, Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. He also forged a bitter rivalry with the Liberal Party's William Ewart Gladstone. Upon Derby's retirement due to ill health in 1868, Disraeli became Prime Minister briefly before losing that year's election. He returned to opposition, before leading the party to a majority in the 1874 election. He maintained a close friendship with Queen Victoria, who in 1876 created him Earl of Beaconsfield. Disraeli's second term was dominated by the Eastern Question - the slow decay of the Ottoman Empire and the desire of other countries, such as Russia, to gain at its expense. Disraeli arranged for the British to purchase a major interest in the Suez Canal Company (in Ottoman-controlled Egypt). In 1878, faced with Russian victories against the Ottomans, he worked at the Congress of Berlin to maintain peace in the Balkans and made terms favourable to Britain which weakened Russia, its longstanding enemy. This diplomatic victory over Russia established Disraeli as one of Europe's leading statesmen. World events thereafter moved against the Conservatives. Controversial wars in Afghanistan and South Africa undermined his public support. He angered British farmers by refusing to reinstitute the Corn Laws in response to poor harvests and cheap American grain. With Gladstone conducting a massive speaking campaign, his Liberals bested Disraeli's Conservatives in the 1880 election. In his final months, Disraeli led the Conservatives in opposition. He had throughout his career written novels, beginning in 1826, and he published his last completed novel, Endymion, shortly before he died at the age of 76. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0114 ] Alegria, Ciro. The Golden Serpent. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. Translated From The Spanish & With An Afterword By Harriet de Onis. 190 pages. paperback. CP114. Cover: Kossin.
DESCRIPTION - Unpredictably swift and menacing, unfathomable in its nature, the 'Golden Serpent' inspires reverence and terror in the tiny, scattered communities that border its banks - villages of peons pitched between pagan recklessness and Christian despair. Hardy agrarians, these people are prone to supernatural fears that arise from total dependence upon a river that bestows great gifts and, at times, destroys all that it has given. Here are the Andean peaks, surging rapids, river men, flower girls, fiestas, and mournful pipes. Here are the victims of avalanche and flood, witch hunts and plagues that corrode the mind and body. Ciro Alegria's lyric eloquence has produced a hypnotic vision of the remorseless Marañon country of Peru. In the words of Harriet de Onis, 'He has created a world peopled by beings teeming with life, with their sorrows and joys, their aspirations and defeats, and all suffused with that poetry which comes from emotion recalled in tranquillity. And when progress has spanned the turbulent Maranon with bridges, has dammed and channeled its treacherous waters, and the boatmen of Calemar have disappeared, their work done, The Golden Serpent will remain as a monument to the days when it ran free and bold, tamed only by brave men.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ciro Alegría Bazán (November 4, 1909 - February 17, 1967) was a Peruvian journalist, politician, and novelist. Born in Huamachuco District, he exposed the problems of the native Peruvians while learning about their way of life. This understanding of how they were oppressed was the focus for his novels. He attended classes at the University of Trujillo, and worked briefly as a journalist for the newspaper El Norte. In 1930 Alegría joined the Aprista movement, dedicated to social reform as well as improving the welfare of native Peruvians. He was imprisoned several times for his political activities before finally being exiled to Chile in 1934. He remained in exile in both Chile and later the United States up until 1948. Later, he taught at the University of Puerto Rico, and wrote about the Cuban revolution while in Cuba. His most well known novel, Broad and Alien is the World (1941) or El mundo es ancho y ajeno, won the Latin American Novel Prize in 1941, and brought him international attention. It depicts an Andean community, living in the Peruvian highlands. The book was later published in the United States and has been reprinted many times, in multiple languages. Alegría returned to Peru in 1957. He joined President Fernando Belaúnde Terry's party (Accion Popular) and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1963. He died unexpectedly in Lima, Peru on February 17, 1967. After his death, his widow published many of his essays and reports he had written for various newspapers. He was 58 years old. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0115 ] Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501152. Foreword By Gerald Weales. 304 pages. paperback. CP115. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is Oscar Wilde's novel of a youth whose features, year after year, retain the same youthful appearance of innocent beauty, while the shame of his hideous vices become mirrored, year after year, on the features of his portrait. Tempted by the cynical Lord Henry Wotton, the angelic - faced Dorian Gray enters into a life of gradual dissipation. Soon student surpasses master. Dorian's power for evil leads him into acts of debauchery, degradation, and finally murder, before the diabolic secret he shares with his portrait is dramatically revealed. Published in 1891, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY was attacked by many as a piece of hedonism, praised by others as a penetrating commentary on life. It reflects the rebellious philosophy of the Esthetic Movement and epitomizes Wilde's literary revolt against the propriety and pious sentimentality of the Victorian Era. Included in this Signet Classic are three of Oscar Wilde's short stories - the witty and sophisticated LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME, and two charming fairy tales, THE HAPPY PRINCE and THE BIRTHDAY OF THE INFANTA. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He graduated from Oxford University in 1878 with a reputation as a brilliant scholar and quickly dazzled London society with his wit and his flamboyant dress. His first literary successes came in the 1880s with his lecture tour of America and the publication of his fairy tales. These were followed by five highly polished plays and The Picture of Dorian Gray, all completed during the first half of the 1890s. After losing a slander suit over accusations of his homosexual behavior, Wilde was prosecuted and spent two years in prison. Following his release in 1897, estranged from his wife and children, Wilde moved to Paris, where he died in 1900. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0116 ] Stephens, James. Deirdre. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501160. Afterword By Walter Starkie. 155 pages. paperback. CP116. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The tragic theme of Deirdre has meant for every Irish man and woman what the legend of Helen of Troy meant for the ancient Greeks, and Deirdre's beauty has inspired the Gaelic poets for centuries,' writes Walter Starkie in his Afterword. He goes on to point out that of all the modern versions of the legend - including those by W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge - 'only that of James Stephens tells the complete tragic tale according to the Gaelic original.' James Stephens' Deirdre is a magical novel couched in antiquity's bold and barbaric trappings. It is a story of innocence and experience, of the clash of desires between youth and middle age. '[He) has all my admiration. ' - W. B. Yeats. 'To James Stephens Demeter gave the rhapsodic gift of minstrelsy as well as storytelling, which impelled him to forsake the higher slopes of Parnassus for the lonely glens and raths haunted by the 'shee,' the ghostly descendants of the ancient heroes of the Gaels.' - Walter Starkie. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Stephens (9 February 1880 - 26 December 1950) was an Irish novelist and poet. James' mother worked in the home of the Collins family of Dublin and was adopted by them. James was committed to the Meath Protestant Industrial School for Boys as a small child and spent his childhood there. He attended school with his adopted brothers Thomas and Richard (Tom and Dick) before graduating as a solicitor's clerk. They competed and won several athletic competitions despite James' tiny stature (he stood 4'10" in his socks). He was known affectionately as 'Tiny Tim'. He was much enthralled by the tales of military valour of his adoptive family and would have become a soldier except for his height. By the early 1900s James was increasingly inclined to socialism and the Irish language (he spoke and wrote Irish) and by 1912 was a dedicated Irish Republican. He was a close friend of the 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh, who was then editor of "The Irish Review" and deputy headmaster in St Enda's, the radical bilingual school run by PH Pearse and would be manager of the Irish Theatre, and spent much time with MacDonagh in 1911. His growing nationalism brought a schism with his adopted family, but probably won him his job as registrar in the National Gallery of Ireland, where he worked between 1915 and 1925, having previously had an ill-paid job with the Mecredy solicitors' firm. James Stephens produced many retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales. His retellings are marked by a rare combination of humour and lyricism (Deirdre, and Irish Fairy Tales are often especially praised). He also wrote several original novels (The Crock of Gold, Etched in Moonlight, Demi-Gods) based loosely on Irish fairy tales. The Crock of Gold in particular has achieved enduring popularity and has often been reprinted Stephens began his career as a poet under the tutelage of "Æ" (George William Russell). Stephens's first book of poems, Insurrections, was published in 1909. His last book, Kings and the Moon (1938), was also a volume of verse. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0117 ] James, Henry. The Ambassadors. New York. 1960. Signet/New American Library. 0451501179. Afterword By R.W. Stallman. 384 pages. paperback. CP117. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Henry James considered this book to be his most perfect work of art. The ambassadors of the title are the emissaries sent by Mrs. Newsome, a wealthy New England widow, to restore to the home town and the family business her son Chad who has lingered too long in Paris, reputedly detained by a sordid liaison. Lambert Strether, the first of the envoys and the novel's strait-laced hero, embarks on the mission only to find himself caught up in a romantic intrigue, the outcome of which will radically change the direction and purpose of his life. Since its publication in 1903, The Ambassadors has come to be regarded as a masterpiece of American fiction because of its remarkable technical structure, its profound moral significance, and its perceptive contrast of New World conscience and Old World culture. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0118 ] Shaw, George Bernard. Plays. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501187. paperback. CP118. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, & Man and Superman. George Bernard Shaw demanded truth and despised convention. He punctured hollow pretensions and smug prudishness - sugar - coating his criticism with ingenious and irreverent wit. In Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, and Man and Superman, the great playwright satirizes accepted attitudes toward: woman's place in society, military heroism, marriage, the pursuit of man by woman. From a social, literary, and theatrical standpoint, these four plays are among the foremost dramas of the ages - as, intellectually stimulating as they are thoroughly enjoyable. 'My way of joking is to tell the truth: it is the funniest joke in the world.' - G. B. Shaw. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Shaw, George Bernard. (Born July 26, 1856 ). .. George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 - 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Issues which engaged Shaw's attention included education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege. He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council. In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively. Shaw turned down all other awards and honours, including the offer of a knighthood. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0119 ] Azuela, Mariano. The Underdogs. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501195. Translated From The Spanish By E. Munguia Jr. Foreword By Harriet de Onis. 151 pages. paperback. CP119. Cover: Kossin. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Ten years after its publication in a small El Paso paper, The Underdogs achieved world - wide renown as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution. It is the story of Demetrio Maclas, a naïve, peace - loving Indian, who is forced to side with the rebels to save his family. In the course of battle, he becomes a compulsive militarist whose courage, almost despite himself, leads to a generalship in Villa's army. But as the Cause suffers defeat after defeat, Maclas loses prestige and moral purpose at the hands of turncoats, camp followers, and the peasants who had once loved him. Carleton Beals wrote of this novel, 'The scenes have the brutality of Gorky. Azuela is the Mexican Chekhov only in so much as he is a doctor; in all else he is close to Gorky, with a touch of Gorky's terrific pessimism, but none of Gorky's revolutionary optimism.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mariano Azuela González (January 1, 1873 - March 1, 1952) was a Mexican author and physician, best known for his fictional stories of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He wrote novels, works for theatre and literary criticism. Azuela wrote many pieces including the newspaper piece ‘Impressions of a Student' in 1896, the novel AndrEs PErez, maderista in 1911, and Los de abajo, (or The Underdogs), in 1915. Azuela was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. During his days in the Mexican Revolution, Azuela wrote about the war and its impact on Mexico. He served under president Francisco I. Madero as chief of political affairs in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco - his home town. After Madero's death, he joined the military forces of Julián Medina, a follower of Pancho Villa, where he served as a field doctor. He later was forced for a time to emigrate to El Paso, Texas. There he wrote Los de abajo, a first-hand description of combat during the Mexican revolution, based on his experiences in the field. In 1917 he moved to Mexico City where for the rest of his life he continued his writing and worked as a doctor among the poor. In 1942 he received the Mexican national prize for literature. On April 8, 1943 he became a founding member of Mexico's National College. In 1949 he received the Mexican national prize for Arts and Sciences. He died in Mexico City March 1, 1952 and was placed in a sepulchre of the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0120 ] Yeats, William Butler. The Celtic Twilight and a Selection of Early Poems. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501209. Foreword By Walter Starkie. 222 pages. paperback. CP120. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The tales that comprise The Celtic Twilight Portray Yeats's mystical evolution through world - symbols and show the extent to which this century's greatest English - language poet remained essentially nationalistic in order to approach the universal concerns. Ancient Irish mythology was second nature to Yeats, and from it he drew or reconstructed heroes, lovers, beggars, and fools for these tales and lyrics - characters able to convey authoritatively his metaphysic as he himself, a common man, could not. Forced beyond the limits of fact and legend by subjects as personal as they were universal, Yeats alone was eclectic enough to turn ritual magic, alchemy, the Upanishads, even Theosophy, to his own symbolic uses without the risk of affectation. No modern poet has fully escaped the trancelike self - assurance and scourging rhythms that invigorate his verses. Of the poet himself, T. S. Eliot has said he is 'certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as ‘inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.' Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate Ezra Pound. Yeats was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 and those slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0121 ] Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501217. Introduction By C.M. Woodhouse. 128 pages. paperback. CP121. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - This remarkable book has been described in many ways - as a masterpiece. a fairy story. a brilliant satire. a frightening view of the future. A devastating attack on the pig - headed, gluttonous and avaricious rulers in an imaginary totalitarian state, it illuminates the range of human experience from love to hate, from comedy to tragedy. 'A wise, compassionate and illuminating fable for our time. The steadiness and lucidity of Orwell's wit are reminiscent of Anatole France and even of Swift.' - NEW YORK TIMES. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0122 ] Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000-1887. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501225. paperback. CP122. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Edward Bellamy's classic look at the future has been translated into over twenty languages and is the most widely read novel of its time. A young Boston gentleman is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty - first century - - from a world of war and want to one of peace and plenty. This brilliant vision became the blueprint of utopia that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 - May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle-like tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of over 160 ‘Nationalist Clubs‘ dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0123 ] Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Idylls of the King. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501233. paperback. CP123. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - 'With regal melancholy and a superb sense of craft, Tennyson's poems evoke Past and Present - the Isle of the Lotos-Eaters, heraldic Camelot, his own twilit English gardens - seeking to reconcile the Victorian zeal for public progress with private despair. Using his own eloquence or masks of mythic figures, Tennyson was the stylist most imitated by poets of his day - praised over all the rest for his vigorous portrayals of the 'general conscience' of statesmen and common men alike.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (6 August 1809 - 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as 'Break, Break, Break', 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', 'Tears, Idle Tears' and 'Crossing the Bar'. Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister, but died from a brain haemorrhage before they could marry. Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, 'Ulysses', and 'Tithonus'. During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success. A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including 'Nature, red in tooth and claw', ''Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all', 'Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die', 'My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure', 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield', 'Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers', and 'The old order changeth, yielding place to new'. He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0124 ] Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Ox-Bow Incident. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501241. paperback. CP124. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - This is a searing study of mob justice. The story takes place in the Old West, but it could happen anywhere, anytime that men of action let their anger goad them into taking the law into their own hands. Published in 1940, this powerful narrative was immediately hailed as a work of art. 'The Ox - Bow Incident is a triumph of restraint and workmanship. The tenseness that builds and eddies and comes back stronger is beautifully geared to the temper of each central character and the shifting emotions of the mob, as doubt, anger, stubbornness, physical cold, pity and revulsion hold them in turn,' said Max Gissen in the New Republic. Ben Ray Redman described it in The Saturday Review as 'A sinewy, masculine tale that progressively tightens its grip on the reader.' And Clifton Fadiman summed up the verdict of all the critics when he called this modern classic 'a masterpiece.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (August 3, 1909 - November 10, 1971) was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels and short stories. As a writer, he taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0125 ] Lagerlof, Selma. The Saga of Gosta Berling. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 045150125x. Translated From The Swedish and With An Afterword By Robert Bly. 319 pages. paperback. CT125. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - An unfrocked minister's picaresque search for redemption is the central drama of The Story of Gösta Berling, set in the farmlands of nineteenth - century Sweden. After the loss of his pulpit Gösta becomes a ne'er - do - well - chivalric, attractive, given to drink and dancing - whose every adventure is circumscribed by women. Openly pitied, secretly loved, he encounters a proud and courageous heiress, a famous beauty, a love - sick devotee, and a countess who has borne an illegitimate child - each of whom proffers him chances to prove his moral nature. Selma Lagerlof has exerted great formative power in Scandinavian letter, with particular influence on Hamsun and Lagerkvist. Her novel reveals an Andersenlike stylistic lightness, warmth, and predilection for supernatural events, which have caused critics to hail it as the foremost example of Swedish regional writing. Miss Lagerlof was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (20 November 1858 - 16 March 1940) was a Swedish author. She was the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and most widely known for her children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0126 ] Kleist, Heinrich von. The Marquise of O-- & Other Stories. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501268. Translated From The German By Martin Greenberg.Foreword By Thomas Mann. 288 pages. paperback. CT126. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The nightmare shock - tactics and controlled hysteria that Kleist perfected led the classicist Goethe to describe his stories as 'tainted with an incurable disease.' Yet 150 years later, his characters - men who commit crimes in the name of justice, who rage at dead enemies for denying them their revenge, who are driven insane by beatific experience - maintain the reality Kleist's fiction gave them. The Marquise of 0 - and Other Stories is concerned with the effects of extreme social pressure on the individual during a time of crisis. Against varying backdrops of social revolution, religious war, cloistered marriage, unearthly ecclesiastical music, and even earthquake, the heroes of these demonic parables surpass themselves to achieve unique martyrdom - or sink to the level of human beasts. In his Foreword to the present collection, Thomas Mann writes of the author: 'He was one of the greatest, boldest, and most ambitious poets Germany has produced. a man unique in every respect, whose achievement and career seemed to violate all known codes and patterns. Kleist dedicated himself to his extravagant themes with a passion little short of frenzy.' Includes: THE MARQUISE OF O - , MICHAEL KOHLHAAS, THE BEGGARWOMAN OF LOCARNO, THE ENGAGEMENT IN SANTO DOMINGO, THE FOUNDLING, THE EARTHQUAKE IN CHILE, ST. CECILIA OR THE POWER OF MUSIC, & THE DUEL. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (18 October 1777 - 21 November 1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him. Kleist was born into the von Kleist family in Frankfurt an der Oder in the Margraviate of Brandenburg. After a scanty education, he entered the Prussian Army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796, and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and philosophy at the Viadrina University and in 1800 received a subordinate post in the Ministry of Finance at Berlin. In the following year, Kleist's roving, restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence he visited Paris and then settled in Switzerland. Here he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke and Ludwig Friedrich August Wieland (d. 1819), son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family (1803, originally entitled The Ghonorez Family). In the autumn of 1802, Kleist returned to Germany; he visited Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland in Weimar, stayed for a while in Leipzig and Dresden, again proceeded to Paris, and returning in 1804 to his post in Berlin was transferred to the Domänenkammer (department for the administration of crown lands) at Königsberg. On a journey to Dresden in 1807, Kleist was arrested by the French as a spy; he remained a close prisoner of France in the Fort de Joux. On regaining his liberty, he proceeded to Dresden, where, in conjunction with Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829), he published the journal Phöbus in 1808. In 1809 Kleist went to Prague, and ultimately settled in Berlin, where he edited (1810/1811) the Berliner Abendblätter. Captivated by the intellectual and musical accomplishments of the terminally ill Henriette Vogel, Kleist, who was himself more disheartened and embittered than ever, agreed to do her bidding and die with her, carrying out this resolution by first shooting Vogel and then himself on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee (Little Wannsee) near Potsdam, on 21 November 1811. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, ‘Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work. He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation.' In the spring of 1799, the 21-year-old Kleist wrote a letter to his half-sister Ulrike in which he found it ‘incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life' (Lebensplan). In effect, Kleist sought and discovered an overwhelming sense of security by looking to the future with a definitive plan for his life. It brought him happiness and assured him of confidence, especially knowing that life without a plan only saw despair and discomfort. The irony of his later suicide has been the fodder of his critics. His first tragedy was The Schroffenstein Family (Die Familie Schroffenstein). The material for the second, Penthesilea (1808), queen of the Amazons, is taken from a Greek source and presents a picture of wild passion. In comedy, Kleist made a name with The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug) (1808), while Amphitryon (1808), an adaptation of Molière's comedy, received critical acclaim long after his death. Of Kleist's other dramas, Die Hermannsschlacht (1809) is a dramatic work of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, written as Austria and France went to war. It has been described by Carl Schmitt as the ‘greatest partisan work of all time'. In it he gives vent to his hatred of his country's oppressors. This, together with the drama The Prince of Homburg (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg oder die Schlacht bei Fehrbellin), which is among his best works, was first published by Ludwig Tieck in Kleist's Hinterlassene Schriften (1821). Robert Guiskard, a drama conceived on a grand plan, was left a fragment. Kleist was also a master in the art of narrative, and of his Gesammelte Erzählungen (Collected Short Stories) (1810–1811), Michael Kohlhaas, in which the famous Brandenburg horse dealer in Martin Luther's day is immortalized, is one of the best German stories of its time. The Earthquake in Chile (Das Erdbeben in Chili) and St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music (Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik) are also fine examples of Kleist's story telling as is The Marquise of O (Die Marquise von O.). His short narratives influenced those of Kafka. He also wrote patriotic lyrics in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. A Romantic by context, predilection, and temperament, Kleist subverted clichEd ideas of Romantic longing and themes of nature and innocence and irony, instead taking up subjective emotion and contextual paradox to show individuals in moments of crises and doubt, with both tragic and comic outcomes, but as often as not his dramatic and narrative situations end without resolution. Seen as a precursor to Henrik Ibsen and modern drama because of his attention to the real and detailed causes of characters' emotional crises, he was also understood as a nationalist poet in the German context of the early twentieth century, and was appropriated by Nazi scholars and critics as a kind of proto-Nazi author. To this day, many scholars see his play Die Hermannsschlacht (‘The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest‘, 1808) as prefiguring the subordination of the individual to the service of the Volk (nation) that became a principle of fascist ideology in the twentieth century. Kleist criticism of the last generation has repudiated nationalist criticism and concentrated instead mainly on psychological, structural and post-structural, philosophical, and narratological modes of reading. Kleist's The Broken Jug is one of the most staged plays of the German canon (1803–05). In the play, a provincial judge gradually and inadvertently shows himself to have committed the crime under investigation. In the enigmatic drama The Prince of Homburg (1811), a young officer struggles with conflicting impulses of romantic self-actualization and obedience to military discipline. Prince Friedrich, who had expected to be executed for his successful but unauthorized initiative in battle, is surprised to receive a laurel wreath from Princess Natalie. To his question, whether this is a dream, the regimental commander Kottwitz replies, ‘A dream, what else?' Kleist wrote his eight novellas later in his life and they show his radically original prose style, which is at the same time careful and detailed, almost bureaucratic, but also full of grotesque, ironic illusions and various sexual, political, and philosophical references. His prose often concentrates on minute details that then serve to subvert the narrative and the narrator, and throw the whole process of narration into question. In Betrothal in St. Domingo (Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo) (1811) Kleist examines the themes of ethics, loyalty, and love in the context of the colonial rebellion in Haiti of 1803, driving the story with the expected forbidden love affair between a young white man and a black rebel woman, though the reader's expectations are confounded in typically Kleistian fashion, since the man is not really French and the woman is not really black. Here for the first time in German literature Kleist addresses the politics of a race-based colonial order and shows, through a careful exploration of a kind of politics of color (black, white, and intermediate shades), the self-deception and ultimate impossibility of existence in a world of absolutes. Kleist is also famous for his essays on subjects of aesthetics and psychology which, to the closer look, show a keen insight into the metaphysical questions discussed by philosophers of his time, such as Kant, Fichte and Schelling. In the first of his larger essays, ‘On the gradual development of thoughts in the process of speaking‘, Kleist shows the conflict of thought and feeling in the soul of man, leading to unforeseeable results through incidents which in their turn provoke the inner forces of the soul to express themselves in a spontaneous flow of ideas and words, both stimulating one another to further development. Kleist's view of the hidden forces in the human soul and the quite unstable and endangered position of the mind in their struggle can be compared to Freud's psychoanalytic model of the soul, especially to his notion of the ‘unconscious' and its hidden influences on the ego. Kleist claims that most people are advised to speak only about what they already understand. Instead of talking about what you already know, Kleist admonishes his readers to speak to others with ‘the sensible intention of instructing yourself.' Fostering a dialogue through the art of ‘skillful questioning' is the key behind achieving a rational or enlightened state of mind. And yet, Kleist employs the example of the French Revolution as the climactic event of the Enlightenment era whereby man broke free from his dark and feudal chains in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity. It is not that easy though for Kleist. Man cannot simply guide himself into the future with a rational mind as his primary tool. Therefore, Kleist strongly advocates for the usefulness of reflection ex post facto or after the fact. In doing so, man will be able to mold his collective consciousness in a manner conducive to the principles of free will. By reflecting after the fact, man will avoid the seemingly detestable inhibitions offered in rational thought. In other words, the will to power has ‘its splendid source in the feelings,' and thus, man must overcome his ‘struggle with Fate‘ with a balanced mixture of wisdom and passion. The metaphysical theory in and behind Kleist's first essay is that consciousness, man's ability to reflect, is the expression of a fall out of nature's harmony, which may either lead to dysfunction, when the flow of feelings is interrupted or blocked by thought, or to the stimulation of ideas, when the flow of feelings is cooperating or struggling with thought. A state of total harmony, however, cannot be reached. Only in total harmony of thought and feeling life and consciousness would come to be identical through the total insight of the mind, an idea elaborated and ironically presented in Kleist's second essay ‘The Puppet Theatre' or ‘On the Marionette Theater' (Über das Marionettentheater). This essay also shows Fichte's influence on Kleist. Similar to Kleist, Fichte had emphasised man's ability and necessity to develop his mind in infinity, without ever being able to reach identity with the absolute, because the individual's existence just hangs on the difference. Without Kleist saying this expressedly, works of art, such as his own, may offer an artificial image of this ideal, though this is in itself wrenched out from the same sinful state of insufficiency and rupture that it wants to transcend. Kleist's philosophy is the ironic rebuff of all theories of human perfection, whether this perfection is projected in a golden age at the beginníng (Hölderlin, Novalis), in the present (Hegel), or in the future (as the philosophers of the enlightenment and still Marx would have seen it). His essays show man, like the literary works, torn apart by conflicting forces and held together on the surface only by illusions, like that of real love (if this was not the worst of all illusions). Jeronimo, for example, in Kleist's The Earthquake in Chile, is presented as emotionally and socially repressed and incapable of self-control, but still clinging to religious ideas and hopes. At the end of a process marked by chance, luck and coincidence, and driven by greed, hatred and the lust for power, embodied in a repressive social order, the human being that at the beginning had been standing between execution and suicide, is murdered by a mob of brutalized maniacs who mistake their hatred for religious feelings. The ending of this novella could be used to describe Kleist's concept of life as well as his philosophy and aesthetics, expressed in the ironic style which fits the content: ‘And sometimes ... it almost seemed to him, that he ought to be happy.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0127 ] Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501276. Translated From The French By Richard AldingtonForeword By Harry Levin. 384 pages. paperback. CT127. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The systematic corruption of the innocent by two partners - in - jealousy is the theme of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the great French novel that crystallizes the tragedy of the highly civilized society where the intellect reigns supreme in every facet of life, especially love. Revealed through their intimate, wickedly detached correspondence.; the conquests effected by the Marquise de Merteuil and the libertine Valmont, her former lover, are, on the surface, motivated by revenge. In a deeper sense, they are seen to be the results of a power struggle between the pair for sexual supremacy. Laclos has likened their exposure and eventual ruin to the doom of the hyperrational eighteenth - century regime whose immoralities he had observed so closely. AndrE Gide wrote of the author and his masterpiece: 'There is no doubt as to his being hand in glove with Satan. Yet this book, diabolical as its inspiration is, turns out, like every work of profound observation and exact expression, to contain, without the author's desire, much more instruction on morals than many a well - intentioned treatise.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de Laclos (18 October 1741 - 5 September 1803) was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). A unique case in French literature, he was for a long time considered to be as scandalous a writer as the Marquis de Sade or Nicolas-Edme REtif. He was a military officer and an amateur writer with a cynical outlook on human relations. However, he aspired to ‘write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on earth after his death'; he surely attained his goals with the lasting fame of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which is now widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of literature of the 18th century. Les Liaisons Dangereuses has inspired a number of critical and analytic commentaries, plays, and films. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0128 ] Zola, Emile. L'Assommoir. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501284. Newly Translated From The French By Atwood H. TownsendAfterword By Angus Wilson. 500 pages. paperback. CT128. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Producing a vision of horror through his relentless accumulation of facts, Emile Zola expresses in L'Assommoir his fascination with the fatalistic nightly inhabitants of Parisian taverns. The novel deals with the struggle for honorable survival made by Gervaise, a lame but proud laundress, whom fate leaves to support herself and her two illegitimate children. Her perennial hope to open her own shop is crushed on the brink of achievement by the added financial burden of a drunken husband and a parasitic lover out of her past. Her complete moral deterioration through drink, the flagrant nihilism of her final street encounters, have placed this book at the pinnacle of naturalistic literary accomplishment. Writing of Zola's Rougon - Macquart series and L'Assommoir, which is one section thereof, Henry James described the author's achievement: 'One strange animal after another stepped forth into the light. though it was doubtless not till the issue of L'Assommoir that the true type of the monstrous seemed to be reached. L'Assommoir is the nature of man - but not his finer, nobler, cleaner or more cultivated nature, it is the image of his free instincts, the better and the worse, the better struggling as they can, gasping for light and air, the worse making themselves at home in darkness, ignorance and poverty.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emile Francois Zola (2 April 1840 - 29 September 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0129 ] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501292. Newly Translated From The Russian By Andrew R. MacAndrew.Afterword By Marc Slonim. 703 pages. paperback. CQ129. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE POSSESSED is regarded the world over as the most shattering vision of nihilism in action to come out of Russia. Despite their different interpretations of radical politics, the young men, Stavrogin and Verhovensky combine fanaticism, treachery, and self - contradiction to incite an entire town to pillage, arson, and slaughter. In this story of misfits who believe in nothing and wish only to destroy, Dostoyevsky is everywhere concerned with the passion man demonstrates for the lie in order to create a chaos that mirrors his tortured soul. 'Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological,' while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature. He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.' - Edwin Muir AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. VICTOR TERRAS is a professor of Slavic languages and chairman of the Department of Slavic languages at Brown University. He has also taught at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. Among his many publications as THE YOUNG DOSTOEVSKY, and translations of Dostoevsky's Notebooks for THE POSSESSED and A RAW YOUTH. EDWARD WASIOLEK is chairman of the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, and Avalon Foundation Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He edited and translated Dostoevsky's Notebooks for CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and edited the Notebooks for THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED, and A RAW YOUTH. He is the author of DOSTOEVSKY: THE MAJOR FICTION, coauthor of NINE SOVIET PORTRAITS, and author or editor of numerous other works. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0130 ] Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501306. paperback. CP130. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about ‘packingtown,' the busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the ‘muckraking' novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turn of the century: the backbreaking labor, the injustices of ‘wage-slavery,' the bewildering chaos of urban life. THE JUNGLE, a story so shocking that it launched a government investigation, recreates this startling chapter if our history in unflinching detail. Always a vigorous champion on political reform, Sinclair is also a gripping storyteller, and his 1906 novel stands as one of the most important -- and moving -- works in the literature of social change. ‘Practically alone among the American writers of his generation,' wrote Edmund Wilson, ‘[Sinclair] put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them.' When it was first published in 1906, THE JUNGLE exposed the inhumane conditions of Chicago's stockyards and the laborer's struggle against industry and ‘wage slavery.' It was an immediate bestseller and led to new regulations that forever changed workers' rights and the meatpacking industry. A direct descendant of Dickens's HARD TIMES, it remains the most influential workingman's novel in American literature. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 - November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposE of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the free press in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him 'a man with every gift except humor and silence.' In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, but his campaign was defeated decisively. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0131 ] Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501314. Afterword By Mark Schorer. 271 pages. paperback. CP131. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This book challenges the concept of the American dream. It reveals the stubborn courage and pessimistic wit of midwest farmers who are scarcely conscious that they are somewhat to blame for their own misfortunes. Inspired by a visit to the Dakota farm country of his youth, Hamlin Garland's MAIN - TRAVELLED ROADS depicts the half - resigned, half - rebellious men and women who work the arid soil for the profit of shrewd landowners. These characters share a sense of deprivation, losing their farms, loved ones, and faith in people - with such recurrence that they feel guilt at even their own occasional, belated successes. 'If anyone is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the farmers in the West which is the translation of the Peasants' War into modern and republican terms, let him read MAIN - TRAVELLED ROADS. ' - W. D. Howells. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Hannibal Hamlin Garland (September 14, 1860 - March 4, 1940) was an American novelist, poet, psychical researcher essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0132 ] Tolstoy, Leo. Fables and Fairy Tales. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501322. Newly Translated From The Russian By Ann Dunnigan.Illustrated By Shelia Greenwald.Foreword By Raymond Rosenthal. 141 pages. paperback. CP132. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Fables and Fairy Tales is the first generally available translation of many of Leo Tolstoy's shorter and lesser - known works. With beautiful simplicity, the author brings his great themes of purgation and social justice to the succinct medium of the timeless fantasy - themes which are more diffuse and implicit in his novels. Simplicity of character and hard physical labor lead to spiritual reward for the kings, hermits, imps and talking animals, peasants and fools of these parables - whereas wit and cleverness are conditions for their imminent downfall. 'His art is so full and broad and true that he seems able to do for his own time and country what Shakespeare. did for his.' Havelock Ellis. 'Tolstoy perceived the dawning of a time when. the leading, illuminating and decisive spirit which is to unify and serve society must supersede the objective genius, and the ethical and intelligent rise above the irresponsibly lovely. ' - Thomas Mann. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0133 ] James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501330. Foreword By Willard Thorp. 254 pages. paperback. CT133. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, An International Episode, The Aspern Papers, The Altar of the Dead, & The Beast in the Jungle. Henry James considered 'the beautiful and blest nouvelle' to be 'the ideal form' for fiction, and to this genre he brought the full perfection of his imaginative artistry. The themes he chose and the values he set forth in the six nouvelles that comprise this Signet Classic typify the depth and power of his craftsmanship - the unique perception of a writer who unerringly deciphers the mind of a gay and flirtatious American girl adrift among the sophisticates of Europe. the motivations of a man who spends a lifetime waiting to experience his 'rare and strange' destiny. 'Few writers of fiction have been so inventive as Henry James,' writes Willard Thorp. Edmund Wilson commented that 'he can be judged only in the company of the very greatest.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0134 ] Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501349. Afterword By V.S. Pritchett. 832 pages. paperback. CQ134. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - VANITY FAIR is the story of Becky Sharp, one of the most beautiful, willful, and resourcefully charming pleasure - seekers in literature. With finishing - school credentials and proper connections, Becky begins as a governess, wins the hearts of the moneyed young and old, and, in the light of presentation at court and calculated scandals, emerges a full - fledged courtesan on the Continent, living surprisingly well beyond her means. Thackeray's greatest novel is a moral tapestry of early nineteenth - century English manners, and his persistent theme is the folly of the good - at - heart, the evil of those endowed with grace and wit. Anthony Trollope called Thackeray '. one of the recognized stars of the literary heaven.' V.S. Pritchett finds Thackeray '. the first of our novelists to catch life visually and actually as it passes in fragments before us. he is above all a superb impressionist - perhaps our greatest.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 - 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0135 ] Turgenev, Ivan. The Hunting Sketches. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501357. Newly Translated From The Russian & With An Afterword By Benard Guilbert Guerney. 415 pages. paperback. CT135. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - An uncanny observer of Russians of every class, Turgenev's huntsman learns the touching, but frequently comic, secrets in the complex relationships between peasants and their masters. In his journeys through the steppes and forests he finds courageous, practical men who submit to slavery, dreamers freer than the dissolute lords who own them, and servants made cruel by bondage. He is witness to village festivals and trysts, to public and private farces perpetrated by strangely incestuous, ingrown aristocrats. A faithful account of the mores in rural Russia, this book abounds in folklore and insights into Nature - renditions no less astute than its careful destruction of every human stereotype. 'For me, when I read in that book 'The Singers,' or 'Chertopkhanov and Nedopiuskin,' or that most beautiful of all pieces of writing, 'Bezhin Meadow,' I am conscious. always of Turgenev's face looking up out of the pages. he was the supreme creative writer.' - Ford Madox Ford. 'He lived, he sought, and he expressed in his works what he found - everything he found.' - Leo Tolstoy. 'I was enthralled by the portraits you put into print. What masterly limning! How one can see, and hear, and know all these peasants of the North. and all those countrified landowners, burghers or noblemen - it needed but a few words of yours to sketch momentary encounters with them into images aquiver with life and vivid! No one could have done this better than you.' - George Sand. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (November 9, 1818 - September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0136 ] Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters From An American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501365. Foreword By Albert E. Stone, Jr. 477 pages. paperback. CQ136. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - What, then, is the American, this new man?' An immigrant in a land of immigrants, caught between the contradictions of high ideals and harsh realities, Crèvecoeur was the first to give voice to the question, which runs like a leitmotiv through American thought and literature. His description of eighteenth - century America, from the seafaring towns of New England to the forests of the frontier, from the farms of freemen to plantations nurtured by the sweat of slaves, is more than brilliant reportage; it is a search forced by the writer's own pressing need to capture the elusive personality of his new land. In this volume, which for the first time unites under single cover Crèvecoeur's chief works, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, the reader encounters a consciousness whose intense self - examination and often ambiguous stance is both modern and uniquely American. These writings provide not only an unsurpassed picture of the American past but also an invaluable insight into the continuing mystery of the present. 'An accomplished work of art.' - ALBERT E. STONE, JR. 'Franklin is the real practical prototype of the American. Crêvecoeur is the emotional.' - D. H. LAWRENCE AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur (December 31, 1735 - November 12, 1813), naturalized in New York as John Hector St. John, was a French-American writer. He was born in Caen, Normandy, France, to the Comte and Comtesse de Crèvecœur (Count and Countess of Crèvecœur). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0137 ] Porter, Katherine Anne. Pale Horse, Pale Rider. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501373. Afterword By Mark Schorer. 175 pages. paperback. CP137. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Katherine Anne Porter is regarded as one of the most distinguished writers in the world today. Her style is a rare combination of subtlety and insight; her concern is 'human nature, the fatalities of life and the perils of human relationships.' In the three beautiful short novels that comprise PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER she explores the chaotic individualism experienced by those who cope with - and today outlive - their greatest crises. Miranda, the heroine of the first and last stories, survives the ghosts of a poignant but unreal childhood, the Great War, and a flu epidemic that claims her lover - to spend her days with a heightened sense of jeopardy. In 'Noon Wine', Farmer Thompson, though legally acquitted of the murder he commits, can find no justification for his crime and seeks release in a final and tragic act. 'Miss Porter is one of the finest writers of prose in America.' - Granville Hicks. 'There is a kind of magic about everything Miss Porter writes.' - New York Times. 'Katherine Anne Porter moves in the illustrious company headed by Hawthorne, Flaubert, and Henry; James.' - Saturday Review. With an Afterword by Mark Schorer AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 - September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. In 1990, Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 2905 was placed in Brown County, Texas, to honor the life and career of Porter. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0138 ] Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501381. Afterword By Compton MacKenzie. 508 pages. paperback. CP138. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Sir Walter Scott gathered a popular audience as no other writer had done before him; a great innovator, he virtually created one of the outstanding literary forms of the past hundred and fifty years - the historical novel. He infused this genre of fiction with color and spectacle, with romance, action, and suspense. In IVANHOE Sir Walter Scott gives reality to the life of twelfth - century England through his gallery of flesh - and - blood characters. The disinherited knight Ivanhoe and his fair lady Rowena, Richard the LionHearted and Robin Hood - these are people shaped by the forces of tradition, molded by their nation's history. Through them the past of England comes alive - a past of crusades, chivalry, and courtly love. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 - 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. A prominent member of the Tory establishment in Edinburgh, Scott was an active member of the Highland Society and served a long term as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–32). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0139 ] Balzac, Honore de. Pere Goriot. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 045150139x. Newly Translated From The French & With An Afterword By Henry Reed. 286 pages. paperback. CP139. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - ‘PÊRE GORIOT can rightly be regarded as one of the greatest of Balzac's novels,' writes Henry Reed of this masterful study of a father whose sacrifices for his daughters have become a maniacal compulsion. This novel marks Balzac's ‘real entrEe' into LA COMEDIE HUMAINE, his series of almost one hundred novels and short stories, which was to depict ‘human feelings, social crises, the whole pell-mell of civilization.' In PERE GORIOT the great novelist probes the ‘bourgeois tragedy' of money, power, and despair from two different directions. Through parental love Goriot is willingly reduced to poverty so that he may satisfy the demands of his well-married but debt-ridden daughters. On the other hand, Rastignac, the impoverished young man of integrity who is attracted to one of Goriot's daughters, becomes infected with ambition and succumbs to the fever for money and social success. Victor Hugo called Balzac ‘a man of genius,' and Stefan Zweig wrote that Pêre Goriot shows the ‘supreme architectonic skill with which Balzac. worked out in his mind to the last detail his vast structural design of the multifarious forms of human society.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Honore de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comedie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Perez Galdos, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comedie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0140 ] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501403. Newly Translated From The German By Catherine Hutter.Foreword By Hermann J. Weigand. 256 pages. paperback. CP140. Cover: Percy?. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This book is a unique collection comprising those works of Goethe which stress his positive attitude toward love and death. In these tales and memoirs of fated courtships and redemption through death, the great classicist avoids the melodramatic and macabre, infusing his writing with clairvoyant wisdom and 'the laughter of the gods.' His heroes and heroines, confronted by irreparable loss, stand strong in their will to live and reflect the wellsprings of universal order. A revolutionary in an epoch of sentiment, Goethe was the prime force of the Romantic Movement throughout Europe. Emerson acclaimed him as the world's 'greatest writer.' Thomas Mann, whose own LOTTE IN WEIMAR recasts a central situation from THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER, Writes of this novel: 'As for Werther, all the richness of (Goethe's) gift was apparent. The extreme, nerve - shattering sensitivity of the little book. evoked a storm of applause which went beyond all bounds and fairly intoxicated the world.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 - 22 March 1832) was a German writer, artist, and politician. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, and more than 10,000 letters written by him are extant, as are nearly 3,000 drawings. A literary celebrity by the age of 25, Goethe was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Carl August in 1782 after first taking up residence there in November of 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. He was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement, named for a play by his childhood friend Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe served as a member of the Duke's privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace, which in 1998 were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After returning from a tour of Italy in 1788, Goethe published his first major work of a scientific nature, the Metamorphosis of Plants. In 1791 he was charged with managing the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various common undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have, in later years, been collectively termed Weimar Classicism. Arthur Schopenhauer cited Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship as one of the four greatest novels ever written and Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe, along with Plato, Napoleon, and William Shakespeare, as one of six ‘representative men' in his work of the same name. Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, most notably Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe. There are frequent references to Goethe's various sayings and maxims throughout the course of Friedrich Nietzsche's work and there are numerous allusions to Goethe in the novels of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. Goethe's poems were set to music throughout the nineteenth century by a number of composers, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Gustav Mahler. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0141 ] Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501411. Afterword By Edgar Johnson. 880 pages. paperback. CT141. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The year before he died Charles Dickens wrote of David Copperfield, 'Of all my books, I like this the best.' The story of the abandoned waif who develops a 'disciplined heart' through challenging encounters with distress and misfortune is a supreme example of Dickens' skill as a novelist. In this great work plots and counterplots are interwoven into one intricate, grand design. and a huge gallery of individual characters comes alive. The malignantly treacherous Uriah Heep, the jovial nurse Peggotty, the foolishly innocent Dora, the improvident Mr. Micawber, the egotistic and charming Steerforth - these stand among literature's most remembered people. 'Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings.' - T. S. Eliot. 'No novelist has ever captured more poignantly the brightness and magic and terror of the world as seen through the eyes of a child. the brutality and cruelty of boyhood. , the widening gaze of adolescence, the stress of starting out on a career, the silliness and delirious ecstasy and anguish of youthful love. That Dickens was able to weave all these strands into a design so richly integrated in theme and form makes it one of the transcendent achievements of the art of the novel.' - Edgar Johnson. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0142 ] Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 045150142x. Foreword By Gerald Weales. 546 pages. paperback. CT142. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Laurence Sterne's TRISTRAM SHANDY is an epic of eighteenth - century Yorkshire life, and perhaps the most capriciously written classic of all time. On the surface this delightfully delirious book has no apparent order. A sentence forms a chapter; chapters begin, are broken off, or even vanish completely, only to reappear in unnumerical sequence later on. But beneath this deceptive façade of aimless frivolity is a carefully prepared design, subtle in style and brilliant in execution. In the persons of Mr. Shandy, retired merchant and student of philosophy, and of Uncle Toby, veteran of King William's War and a simple - minded sentimentalist, Sterne has created two memorable characters, as clearly defined as any in literature. The one is abstractly intellectual, the other impressionably emotional. Between these two extremes is embodied the sum of human nature. Their diligent discussions on such unprofound topics as short and long noses, the art of cursing, and the influence that names exert upon the personality are masterpieces of droll humor in the vein of Rabelais and Cervantes. Written in unprecedented style, TRISTRAM SHANDY marked a new development in the form of the English novel. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 - 18 March 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0143 ] Twain, Mark. Roughing It. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501438. Foreword By Leonard Kreigel. 448 pages. paperback. CT143. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In his youth Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West - working as a civil servant, gold prospector, reporter, and traveling lecturer. Roughing It is the inimitable record - fact and impression - of those early years. Twain tried his luck at anything and everything. He writes hilariously of his encounters with vigilantes; with Slade the Terrible, whose wife toted guns that blazed from under her petticoats; Brigham Young, the ambitious Morman leader; Hank Erickson, who wrote for advice on turnips to Horace Greeley and vowed revenge because he could not decipher the latter's answer. 'So we see Mark Twain, the playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty liberality, all inside the folk - feeling of his time, holding the American nation in the hollow of his hand. ' - Van Wyck Brooks. With a Foreword by Leonard Kriegel. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0144 ] Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle). The Charterhouse of Parma. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501446. Translated From The French By C.K. Scott Moncrieff.Afterword by Jacques Barzun. 503 pages. paperback. CT144. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Stendhal's 'Machiavellian' insight into power politics and love is crystallized in this romantic novel of the Napoleonic Wars. The Charterhouse of Parma describes an unusually brilliant and beautiful woman who becomes the mistress of a master politician to further her beloved nephew's worldly aims. Imbued with the author's unprecedented flair for pathos pointed with wit, the book is a unique treatment of the them of female persuasion: both heroine and hero demonstrate moral integrity in their every action, despite the conflicting passions that motivate them. HonorE de Balzac has written that the ultimate subtleties of this novel can best be fathomed by 'diplomats, ministers, observers, the leaders of society, the most distinguished artists.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marie-Henri Beyle (23 January 1783 - 23 March 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal in English, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0145 ] Wharton, Edith. Hudson River Bracketed. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501454. Afterword By Louis Auchincloss. 415 pages. paperback. CT145. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'It is astonishing that a woman who had turned her face as resolutely and for as many years away from the land of her birth as Mrs. Wharton, should, in her late sixties, have so accurately conceived a career and personality so innately American,' writes Louis Auchincloss of the hero of Hudson River Bracketed. 'Midwestern, Unsubtly gauche, brutally honest and, above all, passionately dedicated to his art,' Vance Weston is a man with confused values and divided loyalties. Reared in the Philistine environment of Euphoria, Illinois, he comes to the Willows - a Hudson River estate owned by cousins - for an extended visit. Under the influence of Halo Tarrant, his lovely and cultivated neighbor, Vance learns to despise his rootless origins and hungers to comprehend more deeply the artistic past of Europe. He writes a novel that becomes a commercial success, true to neither his background nor cultural enthusiasms. In praise of Edith Wharton's work as a moralist, Henry James wrote, '. we move in an air purged at a stroke of4~e old sentimental and romantic values.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones, January 24, 1862 - August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0146 ] Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501462. 240 pages. paperback. CP146. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Bring out your dead! The ceaseless chant of doom echoed through a city of emptied streets and filled grave pits. For this was London in the year 1665, the Year of the Great Plague. In 1721, when the Black Death again threatened the European Continent, Daniel Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague rear to alert an indifferent populace to the horror that was almost upon them. Through the eyes of a saddler who had chosen to remain while multitudes fled, the master realist vividly depicted a plague - stricken city. He re - enacted the terror of a helpless people caught in a tragedy they could not comprehend: the weak preying on the dying, the strong administering to the sick, the sinful orgies of the cynical, the quiet faith of the pious With dramatic insight he captured for all time the death throes of a great city. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660 to 24 April 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain, and, along with others such as Richardson, is among the founders of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0147 ] Scott, Sir Walter. The Lady of the Lake and Other Poems. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501470. Foreword By Bartlett W. Boyden. 352 pages. paperback. CT147. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Walter Scott gave Scottish history life, and immediacy by investing it with a romantic dimension. In The Lady of the Lakes and Marmion he evokes the color and mystery of the Highland past. He re - creates fierce clan uprisings, breathless nocturnal chases, passionate trysts. , he endows his kings, warlocks, rebels and battle - shy youths, crazed hags and resplendent ladies with timeless character and heroic 'purpose. 'Scott was a very great storyteller. His characters are unlike those of any other Scottish or English writer.' - Edwin Muir. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 - 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. A prominent member of the Tory establishment in Edinburgh, Scott was an active member of the Highland Society and served a long term as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–32). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0148 ] Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501489. Afterword By James F. Beard. 431 pages. paperback. CD148. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS contains the classic portrait of the man of moral courage who severs all connections with a society whose values he can no longer accept. Despite his chosen exile, Hawk - eye (Natty Bumppo), the frontier scout, risks his life to escort two sisters through hostile Indian country. On the dangerous journey he enlists the aid of the Mohican Chingachgook. And in the challenging ordeal that follows, in their encounters with deception, brutality, and the deaths of loved ones, the friendship between the two men deepens - the scout and the Indian, each with a singular philosophy of independence that has been nurtured and shaped by the silent, virgin forest. '. in his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo [Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society A stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than Love.' - D. H. Lawrence. 'THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS raises again the question of the efficacy of human effort to control irrational forces at work in individual men, races, and nations. The question has never been more pertinent than now.' - James Franklin Beard. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0149 ] Baroja, Pio. The Restlessness of Shanti Andia and Selected Stories. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451501497. Translated From The Spanish By Anthony & Elaine Kerrigan.Foreword by Anthony Kerrigan. 330 pages. paperback. CT149. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Pio Baroja was one of Spain's chief contributions to the European and world novel in the first half of the twentieth century - a novelist who, according to Jose Ortega y Gasset, 'furnishes us an example of the genius of independence in the midst of a society like our own, where everything is compromise and surrender.' Baroja's heroes are men who do not conform. Vagabonds, adventurers, dreamers, they pit themselves against the power of nature and a society that would corrupt them. Shanti Andia is a wanderer torn by shifting allegiance to his beloved Basque country and to the sea. He idolizes his uncle Juan de Aguirre, a dead sea captain whose mysterious, seemingly aimless, voyages have made him, a village myth. In Shanti's efforts to decipher his uncle's past there unfolds a hazardous drama of Basque seamen trapped on a slave ship, of a mutiny, capture, imprisonment, and a desperate rendezvous with stolen gold. It is this search for his uncle's destiny that eventually leads Shanti to find himself. In a conversation between Ernest Hemingway and Pio Baroja, reported in TIME, the American writer is quoted as saying: 'Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers, yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.' Baroja's reply: 'Caramba!' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pío Baroja y Nessi (December 28, 1872 - October 30, 1956) was a Spanish Basque writer, one of the key novelists of the Generation of '98. He was a member of an illustrious family, his brother Ricardo was a painter, writer and engraver, and his nephew Julio Caro Baroja, son of his younger sister Carmen, was a well known anthropologist. The son of Serafin Baroja, a Basque writer, opera librettist and mining engineer, Pío was born in San Sebastian, Spain. Although educated as a physician, Baroja only practised this profession briefly. As a matter of fact, he would use his student's memories - some of them he would consider terrible - as the raw material for his novel The Tree of Knowledge. He also managed the family bakery for a short time and ran unsuccessfully on two occasions for a seat at the Cortes (Spanish parliament) as a Radical Republican. Baroja's true calling, however, was always writing, which he began seriously at the age of 13. His first novel --La casa de Aizgorri (The House of Aizgorri, 1900)-- is part of a trilogy called La Tierra Vasca (The Basque Country, 1900–1909). This trilogy also includes El Mayorazgo de Labraz (The Lord of Labraz, 1903) which became one of his most popular novels in Spain. However, he is best known internationally by another trilogy entitled La lucha por la vida (The Struggle for Life, 1922–1924) which offers a vivid depiction of life in Madrid's slums. John Dos Passos greatly admired these works and wrote about them. Another major work --Memorias de un Hombre de Accion (Memories of a Man of Action, 1913–1931)-- offers a depiction of one of his ancestors who lived in the Basque region during the Carlist uprising in the 19th century. Another of his trilogies is called La mar (The sea) and comprises La estrella del capitán Tximista, Los Pilotos de altura, and Los mercaderes de esclavos. Baroja also wrote the biography of Juan Manuel Antonio Julian Van Halen, a mariner who lived in the late 18th century. However, some believe his masterpiece to be El árbol de la ciencia (1911) (translated as The Tree of Knowledge), a pessimistic Bildungsroman that depicts the futility of the pursuit of knowledge and of life in general. The title is ironically symbolic: The more the chief protagonist Andres Hurtado learns about and experiences life, the more pessimistic he feels and the more futile his life seems. In keeping with Spanish literary tradition, Baroja often wrote in a pessimistic, picaresque style. His deft portrayal of the characters and settings brought the Basque region to life much as Benito PErez Galdos' works offered an insight into Madrid. Baroja's works were often lively, but could be lacking in plot and are written in an abrupt, vivid, yet impersonal style. Sometimes he is even accused of grammatical errors, which he never denied. Baroja as a young man believed loosely in anarchistic ideals, as other members of the '98 Generation. However, later he would derive into simple admiration of men of action, somehow similar to Nietzsche's superman. His vitalistic vision of life -although pessimistic- led his novels, his ideas and his figure to be considered somehow a precursor of a kind of Spanish fascism. In any case, he was not loved by Catholic and traditionalist ideologists and his life was at risk during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Ernest Hemingway was greatly influenced by Baroja, and told him when he visited him in October 1956, ‘Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0150 ] Conrad, Joseph. Typhoon and Other Tales. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501500. Foreword By Albert J. Guerard. 448 pages. paperback. CT150. Cover: Kossin. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes - TYPHOON, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus,' Karain, An Outpost of Progress, The Lagoon, Youth, Amy Foster, & The Shadow - Line. The short novels and stories that comprise this Signet Classic are an extraordinary blend of exciting adventure and high seriousness - they are, as Albert Guerard says, 'an achievement unique in English fiction.' In his depiction of the narrow world of ship and jungle outpost the master storyteller explores the destiny of 'men of action.' He probes their reaction to tests of moral and physical courage, their conceptions of honor and of loyalty to society and to the individual. He deals with the conscientious man's need for self - punishment, with his lifelong efforts to expiate an involuntary crime of betrayal. In these tales he treats the themes that were to preoccupy him in his major works. Whether writing satirically of Europeans invading the wilderness of the Congo, or compassionately of a man obsessed by the mystery and danger of the Eastern seas, Conrad takes the reader on a profound personal search of man's voyage - within himself. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, J. G. Ballard, John le CarrE, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0151 ] Wilson, Angus. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501519. Foreword By Frank Kermode. 352 pages. paperback. CT151. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of Angus Wilson s most brilliant books this novel is also the best introduction to his work. As Frank Kermode points out in the Foreword, it is 'the book in which Wilson's people. began to move freely in history and society. interpreted with that blend of cruel penetration and humanist compassion which distinguishes the moral vision of this author.' The moral vision here is focused on the dilemma of Gerald Middleton. As a young man lie had been near the scene of a discovery unique in English archaeology - an excavation which unearthed a heathen idol in the coffin of a Bishop of the early church. Middleton doubted the authenticity of the find, but said nothing. Now, forty years later when the story begins, he has attained stature as a scholar, but both his family (and his personal) life are hollow with pretense. He is unable to face up to this pretense - just as earlier he was unable to deal with the problem of the Melpham Tomb. How Middleton confronts his weaknesses and resolves his indecision is the denouement of this beautifully plotted novel which recalls in its wealth of characters and its richness of substance the work of the great Victorian realists. Paul Pickrel wrote in Harper's, 'altogether a brilliant and remarkable performance.' and Brendan Gill in The New Yorker,. ' [In this immensely entertaining volume are to be found in abundance the virtues that so much recent English fiction has lacked. energy, observation, inventiveness, conviction.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson, CBE (11 August 1913 - 31 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0152 ] Parkman, Francis. The Oregon Trail. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501527. Foreword By A.B. Guthrie Jr. 288 pages. paperback. CP152. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - More than a century ago, a young Easterner named Francis Parkman set out to explore life in the uncivilized West. With his friend and companion Quincy Adams Shaw, he traveled up the Oregon Trail to the camps of the Pawnee and the Sioux. This book is the fascinating journal of that hazardous experience. It is an authentic record of life on the trail, an eyewitness account of the Mormons and outlaws, trappers and Indians, pioneers and adventurers who tried to conquer the frontier back in the days when America was young. Historian Henry Steele Commager wrote: ‘THE OREGON TRAIL appeared in 1849, and with its publication Parkman was launched upon his career as a storyteller without peer in American letters. It is the picturesqueness, the racy vigor, the poetic eloquence, the youthful excitement, that give THE OREGON TRAIL its enduring appeal, recreating for us, as perhaps does no other book in our literature, the wonder and beauty of life in a new world that is now old and but a memory.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francis Parkman, Jr. (September 16, 1823 - November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0153 ] Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501535. Afterword By R.P. Blackmur. 301 pages. paperback. CP153. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The daydreams which edge toward nightmare; toward our desire to be pursued, cast out. demolished, damned' is how R. P. Blackmur describes the 'mode' of the eighteen stories in this Signet Classic collection By means of weird, yet inescapably convincing fables Hawthorne explores the corroding desires of superior men and women. Thwarted in their pursuit of perfection, endeavoring to escape the reality of their existence, they fall prey to a sudden lust for the Ideal and are unwittingly compelled to commit evils in the name of pride. Of the author's insights into the Puritan's simultaneous need for fulfillment and self - destruction D. H. Lawrence wrote, 'That blue - eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.' Hawthorne's contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, said of his writing that 'Every word tells, and there is not a word which does not tell.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a ‘w' to make his name ‘Hawthorne' in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0154 ] Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501543. paperback. CP154. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Leo Tolstoy combined detailed physical description with perceptive psychological insight to sweep aside the sham of surface appearances and lay bare man's intimate gestures, acts, and thoughts. Murder and sacrifice. greed and devotion. lust and affection. vanity and love -- one by one, in this volume of great stories, Tolstoy dissects the basic drives, emotions, and motives of ordinary people searching for self-knowledge and spiritual perfection. Chekhov said, 'Of authors my favorite is Tolstoy.' And Turgenev 'marveled at the strength of his huge talent. It sends a cold shudder even down my back. He is a master, a master.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0155 ] Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501551. Afterword By Henry T. Moore. 351 pages. paperback. CT155. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know.' - William Dean Howells. The Rise of Silas Lapham, first published in book form in 1885, was the first important novel to center on the American businessman and the first to treat its theme with a realism that was to foreshadow the work of modern writers. In his story of Yankee Silas Lapham - one of the millionaires who flourished with the expanding industrialization of post - Civil War years - William Dean Howells probed the moral and social conflicts that confronted a self - made man who attempted to crash Boston's old - guard, aristocratic society. Howells was essentially sympathetic to his hero: his Silas Lapham was a man of conscience who fully realized his folly. But he was also an ambitious man who knowingly let his aspirations lead him to hazard both his fortune and his family's happiness for status in a society that could never accept him. 'His perceptions were sure, his integrity was absolute,' wrote Henry Seidel Canby of William Dean Howells, whom he credited as being 'responsible for giving the American novel form.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 - May 11, 1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed 'The Dean of American Letters', he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story 'Christmas Every Day', and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0156 ] Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 045150156x. Afterword By Elizabeth Bowen.Includes The Original Illustrations. paperback. CP156. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Spanning three and a half centuries of boisterous, exuberant adventure in England, in Constantinople, with aristocrats and gypsies-first as a man and then as a woman-Orlando's story is a wild farce, a humorous history, a gay romance filled with the delightful experiences of one of the most fascinating and fantastic characters ever to rule the realm of fiction. David Daiches said: ‘Virginia Woolf can afford to rest her claims on her novels, which show her to be one of the half- dozen novelists of the present century whom the world will not easily let die.' Rebecca West called Orlando ‘a poetic masterpiece of the first rank' and Elizabeth Bowen found it ‘one of the most high spirited books I know. a book for those who are young in a big way.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adeline Virginia Woolf (nEe Stephen; 25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.' Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0157 ] Cervantes, Miguel de. The Deceitful Marriage and Other Exemplary Novels. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501578. Newly Translated From The Spanish & With An Foreword By Walter Starkie. 320 pages. paperback. CT157. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes - The Deceitful Marriage, The Little Gypsy, Rinconete and Cortadillo, The Man of Glass, The Illustrious Kitchen Maid, and The Dogs' Colloquy. 'Cervantes was the only author who fused the rougish and the swashbuckling elements of the picaresque novel, because his aims as an artist were more universal than were those of his contemporaries, and his humor, like that of Shakespeare, with its infinite tolerance, melancholy, and love of all classes of humanity, glowed with the genius of thoughtful laughter.' ' - Walter Starkie. It was the Exemplary Novels, published three years before his death, more than his masterpiece, Don Quixote, that established Cervantes' literary reputation among the intellectuals of his time. These picaresque stories ring with racy idiom and peasant humor, and with explicit characterizations that show how well he knew the speech and folkways and psychology of the common people. Among the Exemplary Novels pre - sented here are three of his most famous ones: The Deceitful Marriage, a cynical tale of Spanish domestic life, merciless in its realism, pungent in its humor. The Little Gypsy, a love story of a high - spirited girl whose haunting counterpart has reappeared in the works of Goethe and Victor Hugo. and The Dogs' Colloquy, judged by many critics to be the greatest short story ever written. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (29 September 1547 (assumed) - 22 April 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered to be the first modern European novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written. His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la lengua de Cervantes (‘the language of Cervantes'). He was dubbed El Príncipe de los Ingenios (‘The Prince of Wits'). In 1569, Cervantes moved to Rome where he worked as chamber assistant of Giulio Acquaviva, a wealthy priest who became a cardinal during the following year. By then, Cervantes had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish Navy infantry regiment and continued his military life until 1575, when he was captured by Algerian corsairs. After five years of slavery he was released on ransom from his captors by his parents and the Trinitarians, a Catholic religious order. He subsequently returned to his family in Madrid. In 1585, Cervantes published a pastoral novel named La Galatea. Because of financial problems, Cervantes worked as a purveyor for the Spanish Armada, and later as a tax collector. In 1597, discrepancies in his accounts of three years previous landed him in the Crown Jail of Seville. In 1605, he was in Valladolid, just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signaled his return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrid, where he lived and worked until his death. During the last nine years of his life, Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer; he published the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) in 1613, the Journey to Parnassus (Viaje al Parnaso) in 1614, and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote. Carlos Fuentes noted that, ‘Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be written.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0158 ] Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501586. Afterword By Edmund Reiss. 334 pages. paperback. CD158. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Hank Morgan, cracked on the head by a crowbar in nineteenth - century Connecticut, wakes to find himself in the England of King Arthur. The tough - minded Yankee, an embodiment of scientific enlightenment, faces a world whose idyllic surface only masks the dark forces of fear, injustice, and ignorance. This is the springboard which launches one of literature's most extraordinary excursions into fantasy. With the agility of Mark Twain's unique virtuosity, this acrobatic tour de force moves from broad comedy to biting social satire, and from the pure joy of wild high jinks to deeply probing insights into the nature of man, whose capacity for progress is matched only by his capacity for destruction. The reader is shaken by laughter - and something more than laughter - as he falls under the book's enchantment and finds that the grim truths of Mark Twain's Camelot strike a resoundingly contemporary note. 'This story is something other and greater than a funny book. It is a work written with a high purpose, to convey what seemed to its author the most profound and elemental truths about human society.' - Stephen Leacock AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0159 ] Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501594. Afterword By Angus Wilson. 534 pages. paperback. CP159. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Great Expectations is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mystery and a profound examination of moral values. Written at a time when Dickens' relationship with Victorian society had reached a crisis, this novel is peopled by characters unmistakably bearing Dickens' familiar stamp - but here they appear in a new and questioning light. The orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch. the beautiful Estella, and her guardian, the embittered and vengeful Miss Havisham. the strangely ambiguous figure of the master lawyer, Mr. Jaggers. all play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shapes Dickens' searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class. From the agony of his disenchantment comes a work that gives an added dimension to his matchless genius. '. the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced. The only one perhaps that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfils the sort of demands that Flaubert or Henry James makes of the novelist.' Angus Wilson. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0160 ] Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501608. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Russell Fraser. 287 pages. paperback. CD160. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A royal family is thrown into utter ruin by its own poisonous web of distrust, deceit and struggle for power. Shakespeare's tragedy is one unsurpassed power and depth. It follows the descent of the ageing King Lear into madness, perpetuated by his malevolent daughters Goneril and Regan who struggle to gain power over the kingdom. Having banished his favorite daughter Cordelia, a loving, compassionate and honest woman, when she refuses to partake in a competition of flattery, he sets in motion a catastrophic sequence of events that will ultimately destroy his sanity, family and kingdom. The lines between good and evil are faultlessly drawn in this exploration of filial ingratitude, injustice, avarice and love. In a time when swollen words, false pretexts and the struggle for power are again the order of the day the message of King Lear carries renewed significance. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0161 ] Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501616. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Sylvan Barnet. 247 pages. paperback. CD161. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare MACBETH - Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet. Source from which Shakespeare derived MACBETH - selections from Raphael Holinshed's THE CHRONICLES OF ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND. Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Samuel Johnson, A. C. Bradley, Elmer Edgar Stoll, Cleanth Brooks, Oscar James Campbell, Mary McCarthy. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. Probably composed in late 1606 or early 1607, Macbeth is the last of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, the others being Hamlet, King Lear and Othello. It is a relatively short play without a major sub - plot, and it is considered by many scholars to be Shakespeare's darkest work. Lear is an utter tragedy in which the natural world is amorally indifferent toward mankind, but in Macbeth, Shakespeare adds a supernatural dimension that purposively conspires against Macbeth and his kingdom. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0162 ] Shakespeare, William. Othello. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501624. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Alvin Kernan. 270 pages. paperback. CD162. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Othello (The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603. It is based on the story Un Capitano Moro ("A Moorish Captain") by Cinthio (a disciple of Boccaccio's), first published in 1565. The story revolves around its two central characters: Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army, and his treacherous ensign, Iago. Given its varied and enduring themes of racism, love, jealousy, betrayal, revenge, and repentance, Othello is still often performed in professional and community theatre alike, and has been the source for numerous operatic, film, and literary adaptations. Unique features of the Signet edition - Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Alvin Kernan, Yale University; General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University; Source from which .Shakespeare derived Othello - a story from Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi; Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Thomas Rymer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Maynard Mack, Robert B. Heilman; Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type; Name of each speaker given in full; Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text; Textual note; Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0163 ] Shakespeare, William. Richard II. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501632. Edited by Kenneth Muir. paperback. CD163. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, commonly called Richard II, is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England (ruled 1377–1399) and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's successors: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0164 ] Shakespeare, William. The Winter's Tale. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501640. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Frank Kermode. paperback. CD164. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Unique features of the Signet Classic Shakespeare An extensive of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet A special introduction to the play by the editor Sources from which Shakespeare derived The Winter's Tale Dramatic criticism from the past and present A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions of The Winter's Tale, then and now Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type Up-to-date list of recommended readings AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0165 ] Parkman, Francis. La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501659. Foreword By John A. Hawgood. 352 pages. paperback. CT165. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The heroic figure of Cavelier de La Salle and the epic scope of his achievements dominate this classic history of conquest and conflict in the New World. His is the leading role in a drama of Homeric proportions, set against the backdrop of a vast and savage wilderness: a network of lakes, rivers, and valleys stretching from New France to the Gulf of Mexico, shaping a dream of French empire and glory. Parkman's description of this untamed land is justly famous; but equally memorable is his vivid delineation of the indomitable explorer whose iron will and fierce pride led him both to triumph and to tragic death - struck clown by the forces of intrigue and avarice he so fiercely scorned. The reader is plunged into the living stream of the past in a saga not only of man against nature but also of man against man; he then emerges with the sense of intensely felt experience, which is the mark of history raised to the level of art. Samuel Eliot Morison called Francis Parkman 'one of the greatest - if not the greatest - historians that the New World has produced.' Frederick Jackson Turner also cited Parkman as 'a great historian' and noted that 'his work will live on because he was even greater as an artist.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francis Parkman, Jr. (September 16, 1823 - November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0166 ] Goncharov, Ivan. Oblomov. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501667. Newly Translated From The Russian By Ann Dunnigan.Foreword by Harry T. Moore. 559 pages. paperback. CQ166. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Oblomov lies in bed, pondering one vital, earth. shattering question: Should he get up? Thus we meet one of the greatest creations in all Russian literature - Oblomov, good natured and indolent, with the mind of a reasonable man and the ambition of a giant sloth, wearily reclining while a procession of visitors plead with him to change his ways. We are drawn to this strange figure in the same way as is the energetic Stolz or the beautiful and vivacious Olga. Fascinated, we watch the meanderings of his life, his attempts at reform, his inevitable descent to his peculiar fate with the interest we usually reserve for the plight of a friend, a brother, or our very selves. For Oblomov's idiosyncrasies are universal. and 'Oblomovism' knows no class, no era, no country; it finds a home in every human heart. 'That the result is a great comic story, the world knows. [Oblomov is] a juicy character, a monstrosity of indolence wrapped in the most famous dressing gown in the literature of laziness, a man who, as he yawns his way through one evasion after another, is always a magnet for our sympathies as well as for our friendly laughter.' - Harry T. Moore. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (18 June [O.S. 6 June] 1812 - 27 September [O.S. 15 September] 1891) was a Russian novelist best known for his novels A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869). He also served in many official capacities, including the position of censor. Goncharov was born in Simbirsk into the family of a wealthy merchant; as a reward for his grandfather's military service, they were elevated to gentry status. He was educated at a boarding school, then the Moscow College of Commerce, and finally at Moscow State University. After graduating, he served for a short time in the office of the Governor of Simbirsk, before moving to Saint Petersburg where he worked as government translator and private tutor, while publishing poetry and fiction in private almanacs. Goncharov's first novel, A Common Story, was published in Sovremennik in 1847. Goncharov's second and best-known novel Oblomov was published in 1859 in Otechestvennye zapiski. His third and final novel The Precipice was published in Vestnik Evropy in 1869. He also worked as a literary and theatre critic. Towards the end of his life Goncharov wrote a memoir called An Uncommon Story, in which he accused his literary rivals, first and foremost Ivan Turgenev, of having plagiarized his works and prevented him from achieving European fame. The memoir was published in 1924. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others, considered Goncharov an author of high stature. Anton Chekhov is quoted as stating that Goncharov was '...ten heads above me in talent.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0167 ] Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501675. Afterword By Frank Kermode. paperback. CQ167. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - ‘People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are.' George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories entwine, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0168 ] Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501683. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Albert Gilman. paperback. CD168. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Unique features of the Signet Classic Shakespeare An extensive of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet A special introduction to the play by the editor, Albert Gilman, Boston University Source from which Shakespeare derived As You Like It--selections from Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Arthur Colby Sprague, Helen Gardener, Peter B. Erickson, Jean E. Howard A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions of As You Like It, then and now Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type Up-to-date list of recommended readings AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0169 ] Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501691. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Edward Hubler. 271 pages. paperback. CD169. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare HAMLET: Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Edward Hubler, Princeton University, General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University, Special note on the sources on which Shakespeare drew for Hamlet, Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, Harley Granville - Barker, Wolfgang Clemen, Maynard Mack, Robert Ornstein, Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type, Name of each speaker given in full, Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text, Textual note, Extensive bibliography. THE SIGNET CLASSIC SHAKESPEARE SERIES - The work of the world's greatest dramatist in authoritative texts edited by outstanding scholars. First performed in 1603, Hamlet, The Prince of Denmark is probably the best known of William Shakespeare's works, and may well be the most famous English - language play ever written. Categorized as one of Shakespeare's 'later tragedies,' Hamlet and its namesake hero display fully the mature Bard's extraordinary talents. But while Hamlet has been the subject of admiring critical commentary since Elizabethan times, it has also developed a reputation as a difficult work to analyze, one that features a very complicated central character, addresses many complex themes, and presents the reader with a multi-layered text which defies easy interpretation. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0170 ] Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501705. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By William & Barbara Rosen. 240 pages. paperback. CD170. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (First Folio title: The Tragedie of Ivlivs Caesar) is a history play and tragedy by William Shakespeare first performed in 1599. It is one of several plays written by Shakespeare based on true events from Roman history, such as Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. Set in Rome in 44 BC, the play depicts the moral dilemma of Brutus as he joins a conspiracy led by Cassius to murder Julius Caesar to prevent him from becoming dictator of Rome. Following Caesar's death, Rome is thrust into a period of civil war, and the republic the conspirators sought to preserve is lost forever. Although the play is named Julius Caesar, Brutus speaks more than four times as many lines as the title character; and the central psychological drama of the play focuses on Brutus' struggle between the conflicting demands of honour, patriotism, and friendship. This edition includes - A special Introduction to the play by the editors, Barbara Rosen and William Rosen, University of Connecticut; General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University; Sources from which Shakespeare derived Julius Caesar - selections from Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Leonard F. Dean, R. A. Foakes, Ernest Schanzer, Roy Walker; Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type; Name of each speaker given in full; Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text; Textual note; Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0171 ] Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501713. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Wolfgang Clemen. paperback. CD171. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Unique features of the Signet Classic Shakespeare An extensive of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet A special introduction to the play by the editor, Wolfgang Clemen, University of Munich A note on the sources from which Shakespeare derived A Midsummer Night's Dream Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by William Hazlitt, John Russell Brown, Frank Kermode, Linda Bamber, Camille Wells Slights A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, then and now Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type Up-to-date list of recommended readings AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0172 ] Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501721. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Daniel Seltzer. 288 pages. paperback. CD172. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE SIGNET CLASSIC SHAKESPEARE SERIES. The work of the world's greatest dramatist in authoritative texts edited by outstanding scholars. Unique Features of The Signet Classic Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida: Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Daniel Seltzer, Harvard University; General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University; Substantial note on the voluminous sources from which Shakespeare derived Troilus and Cressida with specific references to the best editions of these long works; Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by W. W. Lawrence, S. L. Bethell, Derek Traversi, R. A. Foakes, I. A. Richards, Reuben A. Brower; Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type; Name of each speaker given in full; Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text; Textual note Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0173 ] Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150173x. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By David Stevenson. 160 pages. paperback. CD173. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE SIGNET CLASSIC SHAKESPEARE SERIES - The work of the world's greatest dramatist in authoritative texts edited by outstanding scholars. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: Special Introduction to the play by the editor, David L. Stevenson, Hunter College. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. Special note on the sources from which Shakespeare derived MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Charles Gildon, Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Donald A. Stauffer, W. H. Auden. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable Type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. Unlike his earliest comedic works, the humor of Much Ado about Nothing does not depend upon funny situations. While it shares some standard devices with those earlier plays (misperceptions, disguises, false reports), the comedy of Much Ado derives from the characters themselves and the manners of the highly - mannered society in which they live. And while the main plot of Much Ado revolves around obstacles to the union of two young lovers (Claudio and Hero), the plays sub - plot, the 'merry war' of the sexes between Beatrice and Benedick, is much more interesting and entertaining by comparison. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0174 ] Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501748. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Robert Langbaum. 223 pages. paperback. CD174. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare - Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Robert Langbaum, University of Virginia. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. Substantial note on the sources of THE TEMPEST with extracts from them. Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E. M.W. Tillyard, Reuben A. Brower, Bernard Knox, David William. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable Type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography King Alonso of Naples and his entourage sail home for Italy after attending his daughter Claribel's wedding in Tunis, Africa. They encounter a violent storm, or Tempest. Everyone jumps overboard and are washed ashore on a strange island inhabited by the magician Prospero who has deliberately conjured up the storm. Prospero is in fact the rightful Duke of Milan who had been put to sea to die with his three-year-old daughter Miranda by his brother, Antonio who was in league with of King Alonso. Prospero and Miranda live in a cave on the island which is also inhabited by Ariel, a sprite who carries out the bidding of Prospero, and the ugly, half human Caliban. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0175 ] Shakespeare, William. Richard III. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501756. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Mark Eccles. 256 pages. paperback. CD175. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE SIGNET CLASSIC SHAKESPEARE SERIES - The work of the world's greatest dramatist in. authoritative texts edited by outstanding scholars. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare: Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Mark Eccles, University of Wisconsin; General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare Series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University; Sources from which Shakespeare derived Richard III - Sir Thomas More: from True History of King Richard III and Raphael Holinshed: from Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland; Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Charles Lamb, Lily B. Campbell, A. P. Rossiter; Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type; Name of each speaker given in full; Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text; Textual note; Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0176 ] Hasek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Schweik. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501764. Translated From The Czech By Paul Selver. Illustrations By Josef Lada. Foreword By Leslie A. Fiedler. 429 pages. paperback. CT176. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Poor Schweik. How simpleminded he is. Possibly even a lunatic. For how else could he fail to recognize the matchless wisdom of his sergeant, his lieutenant, his colonel, and even his king, who all agree it is his noble duty to serve as a solid target for an enemy bullet. Can the author be so bold as to suggest that this miserable nobody, this disgraceful malingerer, this grain of sand in the great military machine, is the true hero of our times? In all of the literature of war there is no more deadly weapon than Schweik's blank gaze as he listens to a vital order, then marches resolutely away in the wrong direction. For in Schweik's vision of the world - a world in which it is good to live and bad to die - lies a force that can topple empires and reduce the inspiring spectacle of war to bloody absurdity. The brilliant satire of this masterpiece does more than delight the reader; it casts the healing light of sanity upon the festering wounds of this war - torn century. 'The reader is reminded of Swift, Gogol, Dickens. Hasek makes our present - day beatniks, bohemians, and would - be satirists seem very small beer by comparison.' - LONDON TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jaroslav Hašek (April 30, 1883 - January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and anarchist best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 short stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker. Hašek was born in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic), the son of high-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Katerina. Poverty forced the family, with three children - another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria - to move often, more than fifteen times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died from excessive alcohol intake, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank clerk in 1903, before embarking a career as a freelance writer and journalist. At the end of 1910/early 1911 he was also a dog salesman (a profession he was to attribute to his hero Švejk and from which some of the improbable anecdotes told by Švejk are drawn). In 1906 he joined the anarchist movement, having taken part in the 1897 anti-German riots in Prague as a schoolboy. He gave regular lectures to groups of proletarian workers and, in 1907, became the editor of the anarchist journal Komuna. As an anarchist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his movements were closely monitored by the police and he was arrested and imprisoned on a regular basis; his offenses include numerous cases of vandalism and at least one case of assaulting a police officer, for which he spent a month in prison. He satirized the lengths to which the Austro-Hungarian police would go to entrap suspected political subversives in the opening chapters of The Good Soldier Švejk. Hašek met Jarmila Mayerová in 1907, and fell in love with her. However, due to his bohemian lifestyle, her parents found him an unsuitable match for their daughter. In response to this, Hašek attempted to back away from his radical politics and get a settled job as a writer. When he was arrested for desecrating a flag in Prague, Mayerová's parents took her into the country, in hope that this would end their relationship. This move was unsuccessful in that it failed to end the affair, but it did result in Hašek renewing his focus on writing. In 1909 he had sixty-four short stories published, over twice as many as in any previous year, and he was also named as the editor of the journal The Animal World. This job did not last long, however, as he was soon dismissed for publishing articles about imaginary animals which he had dreamed up (though this furnished further material for Švejk). On May 23 1910, he married Jarmila Mayerová. The marriage proved an unhappy one and lasted little more than a year. Mayerová went back to live with her parents in 1911 after he was caught trying to fake his own death. At the outbreak of World War I, Hašek lived periodically with cartoonist Josef Lada, who later illustrated the Good Soldier Švejk. Eventually he was drafted and joined the army; some of the characters in Švejk are based on people he met during the war. He did not spend long fighting in the front line, being captured by the Russians on September 24 1915. At the camp in Totskoye he contracted typhus but later on had a more comfortable existence. In June 1916 he was recruited as a volunteer to join the Czechoslovak Brigade, a unit of mainly Czech volunteers that were fighting the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This unit was later to become known as the Czechoslovak Legions. There he acted respectively as a clerk, journalist, soldier and recruitment agent until February 1918. In March 1918 the Czechoslovak Legions embarked on a journey to join the Western Front via Vladivostok. Hašek disagreed with this move and opted to leave the legion in favour of Czech and Russian revolutionaries. From October 1918 he joined the Red Army, mainly working as a recruiter and propaganda writer. In 1920 he remarried (although still married to Jarmila). He eventually returned to Prague in December 1920. However, in some circles he was not a popular figure, being branded a traitor and a bigamist, and struggled to find a publisher for his works. Before the war, in 1912, he had published the book The Good Soldier Švejk and other strange stories (Dobrý voják Švejk a jinE podivnE historky) where the figure of Švejk appeared for the first time; but it was only after the war in his famous novel that Švejk became a sancta simplicitas, a cheerful idiot who joked about the war as if it were a tavern brawl. By this time, Hašek had become gravely ill and dangerously overweight. He no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom in the village of Lipnice, where he died in on January 3 1923 of heart failure. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0177 ] O'Hara, John. Appointment in Samarra. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501772. Afterword By Arthur Mizener. 216 pages. paperback. CP177. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Handsome, well - born Julian English sits in his Cadillac with only a fifth of Scotch and a pack of cigarettes to keep him company as he waits for death. What path has led him to this tragic rendezvous? Is it a fatal flaw of character that in three short days has brought his life to ruin? Is he the victim of social forces operating as inexorably as the gears in a deadly machine? With a style as finely honed as a scalpel, John O'Hara lays bare the anguish of a desperately driven man and dissects the Pennsylvania town in which he meets his fate. Exposed is a world of banker and bootlegger, country club and pool hall. Exposed are the subtleties that bind humans together, the pressures that separate them, the delicate and shifting emotional balances that can change love into hate and life into death. 'It is not Q'Hara's merely factual knowledge but his imaginative grasp of American life that makes Appointment in Samarra a remarkable book.' - ARTHUR MIZENER. 'More than anyone now writing, O'Hara understands the complex, contradictory, asymmetrical society in which we live.' - LIONEL TRILLING AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 - April 11, 1970) was an American writer who earned his early literary reputation for short stories and later became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. His work stands out among that of contemporaries for its unvarnished realism. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is mixed, his champions rank him among the underappreciated and unjustly neglected major American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at a college level. "O'Hara may not have been the best story writer of the twentieth century, but he is the most addictive," wrote Lorin Stein, editor in chief of the Paris Review, in a 2013 appreciation of O'Hara's work, adding, "You can binge on his collections the way some people binge on Mad Men, and for some of the same reasons. On the topics of class, sex, and alcohol - that is, the topics that mattered to him - his novels amount to a secret history of American life." Five of his stories were adapted into popular films in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet during his lifetime, O'Hara's literary reputation was damaged by the detractors he accumulated due to his outsized and easily bruised ego, alcoholic crankiness, long held resentments and by politically conservative columns he wrote in the 1960s, all of which at times overshadowed his gift for story telling. Fellow Pennsylvanian John Updike, a fan of O'Hara's writing, said that the prolific author "outproduced our capacity for appreciation; maybe now we can settle down and marvel at him all over again." |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0178 ] Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501780. Afterword By Robert Daniel. 536 pages. paperback. CP178. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Who is to rule the diocese of Barchester? This is the burning question that shapes Anthony Trollope's comic masterpiece - fanning the flames of ambition, and invading the once peaceful air of a cathedral town with the spirits of cunning, malice, greed. When the redoubtable Mrs. Proudie and the indomitable Mr. Slope meet the unflinching opposition of the forces of Archdeacon Grantly, the spiritual terrain is transformed into a theater of war. Social calls become skirmishes. Parties are arranged like pitched battles. And not even the most innocent can escape the intricate net of stratagem that Trollope weaves in this satiric revelation of mid - Victorian manners and morality. Justly famous for its incisive characterizations and acute social delineation, BARCHESTER TOWERS offers an engrossing re - creation of a captivating age. Robert W. Daniel calls this work 'a masterpiece in the grand tradition of English comedy.' George Saintsbury judged it 'emphatically its author's best novel,' and Sir Hugh Walpole commented,' 'There is in BARCHESTER TOWERS, I swear, not a dull moment.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 - 6 December 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0179 ] Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501799. Afterword By Frank Kermode. 864 pages. paperback. CT179. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Young Tom Jones, pure - hearted and warm - blooded, parentage unknown and future uncertain, stands at the center of this masterpiece of the English language. Yet he is but one of the book's expertly drawn characters his adventures on the highway of life entangle him with a variety of men and women who vividly cover the full spectrum of human virtue and vice. His high - minded love for sweet Sophia cannot restrain the demands of his flesh for the pretty and bawdy Molly or the seductive Mrs. Waters; nor can the benevolence of Squire Allworthy protect him from the wretched Bilfil. Before he recognizes his destiny, he must suffer all the outrages of comic misfortune. The richly textured pattern of Tom Jones is one of the marvels of literature and in its parody and pathos, its wit and constant surprise, the reader views the pure joy of life itself. Coleridge wrote of this work, 'Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones, the three most perfect plots ever planned.' Frank Kermode comments there are 'few works of art so perfectly made, so perfectly of their period, yet possessing the energy and high spirits and good humor to transcend it.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 - 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones. Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement, having founded (with his half-brother John) what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners, using his authority as a magistrate. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0180 ] Merimee, Prosper. Carmen, Colomba and Selected Stories. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501802. Newly Translated From The French By Walter J. Cobb.Foreword By George Steiner. 286 pages. paperback. CP180. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In these tales of passion and vengeance, conflict and death, the reader encounters an unflinching honesty rare in literature. There is no veil of morality or mist of sentiment to shield him from the naked face of violence - only the impeccable style and ironic detachment of the author's matchless art. Armed with this ambiguous weapon, commanding the reader's attention even as he destroys all illusion, MErimEe is inexorably drawn to the primitive forces beneath the thin veneer of civilization. His stories may be set in the harsh landscapes of Spain and Corsica or the hospitable climes of France and Italy, on a bloody battlefield or in a tense cardroom, but his aim is unswerving: His constant target lies in the primal depths of the human heart. V. S. Pritchett calls MErimEe the 'supreme 'pure storyteller'. , unsurpassed in the technical beauty of his stories, in the ice - clear prose of his narrative.' George Steiner writes, 'Once that somewhat clipped, elegant voice has begun a tale, it becomes nearly impossible to turn away.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Prosper MErimEe (September 28, 1803 - September 23, 1870) was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer. He is perhaps best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0181 ] Scott, Sir Walter. Quentin Durward. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501810. Afterword by D. W. Brogan. 535 pages. paperback. CT181. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The rhythm of horses' hooves and the flash of swords vividly punctuate this tale of high adventure amid the desperate political intrigues of fifteenth-century France. Quentin Durward, in search of fortune in a foreign land, bears the bravely colored standard of the plot. But over- shadowing this gallant young Scotsman is the enigmatic, strangely ambiguous figure of Louis XI as he makes his coldly calculated moves on the chessboard of power against Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, his opponent and opposite. The discerning reader is offered not only a superbly paced story of narrative suspense but also a dramatic portrait of the last epoch of medieval chivalry, its magnificent facade crumbling before the harsh winds of a new age. D. W. Brogan writes, ‘Scott is one of those rare figures in literature who have created a new type of book. It was Quentin Durward that made him., the rival of Byron and Goethe.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 - 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. A prominent member of the Tory establishment in Edinburgh, Scott was an active member of the Highland Society and served a long term as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–32). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0182 ] Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501829. Afterword By Allan Nevins. 544 pages. paperback. CP182. Cover: Pucci. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The last of the Leatherstocking Tales to be written, and Cooper's own favorite, The Deerslayer turns back to the entrance into manhood of Natty Bumppo, the hero of these classic frontier sagas. An idealistic youth who was raised among the Indians, his daring and resourcefulness are evident - but the Deerslayer has yet to meet the test of human conflict. In a tale of violent action and superbly sustained suspense, the harsh realities of tribal warfare force him to kill his first foe, and face torture at the stake. Still yet another kind of initiation awaits him, when he discovers not only the ruthlessness of 'civilized' men, but also the special danger of a woman's will. His youthful spirit transformed into mature courage and moral certainty, the future Leatherstocking emerges to face life with a nobility as pure and proud as the wilderness whose fierce beauty and freedom have claimed his heart. Historian Allan Nevins writes 'It is a rich and intensely exciting. story of an America now so far lost in time and change that it is hard to believe it ever existed. But it did exist, and some memory of it, in our all too artificial day, ought to be cherished by the nation.' And Van Wyck Brooks commented 'Natty Bumppo was destined to remain the symbol of a moment of civilization, the dawn of the new American soul.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0183 ] Bennett, Arnold. The Old Wives' Tale. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501837. Afterword By John Wain. 584 pages. paperback. CT183. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Old Wives' Tale is a masterful study of life seen steadily, and seen whole. This story of two sisters, one married to a dull but worthy husband in a provincial English town, the other abandoned in glittering nineteenth - century Paris by the man with whom she has eloped, offers a profound vision of human destiny in which character and circumstance are inextricably interwoven. It is Arnold Bennett's genius to create from the common place clay of daily life characters of unique reality. Whether the setting be Paris under siege or the apparent peace of middle - class domesticity, he imbues the journey from the dawn of youth to the door of death with tragic grandeur - a grandeur achieved not by use of exalted subject matter, but by a compassionate understanding of the ordinary. Constructed with superb craftsmanship, his novel commands the reader's unflagging attention as two lives, seemingly worlds apart, converge upon a common fate. From their final reconciliation emerges a sense of universal truth that belongs to the highest sphere of artistic achievement. John Wain views The Old Wives' Tale as Arnold Bennett's 'most perfect work.' W Somerset Maugham called it 'a great book. eminently readable.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 - 27 March 1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0184 ] Twain, Mark. Pudd'nhead Wilson. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501845. Foreword By Wright Morris. 175 pages. paperback. CD184. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Set in a town on the Mississippi during the pre - Civil War era, Pudd'nhead Wilson centers its plot around a deception of switched identities involving a child born free and a child born slave. It is a novel of biting social commentary and enduring relevance. It is also a melodrama and a murder mystery, and it introduces one of the author's most delightful characters: Pudd'nhead Wilson, an intellectual with a penchant for amateur detection. F. R. Leavis has termed this novel 'the masterly work of a great writer.' Wright Morris comments, 'In a wide shelf of books only a handful of pages speak out for Samuel Langhorne Clemens, experienced man of the world. It is the distinction of Pudd'nhead Wilson that it contains more than a few of these pages. ' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0185 ] James, Henry. The American. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501853. Afterword By Leon Edel. 336 pages. paperback. CP185. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Leon Edel writes of this novel: 'The American is a novel rich in the way in which it draws archetypal myths and mimetic modes. Behind its melodrama and its simple romance is the history of man's dream of better worlds, travel to strange lands, and marriage to high and noble ladies. At the same time the book reveals a deep affection for American innocence and a deep awareness that such innocence carries with it a fund of ignorance. Its novelty lay in its 'international' character. It has been spoken of as tile first truly 'international' novel. For the first time, with high humor, James here addresses himself to his major theme it was his great discovery for the American novel. '. [It is] a masterpiece of American romanticism in which James shows us his profound grasp of what he was ultimately to call 'time Americano - European legend.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0186 ] Silone, Ignazio. Bread and Wine. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501861. Newly Translated From The Italian By Harvey Fergusson II. A Note On The Revision By Ignazio Silone.Afterword By Marc Slonim. 287 pages. paperback. CT186. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Italy, 1938: a land deadened by dictatorship and deafened by propaganda for approaching war. This is the homeland to which Pietro Spina returns after fifteen years of exile. He is a revolutionary disguised as a priest, and he is on a mission for his people and for truth. His journey takes him from the pavements of Rome to the lovingly tended earth of the impoverished countryside, where he rediscovers a way of life attuned to the eternal rhythms of planting and harvesting, the enduring pulsebeat of birth and death. Slogans and political dogma fade beside the blossoming of a vision in which flesh and spirit are as inseparably joined as the bread and wine that give this masterpiece its title and its theme. Bread and Wine, now revised by the author to bring to sharp focus its lasting truths, is at once a panoramic portrait of Italian society and a moving moral lesson for our times. '. the best [novel] Silone has ever written and the most representative of European fiction between the two world wars.' - - - Marc Slonim. 'This novel reveals Silone's true stature as one of the most truly contemporary and significant writers of our time.' - Philip Rahv. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ignazio Silone (1 May 1900 - 22 August 1978) was the pseudonym of Secondino Tranquilli, an Italian author and politician. He was born in the town of Pescina in the Abruzzo region and lost many family members, including his mother, in the 1915 Avezzano earthquake. His father had died in 1911. Silone joined the Young Socialists group of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), rising to be their leader. He was a founding member of the breakaway Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) in 1921, and became one of its covert leaders during the Fascist regime. Ignazio's brother Romolo Tranquilli was arrested in 1928 for being a member of the PCI, and he died in prison in 1931 as a result of the severe beatings he received. Silone left Italy in 1927 on a mission to the Soviet Union, and settled in Switzerland in 1930. While there, he declared his opposition to Joseph Stalin, and the leadership of Comintern; consequently, he was expelled from the PCI. He suffered from tuberculosis and severe clinical depression, and spent nearly a year in Swiss clinics; in Switzerland Aline Valangin helped and played host to him and other migrants. As he recovered, Silone began writing his first novel, Fontamara, published in German translation in 1933. The English edition, first published by Penguin Books in September 1934, went through frequent reprintings during the 1930s, with the events of the Spanish Civil War and the escalation towards the outbreak of World War II increasing attention for its subject material. The United States Army printed unauthorised versions of Fontamara and Bread and Wine and distributed them to the Italians during the liberation of Italy after 1943. These two books together with The Seed Beneath the Snow form the Abruzzo Trilogy. Silone returned to Italy only in 1944, and two years later he was elected as a PSI deputy. In the course of World War II, he had become the leader of a clandestine Socialist organization operating from Switzerland to support resistance groups in Nazi Germany-occupied Northern Italy. He also became an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent under the pseudonym of Len. Following his contribution to anti-communist anthology The God That Failed (1949), Silone joined the Congress of Cultural Freedom and edited Tempo Presente. In 1967, with the discovery that the journal received secret funds from the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Silone resigned and devoted all his energies to the writing of novels and autobiographical essays. In 1969, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, a literary award for writers who deal with the theme of individual freedom and society. In 1971, he was the recipient of the prestigious Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. Italian historians Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali found documents which, they claimed, 'proved' that Silone acted as an informant for the Fascist police from 1919 until 1930. The two historians published the results of their research in a work titled L'informatore. Silone, i comunisti e la polizia. In spite of bitter controversy in the Italian press, Biocca's and Canali's work proved to be substantiated and was reviewed in a positive light by the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Nation, New Left Review and others. A 2005 biography by Biocca also includes documents showing Silone's involvement with the American intelligence (the OSS) during and after the World War, ultimately suggesting that Silone's political stands (as well as extensive literary work) should be reconsidered in light of a more complex personality and political engagements. Ignazio Silone was married to Darina Laracy, an Irish student of Italian literature. He died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1978. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0187 ] Balzac, Honore de. The Fatal Skin. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 045150187x. Newly Translated From The French By Atwood H. Townsend.Afterword By Henri Peyre. 286 pages. paperback. CP187. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The self - consuming force of man's desire is the theme that animates this extraordinary novel. The 'fatal skin' of the title, a strange talisman that has the power to grant its owner's every wish, is no instrument of fantasy. It is a stunning symbol of vital reality in a tale in which 1ust, avarice, gluttony, and even love play their parts with grim irony. For the skin's blessing also contains its curse: Raphael must watch the talisman shrink with the fulfillment of his every joy. and as it shrinks, so shrinks his life - span. Whether he turns to a courtesan's embrace or to the arms of his young bride, whether he seeks bliss in sensual delight or refuge in the solaces of art, science or philosophy, he cannot escape the self - destruction his strong will to live entails. Set in a Paris whose frenzied pursuit of pleasure and success remarkably presages the desperate tempo of the modern world, this masterpiece of existential paradox grows in relevance with every step mankind takes toward power and annihilation. Henri Peyre calls The Fatal Skin 'the best introduction to the immense and bewildering Balzacian universe. Its tempo is fast. its structure is firm, logical, and symbolic.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Honore de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comedie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Perez Galdos, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comedie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0188 ] Mann, Thomas. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501888. Translated From The German By Denver Lindley.Afterword By George Steiner. 334 pages. paperback. CT188. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Felix Krull, swindler par excellence, stands as Thomas Mann's last great literary creation. With the modest pride of a professional, Krull retraces the course of his extraordinary career from a sweet but hardly innocent child to manhood when his genius for theft, impersonation, and sensual adventure came to full flower. In these 'confessions' the irony that underlies even Mann's most serious work is transformed into high comedy, ribald farce, brilliant parody. Begun in 1911, laid aside, then resumed after a span of some forty years, this first volume of a projected trilogy is a marvel of sustained inspiration. It is a memorable tour de force in which the author's lifelong fascination with the ambiguous relationship between art and morality achieves final expression with Mann assuming the voice of an enchanting charlatan to bid the world a smiling farewell. George Steiner calls Confessions 'a garland of laughter' laid upon the 'monumental facade' of Mann's work. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 - 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family, and portrayed his own family in the novel Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, whence he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0189 ] Sholokhov, Mikhail. And Quiet Flows the Don. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501896. Translated From The Russian By Stephen Garry.Afterword By Maurice Hindus. 518 pages. paperback. CQ189. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - As vast and turbulent as it is true to history, this novel vividly depicts the loyalties that divided Russia after the fall of the czarist regime and during the Civil War. Sholokhov's unsparing portrayal of the cossack Gregor's conflicting commitments to wife and mistress finds a symbolic extension in the war between the Bolsheviks and the cossacks, who by their rage to remain free are forced to oppose the revolution. AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON has been acclaimed by critics as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century; it is a work, according to Maxim Gorky, that 'can only be compared with Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE.' Its publication placed Mikhail Sholokhov in the front rank of Soviet writers; his books have been reprinted 421 times in 55 languages, totaling over 21 million copies. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (May 24 [O.S. May 11] 1905 - February 21, 1984) was a Soviet/Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during Russian revolution, Civil War and collectivization, primarily the famous And Quiet Flows the Don. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0190 ] Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 045150190x. Afterword By Donald Hall. 432 pages. paperback. CD190. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - She dances on the green with the maidens. She is raped in the wood at sixteen. She buries her child in secret. She milks a cow named Dumpling. She hacks turnips on a barren farm. She stabs a man. She hides in an old house with her lover. She wakes to a circle of police, to a noose in the morning.' Thus Donald Hall writes of the figure who dominates this classic novel of tragic destiny. In Tess, victimized by lust, poverty, and hypocrisy, Thomas Hardy created no standard Victorian heroine, but a woman whose intense vitality flares unforgettably against the bleak background of a dying rural society. Shaped by an acute sense of social injustice and by a vision of human fate cosmic in scope, her story is a singular blending of harsh realism and indelibly poignant beauty. The novel shocked its Victorian audience with its honesty; it remains a triumph of literary art and a timeless commentary on the human condition. In the words of Virginia Woolf 'If we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer in the English language.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Hardy (June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin. Most of his fictional works - initially published as serials in magazines - were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. As T. S. Eliot put it, 'The work of Thomas Hardy represents. a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs. at times his style touches sublimity.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0191 ] Meredith, George. The Egoist. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501918. Afterword By Angus Wilson. 511 pages. paperback. CT191. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Meredith produced a novel nearer to classic comedy than anything else in our language,' writes Angus Wilson of this tale - the story of a fatuously self - centered nobleman and the woman whose fierce independence proves his undoing. Unique in design, universal in theme, The Egoist is indelibly stamped by George Meredith's singular wit and psychological insight. It is a work that exemplifies its author's singular blend of elliptical dialogue, incisive epigram, and remarkable metaphor. as well as his devastating talent for evoking both the entrenched male ego and the revolutionary spirit of the new woman. The words of William Ernest Henley, written upon the novel's first appearance, remain undimmed by time: 'Meredith is a companion for Balzac and Richardson, an intimate for Fielding and Cervantes. The Egoist is a piece of imaginative work as solid and rich as any that the century has seen. not only one of its author's masterpieces, but one of the strongest and most individual performances of modern literature.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Meredith, OM (12 February 1828 - 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two years. He read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry. He collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. He married Edward Peacock's widowed sister Mary Ellen Nicolls in 1849 when he was twenty-one years old and she was twenty-eight. He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, published to some acclaim in 1851. In 1856 he posed as the model for The Death of Chatterton, a hugely popular painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis (1830–1916). His wife ran off with Wallis in 1858; she died three years later. The collection of 'sonnets' entitled Modern Love (1862) came of this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first 'major novel'. He married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey. He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by nature. His writing was characterised by a fascination with imagery and indirect references. He had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on Comedy (1877) is still quoted in most discussions of the history of comic theory. In The Egoist, published in 1879, he applies some of his theories of comedy in one of his most enduring novels. Some of his writings, including The Egoist, also highlight the subjugation of women during the Victorian period. During most of his career, he had difficulty achieving popular success. His first truly successful novel was Diana of the Crossways published in 1885. Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a publisher's reader. His advice to Chapman and Hall made him influential in the world of letters. His friends in the literary world included, at different times, William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Cotter Morison, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and J. M. Barrie. His contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle paid him homage in the short-story The Boscombe Valley Mystery, when Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson during the discussion of the case, 'And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow.' Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, implies that Meredith, along with Balzac, is his favourite novelist, saying 'Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning'. In 1868 he was introduced to Thomas Hardy by Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall the publishers. Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it would be attacked by reviewers and destroy his hopes of becoming a novelist. Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another 'with a purely artistic purpose' and more of a plot. Meredith spoke from experience; his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudie's circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies. Hardy continued to try and publish the novel: however it remained unpublished, though he clearly took Meredith's advice seriously. Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. In 1909, he died at his home n Box Hill, Surrey. He is buried in the cemetery at Dorking, Surrey. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0192 ] Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501926. Afterword By Kenneth Rexroth. 317 pages. paperback. CD192. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - As Moll Flanders struggles for survival amid the harsh social realities of seventeenth - century England, there is but one snare she is determined to avoid - the deadly snare of poverty, On the twisting path that leads from her birth in Newgate prison to her final prosperous respectability, love is regarded as worth no more than its weight in gold; and such matters as bigamy, incest, theft, and prostitution occasion but a brief blush before they are reckoned in terms of profit and loss. Yet so pure is her candor, so healthy her animal appetites, so indomitable her resiliency through every vicissitude of fortune, that this extraordinary wench emerges as far more than a prototype of the mercantile mind. In Moll Flanders Defoe added a fresh dimension to the art of writing. 'We seem to see Defoe's characters through the crystal - clear medium of his style with perfect verisimilitude, as real as if we saw them in a mirror that was so flawless that it was invisible,' writes Kenneth Rexroth. Virginia Woolf ranked Moll Flanders as 'among the few English novels which we can call indisputably great.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660 to 24 April 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain, and, along with others such as Richardson, is among the founders of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0193 ] Chekhov, Anton. Selected Stories. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501934. Newly translated from the Russian by Ann Dunnigan. Foreword by Ernest J. Simmons. paperback. CP193. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - One of the world's great masters of the short story, Anton Chekhov wrote about everyday life as he saw it - with humor, insight, and honesty. In this lies his genius: He portrayed the Russian people as they really were, not as he wanted them to be. This Signet Classic presents twenty Chekhov stories, including twelve of his early tales which make their first appearance in English in Thus paperback collection. The Confession * He Understood * At Sea * Surgery * Ninochka * A Cure for Drinking * The Jailer Jailed * The Dance Pianist * The Milksop * The Nincompoop * Marriage in Ten or Fifteen Years * In Spring * Agafya * The Kiss * The Father * In Exile * Three Years * The House with the Mansard * Peasants * The Darling AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife', he once said, ‘and literature is my mistress.' Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a ‘theatre of mood' and a ‘submerged life in the text.' Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0194 ] Orwell, George. Burmese Days. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501942. Afterword By Richard Rees. 255 pages. paperback. CP194. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The product of intimate personal knowledge, Burmese Days, George Orwell's first novel, offers a scathing indictment of British Imperial rule. Against a brilliantly rendered exotic background, the author presents a bitter and satiric picture of the corruption spawned by absolute power, a corruption all - pervading and inescapable, infecting white man and native alike. His theme is given sharp focus in the struggle of. John Flory, the novel's English hero, to maintain some measure of integrity in a debilitating moral climate. As Flory is inexorably driven to final tragic defeat, the reader encounters a vividly delineated cross section of Anglo - Indian society and was an unsurpassed portrayal of an era of history whose effects still profoundly trouble the modern world. Burmese Days is a superb example of Orwell's literary skill and of the fierce and uncompromising vision that made him, in the words of V. S. Pritchett, 'the conscience of his generation.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0195 ] James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501950. Afterword By Oscar Cargill. 559 pages. paperback. CT195. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'No other American and few Europeans can match [the] superb feminine creations of the chief American master of the art of fiction.' Thus writes Oscar Cargill in his appreciation of The Portrait of a Lady, which many critics consider Henry James's supreme achievement. The heroine of this novel is a young American, Isabel Archer. Blessed by nature and fortune, high - spirited and independent, she arrives in Europe to seek the full realization of her potential, In the cultured brilliance of international society, she enters a seemingly charmed existence, An English aristocrat and an aggressive American woo her; her sensitive, ironic cousin, the invalid Ralph, becomes her adoring adviser. But it is only after the ingenuous Isabel falls prey to and suffers from the machinations of a sophisticated and infinitely calculating older woman that she achieves final dimension as a woman and profound triumph as a human being. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0196 ] Colette. Gigi and Selected Writings. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451501969. Foreword By Elaine Marks. 256 pages. paperback. CT196. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The full scope of Colette's remarkable genius is vividly displayed in these selections from a half century of literary creation. Included in its entirety is the enchanting Gigi, worldly, witty, and wise, and an excerpt from one of her masterpieces, The Last of Cheri, a classic novel of an aging courtesan and her young ex - lover. Recollections of childhood and of life among music - hall artistes, portraits of people and deeply personal evocations of nature, are rendered with a scrupulous stylistic mastery that captures the finest shades of perception, the most delicate nuances of sensibility. The keynote of this collection is diversity, but the final effect is one of supreme unity; these stories, memories, meditations, and descriptions combine to form a single world, a world in which spirit and flesh are one, and the senses reign supreme. 'Colette chats with us, writes to us, in her own inimitable style, personal and objective, chock - full of past and present details. Almost until the very end, Colette celebrates. , the fire of the hearth and heart'the fire that she nourished with care and that, although the 'lanai bleu' has been turned off, glows still in the complete works of Sidonie Gabrielle Colette.' - Elaine Marks. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Colette (January 28, 1873, Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, France - August 3, 1954, Paris, France) was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. She is best known for her novel Gigi, the basis for the film and Lerner and Loewe stage production of the same title. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0197 ] Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451501977. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Sylvan Barnet. paperback. CD197. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593, probably in collaboration with George Peele. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were extremely popular with audiences throughout the 16th century. The play is set during the latter days of the Roman Empire and tells the fictional story of Titus, a general in the Roman army, who is engaged in a cycle of revenge with Tamora, Queen of the Goths. It is Shakespeare's bloodiest and most violent work, and traditionally was one of his least respected plays; although it was extremely popular in its day, by the later 17th century it had fallen out of favour. In the Victorian era, it was disapproved of primarily because of what was considered to be a distasteful use of graphic violence, but from around the middle of the 20th century its reputation began to improve. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0198 ] Flaubert, Gustave. Three Tales. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501985. Newly Translated From The French By Walter J. Cobb. Foreword By Henri Peyre. 127 pages. paperback. CP198. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Biographers and critics have generally hailed these three tales, Flaubert's last complete work, not only as his testament, but as the culmination and the summation of his literary career.' Thus writes Henri Peyre, who terms these classic stories 'the fittest initiation to the rest of Flaubert's works.' In them, the reader witnesses the astonishing scope of the author's creative imagination and the full range of his stylistic virtuosity. They deal with the life of a servant woman in nineteenth - century France, the terrible sins and atonement of a legendary medieval saint, and the violent conflict of races and religions during the first century of the Christian era. Whether Flaubert seeks to capture commonplace reality through his selection of essential detail, suspend disbelief with vivid and precise dream imagery, or re - create the oriental splendor and barbarous passions of the ancient world through richly sensuous description, he displays supreme mastery of his art. Flaubert has been praised by such writers as Kafka, Joyce, and Hemingway, and Allen Tate credits him with having 'created the modern novel. created the modern short story. created modern fiction.' Includes - A Simple Heart, The Legend of St. Julian The Hospitaler, & Herodias. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880) was an influential French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protEgE of Flaubert. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0199 ] Balzac, Honore de. Eugenie Grandet. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451501993. Newly Translated From The French By Henry ReedAfterword By Roger Shattuck. 222 pages. paperback. CP199. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In Eugenie Grandet appear two of Balzac's most memorable characters. One is Grandet, a man consumed by avarice; the other, Eugenie, his daughter, who lives in his shadow. quiet, docile, and desperately hungering for love. Around them, a provincial village comes to life with its fine gradations in rank, its bitter rivalries, and its all - pervading obsession with money. In this society Grandet reigns supreme. But for Eugenie it represents a life without hope. A chance of escape is offered her when her handsome and penniless cousin arrives from Paris; she defies her father. only to find that her lover, too, is corrupted by the power of gold. A magnificently told story of dehumanizing greed and tragic waste, Eugenie Grandet occupies an integral place in Balzac's vast Human Comedy. As Roger Shattuck writes, 'Its provincial setting and compact narrative line balance the frenetic pace of the Paris novels. Yet the calm of Saumur cannot conceal for long the tidal forces that drive. men, wherever they are.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Honore de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comedie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Perez Galdos, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comedie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0200 ] Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502000. Afterword By Steven Marcus. 888 pages. paperback. CQ200. Cover: Kossin. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The adventures of the immortal Pickwick Club, headed by the good Mr. Pickwick himself, abetted by his faithful manservant, Sam Weller, form the basis of this, Dickens' first great literary achievement. In no other work does Dickens' richness of comic invention display itself so lavishly. Following the intrepidly bumbling Pickwickians along the highways and byways of old England, he creates a vivid world of highwaymen, duels, lawsuits, jails, hilarious romantic imbroglios - but a world, too, of deeply affecting human warmth and generosity. Superbly vigorous, filled with a host of indelible character creations, Pickwick Papers has never ceased to enjoy the popularity it won with its initial publication - when it rocketed its author to sudden fame and launched a career without equal in the history of the English novel. Steven Marcus writes: 'Pickwick Papers is the one novel in which Dickens achieved the thing we tend to think is the exclusive property of only the greatest, most mature, most fully consummated artists. a representation of life that fulfills the vision that men have never relinquished of the ideal possibilities of human relations. ' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0201 ] Norris, Frank. McTeague. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502019. Afterword By Kenneth Rexroth. 351 pages. paperback. CP201. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'I never truckled. I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth,' declared Frank I Norris, shortly before his death at the age of thirty - two. Of his novels, none shocked his reading public more than McTeague, and few works since have captured the seamy side of American urban life with such graphic immediacy as does this portrayal of human degradation in turn - of - the - century San Francisco. Its protagonists - men and women alike - are shown as both products and victims of a debasing social order. Heredity and environment play the role of fate in a tale that moves toward its harrowing conclusion with the grim power and inevitability of Classic tragedy. Unsparing in its objectivity, McTeague has been termed by Alfred Kazin 'the first great tragic portrait in America of an acquisitive society.' Kenneth Rexroth comments, '. the writing is easy arid natural, the moral earnestness refreshing, and the construction masterful.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (March 5, 1870 - October 25, 1902) was an American novelist during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), and The Pit (1903). Frank Norris was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1870. His father, Benjamin, was a self-made Chicago businessman and his mother, Gertrude Glorvina Doggett, had a stage career. In 1884 the family moved to San Francisco where Benjamin went into real estate. In 1887, after the death of his brother and a brief stay in London, young Norris went to AcadEmie Julian in Paris where he studied painting for two years and was exposed to the naturalist novels of Emile Zola. Between 1890 and 1894 he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he picked up the ideas of human evolution of Darwin and Spencer that are reflected in his later writings. His stories appeared in the undergraduate magazine at Berkeley and in the San Francisco Wave. After his parents' divorce he went east and spent a year in the English Department of Harvard University. There he came under the influence of Lewis E. Gates, who encouraged his writing. He worked as a news correspondent in South Africa (1895–96) for the San Francisco Chronicle, and then as editorial assistant on the San Francisco Wave (1896–97). He worked for McClure's Magazine as a war correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish–American War in 1898. He joined the New York City publishing firm of Doubleday & Page in 1899. During his time at the University of California, Berkeley, Norris was a brother in the Fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta and was an originator of the Skull & Keys society. Because of his involvement with a prank during the Class Day Exercises in 1893, the annual alumni dinner held by each Phi Gamma Delta chapter still bears his name. In 1900 Frank Norris married Jeanette Black. They had a child in 1901. Norris died on October 25, 1902, of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix in San Francisco. This left The Epic of the Wheat trilogy unfinished. He was only 32. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. Charles Gilman Norris, the author's younger brother, became a well regarded novelist and editor. C.G. Norris was also the husband of the prolific novelist Kathleen Norris. The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, houses the archives of all three writers. Frank Norris's work often includes depictions of suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies. In The Octopus: A California Story, the Pacific and Southwest Railroad is implicated in the suffering and deaths of a number of ranchers in Southern California. At the end of the novel, after a bloody shootout between farmers and railroad agents at one of the ranches (named Los Muertos), readers are encouraged to take a 'larger view' that sees that 'through the welter of blood at the irrigating ditch ... the great harvest of Los Muertos rolled like a flood from the Sierras to the Himalayas to feed thousands of starving scarecrows on the barren plains of India'. Though free-wheeling market capitalism causes the deaths of many of the characters in the novel, this 'larger view always ... discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good'. Vandover and the Brute, written in the 1890s, but not published until after his death, is about three college friends, on their way to success, and the ruin of one through a degenerate lifestyle. In addition to Zola's, Norris's writing has been compared to that of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0202 ] McGuffey, William Holmes. McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader-1879 Edition. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451502027. Foreword By Henry Steele Commager. 492 pages. paperback. CT202. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The text of this Signet Classic is that of the revised Sixth Reader, published in 1879. With a Foreword by Henry Steele Commager McGuffey's Henry Steele Commager assesses the contribution of the McGuffey Readers to the education, morals, and culture of nineteenth - century America: 'Justice Holmes said of John Marshall that part of his greatness was in being there; so, too, we can say that part of the greatness. of the McGuffey Readers was that they were thereat the right time - they were there to be read by millions of children from all parts of the country, from all classes, of all faiths. They gave to the American child of the nineteenth century what he so conspicuously lacks today - a common body of allusions, a sense of common experience and of common possession. 'The McGuffey Readers, then, are far more than a historical curiosity. They played an important role in American education and in American culture, and helped shape that elusive thing we call the American character.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Holmes McGuffey (September 23, 1800 - May 4, 1873) was a college professor president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks. An estimated 122 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960[citation needed], placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0203 ] Babel, Isaac. Lyubka the Cossack and Other Stories. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451502035. Newly Translated From The Russian & With An Afterword By Andrew R. MacAndrew. 285 pages. paperback. CT203. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Babel has been compared to Hemingway in the violence he depicts, in his abiding theme of test and initiation, in his intense artistic dedication. Yet his style and vision are uniquely his own. Babel's tales are shaped by deeply personal and intense ironies: maternal love vies with the harsh realities of ghetto life; a starving writer is coupled with a sensual wealthy woman; a Jewish intellectual enters into a strange alliance with brutal Cossacks in the Goyaesque horrors of war in Poland. Babel's stories are written with passionate devotion to the mot juste, the swift phrase, the unexpected image, and they form a series of lightninglike attacks upon the reader's sensibilities. From the author's juxtaposition of gruesome detail and lyric grace there emerges an unforgettable revelation of the mingled bestiality and beauty that lie in primitive emotion and naked action. Lionel Trilling called the stories in RED CAVALRY 'the most remarkable work of fiction that had yet come out of revolutionary Russia. having upon it the mark of exceptional talent, even of genius.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Isaak Emmanuilovoch Babel was born on July 13, 1894, in Odessa, Ukraine, a port city located on the Black Sea. His parents, Manus Yitzkhovich and Feyga Bobel (the original spelling of their last name), were Jewish, and they raised Isaak and his sister in a middle-class household. Soon after his birth, Isaak Babel's family moved to Nikolaev, a port city located about 100 miles away from Odessa. There, his father worked for an overseas agricultural-equipment manufacturer, and Babel, once he reached school age, attended the Count Witte Commercial School. The family returned to Odessa in 1905, and Babel was educated by private tutors until he began attending the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School No. 1. He graduated from the school in 1911 and went on to study economics at the Kiev Commercial Institute (which was relocated to Saratov in 1915, during the First World War). Babel graduated from the institute in 1916, afterward briefly studying law at the Petrograd Psycho-Neurological Institute. Babel met and befriended writer Maxim Gorky in 1916, and their friendship would become a major force in Babel's life. Gorky began to include Babel's short stories in a journal that he edited, The Chronicle. Thanks to this exposure, Babel was invited to contribute his fiction writing and reporting to other journals as well as to the newspaper New Life. Meanwhile, Babel joined the cavalry of the Russian army in 1917, serving at the Rumanian front and in Petrograd. He was active with the army for several years, during which time he wrote pieces about his military experiences for New Life. In 1919, Babel married Evgenia (also spelled Yevgenia and Eugenia) Gronfein, the daughter of a wealthy agricultural-equipment importer, whom he'd met in Kiev. After his time in the army, he worked for newspapers and dedicated more time to his writing. He published The Story of My Dovecote, a volume of short stories inspired by his own childhood, in 1925. He achieved literary fame with Red Cavalry, published in 1926. This collection of stories, inspired by his experiences in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, shocked its readers with its tales of brutality and impressed them with its direct language and humor, even in the face of violence. In 1931, Babel published Odessa Tales, a cycle of short stories set in a ghetto of Odessa. Once again, he was praised for his realism, simple writing style and skillful portrayals of characters from the fringes of society - in this case, a band of Jewish gangsters and their leader, Benya Krik. Later in the 1930s, he wrote a play titled Maria (1935) and four novellas, including ‘The Trial' and ‘The Kiss.' As the decade progressed, Babel's activities and written works were monitored closely by critics and censors for any hints of disloyalty to the Soviet government. Babel traveled frequently to France (where his estranged wife and daughter, Nathalie, lived), wrote less and spent much time in isolation during these years. His friend and greatest ally, Gorky, died in 1936. Like many of his contemporaries, Babel was persecuted in the ‘great purges' conducted under Joseph Stalin in the late 1930s. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police in May 1939, at the age of 45, and was charged with belonging to anti-Soviet political organizations and terrorist groups and serving as a spy for France and Austria. (His affair with Evgeniya Gladun-Khayutina, the wife of the head of the secret police, was likely a contributing factor to his arrest.) Though Babel appealed the charges and tried to revoke the testimony he'd given under torture, he was executed on January 27, 1940. After Stalin's death in 1953, Babel's name was cleared and his writing was rehabilitated. His work was gradually published again in the Soviet Union and even in foreign countries. He continues to influence short-story writers around the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0204 ] Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502043. Afterword By Louis Auchincloss. 352 pages. paperback. CT204. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE HOUSE OF MIRTH stands as the work that first established Edith Wharton's eminent literary reputation. In it she discovered her major subject: the fashionable New York society in which she had been raised, whose power to debase both people and ideals forms the dramatic core of this finely wrought novel. Its heroine, Lily Bart, the poor relation of a wealthy woman, is beautiful, intelligent, and hopelessly addicted to the pleasures of a moneyed world of luxury and grace. But, ironically, her delicacy of taste and moral sensibility - qualities representing the ideal goals of that world - render her unfit for survival in it. As she struggles to maintain her tenuous position, she is helpless against the vulgarity and greed that form the true foundations of the glittering social edifice; the society that has created her commences ruthlessly to destroy her. A brilliant portrayal of both human frailty and nobility, and a bitter attack on false social values, THE HOUSE OF MIRTH has been termed by Louis Auchincloss as 'uniquely authentic among American novels of manners. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones, January 24, 1862 - August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0205 ] David, Alfred and David, Mary Elizabeth (editors). The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Fairy Tales. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502051. Edited & With An Introduction By Alfred & Mary Elizabeth David. 319 pages. paperback. CT205. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Fairy tales are not. a form of children's literature; they are, like fables, legends, and ballads, among the many forms of adult literature that children have adopted. The apparent artlessness of these simple stories is not easily achieved. It is, in fact, the product of an art perhaps older than the art of writing.' Thus write Alfred and Mary Elizabeth David in their revealing introduction to a collection that ranges from the Grimm brothers' inimitable recreations of archetypal folktales to the modern prose wizardry of James Thurber's Many Moons. Represented is the refined intelligence of Perrault,. the wondrous imagination of Andersen, the descriptive power of Ruskin, the bittersweet melancholy of Wilde. These are but a few of the artists in this remarkably inclusive selection of works from Germany, Russia, France, Scandinavia, England, and America, many in brilliant new translations and all testifying eloquently to the unceasing vitality of this literary genre. The sophisticated reader will rediscover an enchantment that remains forever fresh and will discern below the shimmering surfaces of these delightful tales profound and enduring human truths. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred David was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1929. His family left Germany in 1938 and settled in Houston, Texas, where he learned English, and he went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at Harvard University. David had a long and distinguished career as a beloved teacher and a scholar of Chaucer and medieval English literature. He served on the faculty of Indiana University’s Department of English before retiring in 1994. David was a recipient of Guggenheim (1966) and Fulbright Research Fellowships, and he was a past president of the New Chaucer Society, the international society of Chaucer scholars. David was known for his editorship of the medieval section of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and for his role as advisor to Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate, in the production of his prize-winning translation of Beowulf. Mary Elizabeth David was a long-time University of Pittsburgh English professor and medieval scholar, who published and translated children’s literature under her maiden name Mary Elizabeth Meek. Although her family on both sides was from Ohio, Ms. David grew up on Long Island until her parents divorced and she returned to Columbus. Her mother worked as a librarian at the Columbus School for Girls, which Ms. David attended. Until last year, she prepared an annual Christmas letter about her high school classmates. She received her bachelor's degree from Wells College in New York (where she played a spear-carrier in "Twelfth Night") and her master's from Ohio State University. There, one of her advisers steered her toward a Harvard University graduate fellowship. So she went to Harvard, the only woman in her graduate class, living part of the time as a baby-sitter with the family of famed historian Samuel Eliot Morrison. She completed her Ph.D. in medieval literature in 1956 and, that same year, married a classmate, Alfred David. After they spent a post-graduate year in France, he was hired at Indiana University in Bloomington, where, given the nepotism rules of the day, she could not get an appointment. She taught children's literature part time and she and her husband edited collections of fairy tales. After her divorce, she was recruited in 1970 by the Pitt English Department as a medievalist, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Old English, Chaucer, medieval and Arthurian literature and the history of the English language. She prepared pronunciation tapes of Old and Middle English for the Pitt language laboratory, and she was head of Pitt's interdepartmental Medieval and Renaissance Program. Her medieval interests having led naturally into classic children's literature, with its roots in the Middle Ages, she helped develop Pitt's well-regarded program in children's literature, which she directed until her 1995 retirement. She also taught a popular course in those medievalists-turned-novelists, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Ms. David was an indefatigable traveler, especially to Europe. According to Stones, an art professor colleague, her last trip there was in September 2002, when she visited Santiago de Compostela, the famous pilgrimage destination in Spain, taking a 12th-century pilgrims' guidebook as one of her resources. Stones described Ms. David as "a wonderful, generous, funny person. We loved sharing linguistic jokes." From 1998 to 2001, she reviewed children's theater as a freelance critic for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For as long as her Pittsburgh friends can remember, University of Pittsburgh English professor Mary Elizabeth Meek David held a Twelfth Night party each January 6. So, it fulfilled a deep desire when she persuaded her doctors to let her out of West Penn Hospital to attend Saturday's matinee of the Globe Theatre's "Twelfth Night," in a wheelchair, her eyes shining with pleasure. According to her friend Alison Stones, even on Sunday, checking back into the hospital, she was discussing the play with her attending physician. Mary Elizabeth David died the following Monday, November 17, 2003, of kidney failure. She was 79. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0206 ] Howells, William Dean. The Landlord at Lion's Head. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150206x. Afterword By Eleanor M. Tilton. 319 pages. paperback. CT206. Cover: SA or Shields??. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION -. Howells steadfastly refused to flatter the human race. He would not render weakness as villainy or decency as heroism, common sense as wisdom or folly as vice. Nor would he dignify human error by subsuming it under pseudoscientific laws. ' Thus Eleanor Tilton describes this master of American realism, here represented by one of his most notable works. In this tale of the transformation of an impoverished New England farm into a summer hotel, and of the ruthless pursuit of success by its new proprietor, the author memorably displays both his novelistic skill and his integrity of vision. He portrays the book's central figure, Jeff Durgin, virile and iron-willed, with the same objectivity as he does his spiritual opposite, the overrefined artist, Westover,with the same compassion as he does the flirtatious Boston society girl, Bessie Lynde. It is not Howells' purpose to take sides in the conflict of values between the genteel past and the rising tide of the future, but to convey the very nature of that conflict-and with it, the unique nature of the American experience. As Lionel Trilling has written, 'When we praise Howells' social observation, we must see that it is of a precision and subtlety which carry it beyond sociology to literature.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 - May 11, 1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed 'The Dean of American Letters', he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story 'Christmas Every Day', and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0207 ] Grahame, Kenneth. The Golden Age & Dream Days. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502078. Foreword by Vernon Watkins. 240 pages. paperback. CT207. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'One cannot for a moment accept The Golden Age and Dream Days as children's books. Wherever they are found in the juvenile section of a library, they are mistakenly placed there,' writes Vernon Watkins, in his Foreword to the works that first earned Kenneth Grahame his unique place in the world of literature. In this series of tales of five orphaned children who live with relatives in an English country house, the author's superbly modulated prose captures the sensuousness, the mercurial temper, and the fantasy life of childhood. Neither sentimental nor condescending, with perfect sympathy and gentle humor, Grahame creates a world in which each child is a distinctive individual, adults are regarded as doubtful guests, and every passing moment brings the promise of rare adventure. The host of readers who treasure his classic Wind in the Willows will find further evidence of Kenneth Grahame's singular genius in these delightful stories. They are, in the words of the poet Swinburne, 'well - nigh too praiseworthy for praise. The art of writing adequately and receptively about children is among the rarest and most precious of all arts.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kenneth Grahame (March 8, 1859 - 6 July 1932) was a Scottish writer, most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote The Reluctant Dragon; both books were later adapted into Disney films. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0208 ] Gorky, Maxim. A Sky-Blue Life and Selected Stories. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502086. Translated From The Russian & With A Foreword By George Reavey. 256 pages. paperback. CT208. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The world Gorky described in his stories was one of uneasy fermentation, pressing change, and desperate urgency. It was a world of almost American dynamism, but its keynote was rebellion,' writes George Reavey, who has both selected and given superb new translations to this collection of Gorky's finest tales. The heir to the great Russian literary tradition of the nineteenth century, it was Gorky's genius to strike out on a bold new path of vigorous, often harsh, realism, exploring a vast uncharted area of human experience - the 'lower depths' of Russian society. Against a background of steppe and shore, river and mountain, peasant village and teeming city, Gorky brings to life an unforgettable gallery of characters, portrayed in all their ignorance and wisdom; their brutality; their delicate, almost inarticulate, yearnings. These tales tell of theft and murder, love and birth, tragic pain and fleeting beauty; in them, Gorky reveals both his intimate knowledge of the most sordid aspects of existence and his indomitable faith in the infinite potential of the human spirit. He was, in the words of Stefan Zweig, 'a pure true man, a great creative artist.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March 1868 - 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim (Maksim) Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the Socialist realism literary method and a political activist. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0209 ] Cervantes, Miguel de. Interludes. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502094. Translated From The Spanish & With A Foreword By Edwin Honig. 160 pages. paperback. CT209. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Published the year before the author's death, and long unavailable to American readers, these short plays represent a pure, untrammeled expression of Cervantes' literary genius. Freed from the complicated mechanics of plot, he concentrates his powers on the area of his greatest mastery - the creation 'of living, breathing, and, above all, magnificently vocal characters. Deceived husbands and straying wives, ambitious politicians and ingenious frauds, garrulous prostitutes and respectable pimps. It crowds his stage with unforgettable characters who, combined, present a superbly barbed depiction of manners and morals in early - sixteenth - century Spain and a timeless portrayal of the never - ending human comedy. 'These eight short plays are among the most beguiling things Cervantes ever wrote,' comments Edwin Honig, who goes on to say that 'what he achieves in the interludes is something very close to the concentrative spirit of poetry and something characteristically dramatic as well. dramatic in the way that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are dramatic.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (29 September 1547 (assumed) - 22 April 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered to be the first modern European novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written. His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la lengua de Cervantes (‘the language of Cervantes'). He was dubbed El Príncipe de los Ingenios (‘The Prince of Wits'). In 1569, Cervantes moved to Rome where he worked as chamber assistant of Giulio Acquaviva, a wealthy priest who became a cardinal during the following year. By then, Cervantes had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish Navy infantry regiment and continued his military life until 1575, when he was captured by Algerian corsairs. After five years of slavery he was released on ransom from his captors by his parents and the Trinitarians, a Catholic religious order. He subsequently returned to his family in Madrid. In 1585, Cervantes published a pastoral novel named La Galatea. Because of financial problems, Cervantes worked as a purveyor for the Spanish Armada, and later as a tax collector. In 1597, discrepancies in his accounts of three years previous landed him in the Crown Jail of Seville. In 1605, he was in Valladolid, just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signaled his return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrid, where he lived and worked until his death. During the last nine years of his life, Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer; he published the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) in 1613, the Journey to Parnassus (Viaje al Parnaso) in 1614, and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote. Carlos Fuentes noted that, ‘Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be written.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0210 ] Pirandello, Luigi. The Merry-Go-Round of Love and Selected Stories. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502108. Translated From The Italian By Frances Keene & Lily Duplaix.Foreword By Irving Howe. 320 pages. paperback. CT210. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Pirandello is widely known as one of the great playwrights of the twentieth century. Yet before turning to the theater, he wrote a vast number of tales of extraordinary quality; this Signet Classic edition provides a memorable introduction to this facet of his genius. In settings that range from harsh Sicilian landscapes to the midnight streets of Rome, these stories deal with the frustrations of youth and the despair of age, with couples caught in the tentacles of marriage, and men and women living in hopeless isolation; they vary in mood from the high comedy of The Merry - Go - Round of Love, a novella here rendered into English for the first time, to the Chekhovian tragedy of such superbly wrought tales as 'Such Is Life.' In them the reader encounters a masterful economy in narrative technique, an austere objectivity, and, above all, a consciousness singularly attuned to the spiritual travails of the modern world. As Irving Howe writes: 'To stay with a writer like Pirandello takes strong nerves, a gritted determination to see things as they are. The reward, however, is a penetration into truth. His stories live.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LUIGI PIRANDELLO was born on June 28, 1867, in Agrigento, Sicily. After attending secondary school in Palermo, he went, at the age of eighteen, to the University of Rome. The following year he transferred to the University of Bonn. In Germany he studied romance philology and philosophy, started to write poetry, and completed a translation of Goethe's ROMAN ELEGIES. On his return to Rome, Pirandello was urged by his fellow Sicilian, the novelist Capuana, to try his hand at prose writing. In the short-story form, Pirandello's genius began to emerge. In the twenty years from 1894 to the outbreak of World War I he published innumerable short stories and four novels. In an experimental mood, Pirandello then turned to the stage, attempting at first to convey as vividly as possible the attitudes and speech of his native island. A couple of regional plays preceded his first stage success, RIGHT YOU ARE IF YOU THINK YOU ARE, which had its premiere in 1917. From then on Pirandello wrote forty-odd plays in relatively quick succession. He was fifty-four when his drama SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR brought him international acclaim. In 1934 Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died a year and a half later. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0211 ] Melville, Herman. Mardi. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502116. Afterword by Henry Popkin. 557 pages. paperback. CT211. Cover: Seymour Chwast. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - MARDI marks the great turning point in Melville's literary career. The novel begins in the vein of the colorful narrative that had won the author his early fame. But gradually this tale of a young mariner's adventures on a mythical Polynesian archipelago takes on a new dimension as his search for his lost love is transformed into an entirely different quest - a richly symbolic exploration of man's estate on earth. The reader encounters bitingly, satiric commentary on political institutions, profound meditations on human morality, and soaring metaphysical speculations in a work that baffled its original audience and has won ever greater appreciation in modern times. Describing this book, Lewis Mumford has written: '[Melville's] thoughts exploded in a succession of great rockets and Roman candles and flagbombs; and the spectacle was a dazzling and beautiful one. Such wit, such humor, such starry intelligence. were not known in American literature before.' Henry Popkin terms MARDI 'Melville's metaphor for the world. the bridge by which he crossed over from his first books. to his masterpiece, MOBY DICK.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). When asked which of the great American writers he most admired, Vladimir Nabokov replied: ‘When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom I did not read as a boy.' Around his twentieth year he was a schoolteacher for a short time, then became a seaman when his father met business reversals. On his first voyage he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for a time. His first book, an account of that time, Typee, became a bestseller and Melville became known as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals'. After Omoo, the sequel to his first book, Melville began to work philosophical issues in his third book, the elaborate Mardi (1849). The public indifference to Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man, the last work of fiction published during his lifetime. During his later decades, Melville worked at the New York Customs House and privately published some volumes of poetry in editions of only 25 copies. When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the ‘Melville Revival' at the occasion of the centennial of his birth that his work won recognition. In 1924, the story Billy Budd, Sailor was published, which Melville worked on during his final years, and left in manuscript at his death. The single most Melvillean characteristic of his prose is its allusivity. Stanley T. Williams said ‘In Melville's manipulation of his reading was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0212 ] Norris, Frank. The Octopus. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502124. Afterword By Oscar Cargiller. 472 pages. paperback. CT212. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The first novel in a projected 'trilogy of wheat,' The Octopus combines vigorous realism with a vision epic in scope. Dominating the story are the vast wheat fields of the San Joaquin Valley in California; these rippling miles of grain are the prize in a titanic struggle between the powerful farmers who grow the wheat and the railroad monopoly that controls its transportation. It is a conflict in which no quarter is given, whether the battle be with guns in an open field, or bribes behind closed doors. The lives of a multitude of characters are encompassed as the struggle flourishes, yielding a grim harvest of death and disillusion, financial and moral ruin. From the interplay of individual destinies and inexorable economic forces, Frank Norris created a social drama of unprecedented proportions in American literature, and an unsurpassed portrayal of a dynamic and ruthless era. The Octopus is ranked by Robert E. Spiller as Norris's most impressive work.' Warren French terms it 'a magnificent imaginative achievement, one of the few American novels to bring a significant episode from our history to life.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (March 5, 1870 - October 25, 1902) was an American novelist during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), and The Pit (1903). Frank Norris was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1870. His father, Benjamin, was a self-made Chicago businessman and his mother, Gertrude Glorvina Doggett, had a stage career. In 1884 the family moved to San Francisco where Benjamin went into real estate. In 1887, after the death of his brother and a brief stay in London, young Norris went to AcadEmie Julian in Paris where he studied painting for two years and was exposed to the naturalist novels of Emile Zola. Between 1890 and 1894 he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he picked up the ideas of human evolution of Darwin and Spencer that are reflected in his later writings. His stories appeared in the undergraduate magazine at Berkeley and in the San Francisco Wave. After his parents' divorce he went east and spent a year in the English Department of Harvard University. There he came under the influence of Lewis E. Gates, who encouraged his writing. He worked as a news correspondent in South Africa (1895–96) for the San Francisco Chronicle, and then as editorial assistant on the San Francisco Wave (1896–97). He worked for McClure's Magazine as a war correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish–American War in 1898. He joined the New York City publishing firm of Doubleday & Page in 1899. During his time at the University of California, Berkeley, Norris was a brother in the Fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta and was an originator of the Skull & Keys society. Because of his involvement with a prank during the Class Day Exercises in 1893, the annual alumni dinner held by each Phi Gamma Delta chapter still bears his name. In 1900 Frank Norris married Jeanette Black. They had a child in 1901. Norris died on October 25, 1902, of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix in San Francisco. This left The Epic of the Wheat trilogy unfinished. He was only 32. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. Charles Gilman Norris, the author's younger brother, became a well regarded novelist and editor. C.G. Norris was also the husband of the prolific novelist Kathleen Norris. The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, houses the archives of all three writers. Frank Norris's work often includes depictions of suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies. In The Octopus: A California Story, the Pacific and Southwest Railroad is implicated in the suffering and deaths of a number of ranchers in Southern California. At the end of the novel, after a bloody shootout between farmers and railroad agents at one of the ranches (named Los Muertos), readers are encouraged to take a 'larger view' that sees that 'through the welter of blood at the irrigating ditch ... the great harvest of Los Muertos rolled like a flood from the Sierras to the Himalayas to feed thousands of starving scarecrows on the barren plains of India'. Though free-wheeling market capitalism causes the deaths of many of the characters in the novel, this 'larger view always ... discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good'. Vandover and the Brute, written in the 1890s, but not published until after his death, is about three college friends, on their way to success, and the ruin of one through a degenerate lifestyle. In addition to Zola's, Norris's writing has been compared to that of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0213 ] Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502132. Afterword By Geoffrey Tillotson. 896 pages. paperback. CT213. Cover: Thomas R. Allen. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - BLEAK HOUSE opens in a London shrouded by an all - pervading fog - a fog that swirls about the Court of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce lies lost in endless litigation. This drawn - out lawsuit over an inheritance stands at the center of a scathing portrayal of a moribund legal system and of a society permeated with greed, deception, delusion, and guilt. In no other work are the many facets of Dickens' genius - his powers of characterization, dramatic construction, social satire, and poetic evocation - so memorably combined. Peopled by an immense gallery of vivid characters, major and minor, comic and tragic, in settings which range from the mansion of a fear - haunted noblewoman to the squalor of the London slums, this superb example of narrative art has been ranked by Edmund Wilson as 'The masterpiece of [Dickens'] middle period.' Geoffrey Tillotson writes: 'BLEAK HOUSE. is, all told, the finest literary work the nineteenth century produced in England. Dickens was the supreme literary genius of his time. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0214 ] Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502140. Afterword By Robert E. Spiller. 447 pages. paperback. CP214. Cover: Pucci. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Pioneers is set in a time of transition. The forests still abound with deer, passenger pigeons darken the sky, fish teem in the lakes and streams - but over the wilderness falls the ever - lengthening shadow of civilization. Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking, now on the threshold of old age, finds his way of life challenged as the land he has roamed for so long becomes private property; and the laws of man supplant the laws of nature. His struggle to retain his fiercely cherished freedom helps shape a drama of conflicting human values, and an unsparing, often caustic, delineation of frontier society. The most realistically written of the Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers combines unrivaled descriptive power with an abiding concern for complex social and moral questions; it offers an enthralling re - creation of a colorful, exciting, and enduringly significant era of our history. As Robert E. Spiller writes:'. the reader moves back in time to an era in our history that only an imagination like Cooper's could recreate. Characters come to life in their responses to nature in both her savage and her grander moments. we can be grateful. for Cooper's total sense of the stuff of which the American people are made, as well as for his power of expression. that has preserved so much of our 'usable past' for our present enrichment.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0215 ] Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. Newly Translated From The Norwegian & With A Foreword by Rolf Fjelde. 253 pages. paperback. CP215. Cover: Seymour Chwast. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The central theme of this epic drama is the search for self amid moral chaos. Opportunistic and unscrupulous, Peer Gynt wanders the earth, from the supernatural kingdom of the trolls to the desert wastes of Africa. In the roles of son, lover, businessman, prophet, and philosopher, he deceives, betrays, and exploits - only to be duped and victimized in turn. Yet, as he passes from youth to maturity to old age, the mercurial fluctuations of his fortunes yield only an inner emptiness and desperate fear of a final reckoning. Rooted in folklore, transformed by poetic imagination, illumined throughout by the clear northern light of Ibsen's searching moral vision, Peer Gynt represents a truly profound exploration of modern man's existential dilemma, justifying Pirandello's remark: 'After Shakespeare, without hesitation, I put Ibsen first.' As RoIf Flelde writes: 'In this anti - romantic work that employs the full resources of the romantic theater, the nonheroic hero is the pilot model of the hollow man of our own time, rendered perplexed and anxious by problems of identity and direction.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0215 ] Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502159. Newly Translated From The Norwegian & With A Foreword by Rolf Fjelde. 253 pages. paperback. CP215. Cover: Seymour Chwast. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The central theme of this epic drama is the search for self amid moral chaos. Opportunistic and unscrupulous, Peer Gynt wanders the earth, from the supernatural kingdom of the trolls to the desert wastes of Africa. In the roles of son, lover, businessman, prophet, and philosopher, he deceives, betrays, and exploits - only to be duped and victimized in turn. Yet, as he passes from youth to maturity to old age, the mercurial fluctuations of his fortunes yield only an inner emptiness and desperate fear of a final reckoning. Rooted in folklore, transformed by poetic imagination, illumined throughout by the clear northern light of Ibsen's searching moral vision, Peer Gynt represents a truly profound exploration of modern man's existential dilemma, justifying Pirandello's remark: 'After Shakespeare, without hesitation, I put Ibsen first.' As RoIf Flelde writes: 'In this anti - romantic work that employs the full resources of the romantic theater, the nonheroic hero is the pilot model of the hollow man of our own time, rendered perplexed and anxious by problems of identity and direction.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0216 ] Austen, Jane. Emma. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502167. Afterword By Graham Hough. 399 pages. paperback. CD216. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Emma represents the mature flowering of Jane Austen's singular genius. Set in a world the author made uniquely her own - the world of country gentry in Regency England - the novel centers upon a supremely self - assured young lady, determined to arrange her life and the lives of all around her into a pattern dictated by her romantic fancy. By turn intelligent and foolish, wreaking havoc with best intentions, Miss Emma Woodhouse is a captivating embodiment of feminine contradiction, portrayed with the stylistic grace, the wit, and the wisdom that have ensured Jane Austen's continuing popularity. The book's resourceful narrative technique - with its masterly use of point of view and its skillful employment of the elements of mystery - makes it, in the words of Frank O'Connor, 'a delight and a flattery for the knowing type of reader.' Graham Hough writes: 'Emma has a good claim to be the most perfect of Jane Austen's novels, the one in which comedy and gravity, irony and sympathy, are most completely blended.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is ‘famously scarce', according to one biographer. Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned ‘the greater part' of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of ‘good quiet Aunt Jane'. Scholars have unearthed little information since. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0217 ] London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf and Selected Stories. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502175. Afterword By Franklin Walker. 351 pages. paperback. CP217. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: The Sea - Wolf, The Law of Life, The One Thousand Dozen All GoId Canyon, & Moon - Face. 'That tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen. the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime.' Thus Ambrose Bierce wrote of one of Jack London's greatest characterizations, the unforgettable protagonist of The Sea - Wolf. Strong, ruthless, fearless, Larsen is both the prototype of rugged individualism, a man possessed of a demonic will to power, and the negation of every civilized virtue. The perilous voyage of his ship, the seal - hunting Ghost, forms the background of a confrontation between two opposing views of life, a brutal drama played out to a harrowing conclusion. Franklin Walker calls The Sea - Wolf 'one of the world's great sea novels.' Together with the stories selected for this volume, it gives superb expression to the genius of a writer who was, in the words of Maxwell Geismar, 'the poet of the savage Darwinian struggle.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Griffith ‘Jack' London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories ‘To Build a Fire‘, ‘An Odyssey of the North', and ‘Love of Life'. London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposE The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0218 ] Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502183. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Barbara Everett. 276 pages. paperback. CD218. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A magnificent drama of love and war, this riveting tragedy presents one of Shakespeare's greatest female characters--the seductive, cunning Egyptian queen Cleopatra. The Roman leader Mark Antony, a virtual prisoner of his passion for her, is a man torn between pleasure and virtue, between sensual indolence and duty. between an empire and love. Bold, rich, and splendid in its setting and emotions, Antony And Cleopatra ranks among Shakespeare's supreme achievements. A prose retelling of William Shakespeare's play about the love affair between the Roman soldier, Antony, and the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0219 ] Shakespeare, William. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502191. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Bertrand Evans. 200 pages. paperback. CD219. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1589 and 1593. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play,[a] and is often seen as showing his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and motifs with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. The play deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0220 ] Thomas, Dylan. Adventures in the Skin Trade. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451502205. Afterword By Vernon Watkins. paperback. CP220. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - One of the twentieth century's most gifted writers, Dylan Thomas created a vital, lusty, antic world of truly memorable characters. This Signet Classic offers a distinguished selection of his work - twenty stories plus all of his famous unfinished novel, ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE. The title piece relates the adventures of Samuel Bennet, a young innocent embarked on a wild pilgrimage through modern London. The stories range in theme from life and love to nature and madness, but all are written with the extravagant humor, the brilliant imagery, the magic awareness of the true poet. The New York Times wrote of ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE: 'The human warmth keeps bubbling up through the satire. Thomas' last work of fiction, in addition to its intrinsic interest, has a meaningfulness comparable to that of Keats' letters and Yeats' memoirs.' The New York Herald Tribune found it a 'vein of pure gold.' And The Saturday Review called Dylan Thomas 'a genius.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 - 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and 'And death shall have no dominion', the 'Play for Voices', Under Milk Wood, and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death in New York City. In his later life he acquired a reputation, which he encouraged, as a 'roistering, drunken and doomed poet'. Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. An undistinguished pupil, he left school at 16, becoming a journalist for a short time. Although many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager, it was the publication of 'Light breaks where no sun shines', in 1934, that caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937. Their relationship was defined by alcoholism and was mutually destructive. In the early part of his marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth, settling in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne. Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult, which resulted in his augmenting his income with reading tours and broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention and he was used by the Corporation as a populist voice of the literary scene. In the 1950s, Thomas travelled to America, where his readings brought him a level of fame, and his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in America cemented Thomas's legend, and he recorded to vinyl works such as A Child's Christmas in Wales. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma from which he did not recover. Thomas died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales where he was buried at the village churchyard in Laugharne. Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language. He has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century and noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and imagery. Thomas's position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed. He remains popular with the public, who find his work accessible. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0221 ] Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502213. Afterword By F.R. Leavis. 301 pages. paperback. CD221. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS represents the rarest of achievements, a nearly flawless work of art created for non - artistic ends. Bunyan cast his book in the form of a religious allegory; but it is allegory transformed into intense drama, its style an unsurpassed evocation of the power of plain English prose. The multitude of characters who appear on its pages escape the bounds of narrow didactic design; they are superbly individualized, indelibly alive, as memorable as are those landmarks on Christian's perilous journey toward salvation: the Slough of Despond and the Delectable Mountains, Doubting Castle and the Palace Beautiful, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City. The author's religious faith, pure and ever present, serves to imbue the immediacy of his narrative with added dimension; the result belongs to the highest realm of literature, a continuously compelling tale framed in an unwavering vision of eternity. As F R. Leavis writes: 'The Pilgrim's Progress stands alone. the work of a great creative writer. , there was only one Bunyan.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Bunyan (baptised 28 November 1628 - 31 August 1688) was an English writer and preacher best remembered as the author of the religious allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. In addition to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons. Bunyan came from the village of Elstow, near Bedford. He had little schooling and at the age of sixteen joined the Parliamentary army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years in the army he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learnt from his father. He became interested in religion after his marriage, attending first the parish church and then joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist group in Bedford, and becoming a preacher. After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of nonconformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested and spent the next twelve years in gaol as he refused to undertake to give up preaching. During this time he wrote a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and began work on his most famous book, The Pilgrim's Progress, which was not published until some years after his release. Bunyan's later years, in spite of another shorter term of imprisonment, were spent in relative comfort as a popular author and preacher, and pastor of the Bedford Meeting. He died aged 59 or 60 after falling ill on a journey to London and is buried in Bunhill Fields. The Pilgrim's Progress became one of the most published books in the English language; 1,300 editions having been printed by 1938, 250 years after the author's death. He is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 30 August, and on the liturgical calendar of the United States Episcopal Church on 29 August. Some other churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, honour him on the day of his death (31 August). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0222 ] James, Henry. Washington Square. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502221. Afterword By Donald Hall. 192 pages. paperback. CP222. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Everyone likes Washington Square. Even the denigrators of Henry James,' writes Donald Hall in his appreciative Afterword. One of the few' Jamesian novels set in his native land, its style is direct and economical; its plot - centering upon an heiress favored by neither beauty nor brilliance, her proud and pitiless father, her fortune - hunting suitor - has the simplicity of a classic drama. Henry James portrays the shifting relationships of his characters through a series of confrontations and self - revelations. And from this depiction there emerges a view of love and cruelty, innocence and treachery, singularly shaped by his intense moral vision. Clifton Fadiman has written of the novel's 'almost Mozartian combination of sweetness and depth.' While F. W. Dupee has deemed it 'a first - rate novel of James's early period, or of any of his periods. its surfaces are so fine, the writing so perfect, and the fusion of humor and pathos so inevitable.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0223 ] Cooper, James Fenimore. The Prairie. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150223x. Afterword By John William Ward. 415 pages. paperback. CP223. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Prairie marks the closing chapter in James Fenimore Cooper's great American saga, of the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. In flight from the ever - encroaching forces of civilization, the aging hero of the Leatherstocking Tales has journeyed westward seeking to end his days in the still - virgin wilderness of the Great Plains. But once more he is drawn into an involvement with society in the form of an emigrant party led by the embittered outcast, Ishmael Bush. Once again this man of nature finds himself in dramatic confrontation with civilization - called upon to exhibit his courage, his resourcefulness, his singular brand of moral rectitude. Written with the narrative vigor and descriptive power that shape the entire Leatherstocking series, The Prairie is, in the words of John William Ward, 'a threnody over the passing of something fine and heroic in American life. the passing of an ideal natural order before the inevitable advance of society. We still read Cooper today because he was the first of our authors to seize upon the dramatic possibilities of that unfallen western world that stands at the beginning of our national life.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0224 ] Dana Jr., Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502248. Afterword By Wright Morris. 384 pages. paperback. CP224. Cover: Thomas R. Allen. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In the year 1834, a young man, recently of Harvard, signed on as a common seaman aboard the brig Pilgrim for the perilous voyage around Cape Horn to California. During the next two years was to realize the singular joys and almost incredible hardships of a sailor's lot. He recorded his experiences in a daily journal; later he gave them permanent form in one of the most vivid re - creations of life at sea ever published. Conceived as a protest against brutal injustice, written to improve the working conditions of the common sailor, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST is a tale of high adventure, a powerful portrayal of the testing of man's courage and endurance. It is a book that combines descriptive force with striking delineations of character; and it greatly influenced the work of Herman Melville. In the words of Wright Morris, 'A manual for the seafarer, it was also a book of sea - poetry. one of the first books of its kind: a book that opened the sea to the landlocked seafaring mind.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Henry Dana Jr. (August 1, 1815 - January 6, 1882) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of an eminent colonial family, who gained renown as the author of the American classic, the memoir Two Years Before the Mast. Both as a writer and as a lawyer, he was a champion of the downtrodden, from seamen to fugitive slaves. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0225 ] Verga, Giovanni. The House By the Medlar Tree. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502256. Newly Translated From The Italian & With A Foreword By Raymond Rosenthal. 272 pages. paperback. CT225. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This Signet Classic edition presents the first complete English translation of The House by the Medlar Tree. Anticipating such writers as Joyce, Faulkner, and Henry Green, Verga tells his story through the varied voices of his characters, the inhabitants of a poor Sicilian fishing village. With vivid immediacy these voices - magnificently individualized and dramatically juxtaposed - re - create the comedy, the irony, and the abiding tragedy of existence, in a work that gives artistic form to a profound vision of human destiny. As Raymond Rosenthal writes: 'Its theme is the harsh, age - old theme of the meaning of work and the dignity of human striving and suffering. [Verga] has rediscovered in poverty and hardship. an ancient rhythm, a sorrowing lyricism, an epic intonation. When D. H. Lawrence first discovered Verga, he could find only one word adequate to his primitive depth and power: Homeric.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Giovanni Carmelo Verga (2 September 1840 - 27 January 1922) was an Italian realist (Verismo) writer, best known for his depictions of life in his native Sicily, and especially for the short story (and later play) Cavalleria Rusticana and the novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree) |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0226 ] Faulkner, William. Sartoris. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502264. Afterword By Lawrance Thompson. 317 pages. paperback. CT226. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The specter of an heroic past is ever present in Sartoris, casting its ironic light upon the novel's protagonists. Heirs to the aristocratic traditions of the Old South, they have been left with only romantic rhetoric, pride, and self-pity to face a world that no longer mirrors their self-image. Bayard Sartoris seeks refuge in compulsive acts of physical courage; Horace Benbow, in a bloodless aestheticism; and Narcissa Benbow, in a desperate clinging to appearances. But for them there is to be no escape-only ultimate futility, whether in the form of violent self-destruction, or a living death in a fragile world of dreams. A brilliant dissection of a decaying social class, and a vivid evocation of both the physical landscape and psychological climate of the South, Sartoris introduces many of the key themes, places, and characters of the Faulkner canon. By itself, it stands as his first memorable projection of a vision that, as Lawrance Thompson writes, ‘recognizes the inseparability of human weaknesses and strengths, of positives and negatives, of good and evil. what [Faulkner] later called ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962), also known as Will Faulkner, was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of written media, including novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life, and Holly Springs/Marshall County. Faulkner is one of the most important writers in both American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0227 ] Lermontov, Mikhail Yurevich. A Hero of Our Time. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502272. Translated From The Russian By Philip Longworth. Afterword By William E. Harkins. 206 pages. paperback. CT227. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Lermontov created, almost alone, a Russian novel in which the psychology of the hero played a major role; it was with this example in mind that the great masters of Russian fiction, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, went on to explore. profound psychological depths' writes William F. Harkins in his Afterword. A Hero of Our Time centers upon the dashing exploits of a truly enigmatic figure - a young Army officer named Pechorin. Handsome, brilliant, cynical, world - weary, he plunges into reckless adventure. He stakes his life on trifles, he ruins the woman who adores him, he kills without conscience - but he cannot escape the crushing weight of his own profound indifference. In a series of five episodes, which first weave a spell of mystery around Pechorin, then subject him to searching analysis, he emerges as far more than the standard Byronic hero. He stands in all his inner contradiction and complexity as a prototype of the self - tortured, spiritually adrift, existential man. A vivid reflection of his own age's malaise, he has become a hero of our time as well. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (October 15 1814 - July 27 1841), a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837 and the greatest figure in Russian Romanticism. His influence on later Russian literature is still felt in modern times, not only through his poetry, but also through his prose, which founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0228 ] Swinburne, Algernon. Love's Cross Currents. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502280. Afterword By Marya Zaturenska. 158 pages. paperback. CP228. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - With the growing reputation of this, Swinburne's one completed novel, a fresh and intriguing facet of his genius has come to light. Centering upon a great English family, its members bound together both by ties of blood and by near - incestuous attraction, Love's Cross - Currents offers the reader access to a world explored by no other Victorian writer: the closed inner circle of the British aristocracy, a hermetic society with its own inbred code of manners and morals, its own peculiar emotional climate. In the unfolding of this intricate tale of passion and calculation, the reader encounters a brilliant series of character portraits, and a superb depiction of shifting human relationships. Termed by Edmund Wilson as 'unique in English Victorian fiction,' and praised by Marya Zaturenska for 'its true sophistication, its crisp, cool style,' this long - neglected masterpiece bears the stamp of one of the most remarkable writers of his time. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 - 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0229 ] Maugham, W. Somerset. The Summing Up. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502299. Foreword By Glenway Wescott. 194 pages. paperback. CP229. Cover by Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Summing Up is precisely what its title indicates: the summing up of a life, and a distillation of hard - won wisdom. Unsentimental, unapologetic, and superbly crafted, it represents the personal testament of a writer who achieved an extraordinarily successful literary career and created a pattern of existence of singular inner integrity. Within it are blended the most varied elements - autobiographical detail and philosophical speculation, incisive commentary on the art of writing and broad reflections upon religion, morality, and above all, humanity. Combining profound skepticism with an abiding reverence for life, and unyielding pride of intellect with acute awareness of personal limitations, The Summing Up is remarkable for its honesty and illumination; it stands as both a portrait and a product of one of the truly fascinating minds of our time. It is, as Glenway Wescott writes, 'a first - rate book' by 'a very strong and strange and meaningful human being, in some respects the most interesting human being I have known.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Somerset Maugham CH (25 January 1874 - 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a medical doctor (physician). The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0230 ] Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502302. Afterword By Kenneth S. Lynn. 224 pages. paperback. CD230. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - They are the same age. They look alike. In fact, there is but one difference between them: Tom Canty is a child of the London slums; Edward Tudor is heir to the throne of England. Just how insubstantial this difference is becomes all too clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing - and of roles. with the pauper caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wandering horror-stricken through the lower depths of sixteenth-century English society. Out of the theme of switched identities Mark Twain fashioned both a scathing attack upon social hypocrisy and injustice, and an irresistible comedy imbued with the sense of high-spirited play that belongs to his happiest creative period. THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER is, in the worlds of Kenneth S. Lynn, ‘. expressive of its author's genius. Indeed, nothing he ever wrote, not even HUCKLEBERRY FINN, introduces us to more of the themes that preoccupied - and finally obsessed - Mark Twain's imagination.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0231 ] Chekhov, Anton. Chekhov: The Major Plays. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502310. Newly Translated From The Russian By Ann Dunnigan.Foreword By Robert Brustein.Includes - Ivanov, The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sister, & The Cherry Orchard. 382 pages. paperback. CP231. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Let the things that happen on stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.' Thus Chekhov summed up the credo that finds expression in the subtle construction and electrically charged atmosphere of his plays. In these portrayals of human beings trapped in a stultifying environment, victimized as much by their own weakness as by the greed of others, the most casual words and everyday actions assume the import of acts of destiny. Tragedy is mingled with farce, protest wars with resignation, in a world that yields from its darkest despair a singular moral affirmation - an affirmation that stands as the final mark and measure of Chekhov's art. As Robert Brustein declares: '. in the modern theater. there are none who bring the drama to a higher realization of its human role.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife', he once said, ‘and literature is my mistress.' Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a ‘theatre of mood' and a ‘submerged life in the text.' Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0232 ] James, Henry. The Europeans. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502329. Afterword By Richard Poirier. 192 pages. paperback. CP232. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A departure from the familiar Jamesian theme of Americans astray in Europe, this novel centers upon a pair of Europeans - a captivating woman and her engaging brother - who have come to seek their fortunes in America. They are polished in manner, refined in sensibility, wise in the ways of the world. But nothing in their Old World experience has prepared them for the Wentworths, a clan personifying the supreme provincialism of nineteenth - century New England. From this confrontation, depicted with lucidity, grace, and objectivity, emerges a sharply etched, double - edged comedy of manners and morals. Steadily gaining in reputation, The Europeans has come to be recognized as one of James's finest performances, a delightful fable of cultures in collision, with a heroine who, in the words of Richard Poirier, 'is meant to escape our customary moral evaluations and to claim our admiration for her mode of being, her style. ' As F. R. Leavis noted: 'This small book, written so early in James's career, is a masterpiece of major quality.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0233 ] Shakespeare, William. Measure For Measure. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502337. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By S. Nagarajan. 240 pages. paperback. CD233. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Measure for Measure's main themes include justice, "morality and mercy in Vienna", and the dichotomy between corruption and purity: "some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall". Mercy and virtue prevail, as the play does not end tragically, with virtues such as compassion and forgiveness being exercised at the end of the production. While the play focuses on justice overall, the final scene illustrates that Shakespeare intended for moral justice to temper strict civil justice: a number of the characters receive understanding and leniency, instead of the harsh punishment to which they, according to the law, could have been sentenced. Measure for Measure is often called one of Shakespeare's problem plays. It continues to be classified as a comedy, although its tone sometimes defies this classification. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare, MEASURE FOR MEASURE: Special Introduction to the play by the editor, S. Nagarajan, University of Poona, India. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. Special note on the sources from which Shakespeare derived MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by William Hazlitt, Walter Pater, G. Wilson Knight, R. W. Chambers, Mary Lascelles. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0234 ] Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502345. Newly Translated From The French By Mildred Marmur.Foreword By Mary McCarthy. 405 pages. paperback. CD234. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'She is a very ordinary middle - class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling.' Thus Mary McCarthy, in her memorable Foreword to this Signet Classic edition, describes Emma Bovary, whose ill - starred pursuit of tawdry romantic dreams shapes Flaubert's great novel. Set amid the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth - century bourgeois France, MADAME BOVARY is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman's gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human shallowness and stupidity. Neither Emma, nor her lovers, nor Homais, the 'man of science,' escapes the author's searing castigation; and it is the book's final profound irony that only Charles, Emma's oxlike, eternally deceived husband, emerges with a measure of human grace through his stubborn and selfless love. With its rare formal perfection, MADAME BOVARY represents, as Frank O'Connor has declared, 'possibly the most beautifully written book ever composed; undoubtedly the most beautifully written novel. a book that invites superlatives. the most important novel of the century.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880) was an influential French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protEgE of Flaubert. Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880) was an influential French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protEgE of Flaubert. The publication of Madame Bovary in 1856 was followed by more scandal than admiration; it was not understood at first that this novel was the beginning of something new: the scrupulously truthful portraiture of life. Gradually, this aspect of his genius was accepted, and it began to crowd out all others. At the time of his death he was widely regarded as the most influential French Realist. Under this aspect Flaubert exercised an extraordinary influence over Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, and Zola. Even after the decline of the Realist school, Flaubert did not lose prestige in the literary community; he continues to appeal to other writers because of his deep commitment to aesthetic principles, his devotion to style, and his indefatigable pursuit of the perfect expression. He has been admired or written about by almost every major literary personality of the 20th century, including philosophers and sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Paul Sartre whose partially psychoanalytic portrait of Flaubert in The Family Idiot was published in 1971. Georges Perec named Sentimental Education as one of his favourite novels. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is another great admirer of Flaubert. Apart from Perpetual Orgy, which is solely devoted to Flaubert's art, one can find lucid discussions in Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist (published 2003) |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0235 ] Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502353. Afterword By Irving Howe. 831 pages. paperback. CQ235. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - On one level, An American Tragedy is the story of the corruption and destruction of one man, Clyde Griffiths, who forfeits his life in desperate pursuit of success. On a deeper, more profound level, however, the novel represents a massive portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's tawdry ambitions and seal his fate: it is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and of the dark side of the American Dream. Extraordinary in scope and power, vivid in its sense of wholesale human waste, unceasing in its rich compassion, An American Tragedy stands as the supreme achievement of a writer who ranks, in the words of Irving Howe, 'among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had' As Mr. Howe goes on to declare: 'Reading An American Tragedy again. 1 have found myself greatly moved and shaken by its repeated onslaughts of narrative, its profound immersion in human suffering, its dredging up of those shapeless desires which lie, as if in fever, just below the plane of consciousness. It is a masterpiece, nothing less' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 - December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0236 ] Ford, Ford Madox. Some Do Not. & No More Parades. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502361. Afterword By Arthur Mizener. 520 pages. paperback. CQ236. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The two young men - they were of the English public - official class - sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.' Thus, amid the illusory surface decorum of an England on the verge of moral bankruptcy, begins Some Do Not. ,the first of the four novels that constitute Parade's End. Now available in a Signet Classic two - volume edition, this monumental work is an unsurpassed portrayal of the end of an epoch and the ushering in of the chaos of the modern world. Dominating the tetralogy is Christopher Tietjens, 'the last English Tory,' both witness and victim of the general collapse. Inescapably he is caught up in the vicious intrigue and folly let loose by war, and enmeshed in bitter sexual conflict with his faithless, vengeful wife; inescapably he is forced to choose between allegiance to an outmoded code of honor and personal survival in a corrupt age. Distinguished by brilliant technical innovation and masterful harmony of total design, these novels offer what Robie Macauley has termed 'a major act of understanding ourselves and our era.' In the words of Graham Greene: 'There is no novelist of the century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 - 26 June 1939), born Ford Hermann Hueffer, was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now remembered best for his publications The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–28) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–08). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's ‘100 Greatest Novels of All Time', and The Guardian's ‘1000 novels everyone must read'. Ford was born to Catherine and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. His father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish the fellow Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a Catholic aristocrat. He used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer and during 1919 changed it to Ford Madox Ford (allegedly, in the aftermath of World War I because ‘Hueffer' sounded too German) in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written. One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two ‘perfect couples' using intricate flashbacks. In the ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford', his wife, that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier ‘the finest French novel in the English language!' Ford pronounced himself a ‘Tory mad about historic continuity' and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time. Ford was involved with British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, with other writers and scholars who were popular during that time, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915). After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welch Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I. Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, although written much earlier). During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908), historical novels based on the life of Katharine Howard, which Conrad termed, at the time, ‘the swan song of historical romance.' Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised during 1935) is, in a sense, the reverse of Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. During 1908, he initiated The English Review, in which he published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. During 1924, he initiated The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, he befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). As a critic, he is known for remarking ‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.' George Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: ‘'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes.' Ford says, ‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway.' Seldes observes, ‘At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.' Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a cafE in Paris during the early 1920s. During a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. During 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously. Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0237 ] Ford, Ford Madox. A Man Could Stand Up-& Last Post. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150237x. Afterword By Arthur Mizener. 352 pages. paperback. CT237. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A Man Could Stand Up - , the third novel of Ford Madox Ford's monumental tetralogy, Parade's End, opens in 1918 as the Great War ends and the personal drama of Christopher Tietjens moves toward its resolution. Joined by his mistress, Valentine Wannop, Tietjens is free at last from the moral code that has imprisoned him in a doomed society and a destructive marriage; together the lovers resolve to survive. Set against a rapidly shifting background of battlefield and drawing room, hospital and manor, these novels masterfully depict both the course of individual destinies and the fate of an entire way of life. They complete the grand design of a work whose breadth of vision, psychological insight, and consummate artistry place it among the truly great achievements of the modern novel. Granville Hicks has declared: 'With a brilliance that was at times almost too dazzling, Ford portrayed a revolution in manners. in human values. We have not yet caught up with his insights.' In the words of Graham Greene: 'There is no novelist of the century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 - 26 June 1939), born Ford Hermann Hueffer, was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now remembered best for his publications The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–28) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–08). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's ‘100 Greatest Novels of All Time', and The Guardian's ‘1000 novels everyone must read'. Ford was born to Catherine and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. His father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish the fellow Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a Catholic aristocrat. He used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer and during 1919 changed it to Ford Madox Ford (allegedly, in the aftermath of World War I because ‘Hueffer' sounded too German) in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written. One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two ‘perfect couples' using intricate flashbacks. In the ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford', his wife, that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier ‘the finest French novel in the English language!' Ford pronounced himself a ‘Tory mad about historic continuity' and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time. Ford was involved with British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, with other writers and scholars who were popular during that time, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915). After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welch Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I. Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, although written much earlier). During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908), historical novels based on the life of Katharine Howard, which Conrad termed, at the time, ‘the swan song of historical romance.' Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised during 1935) is, in a sense, the reverse of Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. During 1908, he initiated The English Review, in which he published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. During 1924, he initiated The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, he befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). As a critic, he is known for remarking ‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.' George Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: ‘'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes.' Ford says, ‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway.' Seldes observes, ‘At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.' Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a cafE in Paris during the early 1920s. During a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. During 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously. Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0238 ] Melville, Herman. Typee. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502388. Afterword By Harrison Hayford. 320 pages. paperback. CP238. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Herman Melville's first book, Typee, the work. that won him his greatest lifetime fame, is a narrative of a four - month sojourn among primitive South Sea Islanders. In it Melville combines his own extraordinary personal experiences with later intensive research to produce a vivid and imaginative work. Shocking his original audience with its frankness, this portrayal of Polynesian tribal life endures as one of exotic fascination, given sharp focus by a narrator drawn to this primitive pattern of existence, yet forced to remain ever alien to it. In this ambivalent vision appears the first evidence of the author's later moral complexities; but here it is an element that remains below the surface of the vigor and color of this, Melville's freshest, most high - spirited achievement. Harrison Hayford declares, 'Typee is no Moby - Dick. - but it is a classic - and not just a children's classic - in its own right.' As Lewis Mumford has written: 'One reads Typee, and life suddenly shows a new vista. Adventure is possible: Eden is real.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). When asked which of the great American writers he most admired, Vladimir Nabokov replied: ‘When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom I did not read as a boy.' Around his twentieth year he was a schoolteacher for a short time, then became a seaman when his father met business reversals. On his first voyage he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for a time. His first book, an account of that time, Typee, became a bestseller and Melville became known as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals'. After Omoo, the sequel to his first book, Melville began to work philosophical issues in his third book, the elaborate Mardi (1849). The public indifference to Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man, the last work of fiction published during his lifetime. During his later decades, Melville worked at the New York Customs House and privately published some volumes of poetry in editions of only 25 copies. When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the ‘Melville Revival' at the occasion of the centennial of his birth that his work won recognition. In 1924, the story Billy Budd, Sailor was published, which Melville worked on during his final years, and left in manuscript at his death. The single most Melvillean characteristic of his prose is its allusivity. Stanley T. Williams said ‘In Melville's manipulation of his reading was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0239 ] Conrad, Joseph. An Outcast of the Islands. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502396. Afterword By Thomas Moser. 287 pages. paperback. CD239. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'An Outcast of the Islands occupies a crucial place in Conrad's career. it marks the beginning of his real commitment to the craft of fiction. ' Thus writes Thomas Moser of this dramatic tale of East and West. Set against a magnificently rendered background of tropical river and jungle, the novel depicts the gradual degeneration of Willems, its white protagonist: his progression through a career of treachery to final self. betrayal, his descent through sensuality to final humiliation amid the growing horror of his alienation from compatriots and natives alike. Combining vivid, sensuous detail with acute psychological insight, An Outcast of the Islands represents one of Conrad's most memorable explorations of the primitive impulses that plague civilized man, and of the fundamental spiritual isolation of the human condition. It stands as a superb projection of a complex tragic vision, a vision entranced by the rich romance of life, yet drawn eternally toward the abyss. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, J. G. Ballard, John le CarrE, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0240 ] Maupassant, Guy de. Boule De Suif and Selected Stories. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150240x. Newly Translated From The French By Andrew R. MacAndrew.Foreword By Edward D. Sullivan. 285 pages. paperback. CD240. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Maupassant is universally regarded as one of the true masters of the short story, unsurpassed in his swift economy of style and sense of narrative form. In this collection, - which ranges from 'Boule de Suif,' his first and most famous tale, to the stories that belong to his last great creative outpouring - the reader is offered a sampling of. his finest work. These stories are set in farm, town, or city; their characters include grand ladies and prostitutes, peasants and aristocrats, workingmen and members of the bourgeoisie - but all are shaped by the same intensity of vision. It is a vision that tears away the blinders of official morality; a vision that accepts only the evidence of the senses; a vision that invests each of these tautly written tales with the force of truth. As Edward D. Sullivan writes: '[Maupassant's] dread of being deluded drove him to depict the world as it is and not as it purports to be. People protect themselves with masks; society screens itself by hypocrisy. The task of a writer, as he saw it, was to lift those masks and remove that screen.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant (5 August 1850 - 6 July 1893) was a popular French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents. Maupassant was a protege of Flaubert and his stories are characterized by economy of style and efficient, effortless denouements (outcomes). Many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, describing the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught up in events beyond their control, are permanently changed by their experiences. He wrote some 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. His first published story, 'Boule de Suif' ('Ball of Fat', 1880), is often considered his masterpiece. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0241 ] Roosevelt, Theodore. Theodore Roosevelt's Letters To His Children. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502418. Prologue & Epilogue By Elting E. Morison.Illustrations By Theodore Roosevelt. 159 pages. paperback. CP241. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'I would rather have this book published than anything that has ever been written about me,' declared Theodore Roosevelt when, shortly before his death, he helped select the letters for this volume. Spanning more than twenty years, filled with a wealth of day - to - day incident, these letters are remarkable for their vividness of detail, and for the natural, storytelling gift they display. They combine to offer a superb picture of vigorous, richly varied, near - idyllic family life; they offer, too, unique insight into one of the most complex personalities in American history, a man behind whose hearty public manner lay a searching intellect, and whose moral sense was no less finely balanced for all its firmness. From these letters, with their mixture of entertainment and serious counsel, outward delight and inward reflection, emerges, in the words of Elting Morison, 'a piece of genuine Americana. - - [but] not all hearty exercise and small boy's pranks. There are moments of doubt, of pain, of uncertainty, and of loneliness, shots of irony and mordant wit.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Theodore 'T.R.' Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 - January 6, 1919) was an American politician, author, naturalist, soldier, explorer, and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the Progressive Party insurgency of 1912. He is known for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his 'cowboy' persona and robust masculinity. Growing up, Roosevelt was a sickly child who suffered from asthma. To overcome his physical weakness, he embraced a strenuous life. He was home-schooled and became an eager student of nature. He attended Harvard College, where he studied biology, boxed, and developed an interest in naval affairs. He quickly entered politics, determined to become a member of the ruling class. In 1881, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where he became a leader of the reform faction of the GOP. His book, The Naval War of 1812 (1882), established him as a learned historian and writer. When Roosevelt's first wife, Alice, died two days after giving birth in February 1884 and when his mother died the same day in the same house, he was heartbroken and in despair. Roosevelt temporarily left politics and became a cattle rancher in the Dakotas. When blizzards destroyed his herd, he returned to New York City politics, running in and losing a race for mayor. In the 1890s, he took vigorous charge of the city police as New York City Police Commissioner. By 1897, under President William McKinley, Roosevelt was, in effect, running the Navy Department. When the war with Spain broke out in 1898, he helped form the famous Rough Riders, a combination of wealthy Easterners and Western cowboys. He gained national fame for his courage during the war in Cuba. Roosevelt then returned to United States and was elected Governor of New York. He was the GOP nominee for Vice President with William McKinley, campaigning successfully against radicalism and for prosperity, national honor, imperialism (regarding the Philippines), high tariffs and the gold standard. Roosevelt became President after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. He was inaugurated at age 42, making him the youngest person to become president, and the first President to receive full-time Secret Service protection (although this was not at his request). He tried to move the GOP toward Progressivism, including trust busting and increased business regulation. In November 1904, he was reelected in a landslide against conservative Democrat Alton Brooks Parker. Roosevelt called his domestic policies a 'Square Deal', promising a fair deal to the average citizen while breaking up monopolistic corporations, holding down railroad rates, and guaranteeing pure food and drugs. He was the first president to speak out on conservation, and he greatly expanded the system of national parks and national forests. By 1907, he propounded more radical reforms, which were blocked by the conservative Republicans in Congress. His foreign policy focused on the Caribbean, where he ordered the construction of the Panama Canal and guarded it. There were no wars, but his slogan, 'Speak softly and carry a big stick' was underscored by expanding the navy and sending the Great White Fleet on a world tour. He negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. At the end of his second term, Roosevelt supported his close friend, William Howard Taft, for the 1908 Republican nomination. After leaving office, he toured Africa and Europe, and on his return in 1910, his friendship with President Taft ended as a result of disputes on the issues of progressivism and personalities. In the 1912 presidential election, Roosevelt tried to block Taft's renomination, but failed. He then launched the Progressive ('Bull Moose') Party that called for progressive reforms, which split the Republicans, and captured almost 25 percent of all votes cast in the 1912 Presidential election. This allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the White House and Congress, while the Taft conservatives gained control of the GOP for decades. Roosevelt then led a major expedition to the Amazon jungles and contracted several illnesses. From 1914 to 1917, he campaigned for American entry into World War I, and reconciled with the GOP leadership. He was the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the 1920 presidential election, but his health collapsed and he died in 1919. Roosevelt has consistently been ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents. His face adorns Mount Rushmore alongside those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0242 ] Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline and Selected Tales and Poems. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502426. Afterword By Horace Gregory. 288 pages. paperback. CP242. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the first American poet successfully to employ the classic form and style of the Old World to express the subjects and sentiments of the New. His narrative poems - Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish - have long been part of our national heritage; but Longfellow has more than the familiar to offer the discerning modern reader. Only recently have critics rediscovered his gift for creating superb melodies and harmonies in his verse. The shorter lyrics, the sonnets, are among the finest American poems in the Romantic tradition. The distinguished modern poet Horace Gregory has selected thirty - seven of Longfellow's most enduring poems for this edition, which offers to the student and to the general reader a perceptive insight into the many facets of the poet's genius. 'Longfellow's dignified, yet lighthearted phrasing is unique. his mastery in telling a story and reciting a fable is unequaled in American verse.' - Horace Gregory. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator whose works include 'Paul Revere's Ride', The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, and was one of the five Fireside Poets. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, which was then a part of Massachusetts. He studied at Bowdoin College. After spending time in Europe he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College. His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854, to focus on his writing, living the remainder of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a former headquarters of George Washington. His first wife Mary Potter died in 1835, after a miscarriage. His second wife Frances Appleton died in 1861, after sustaining burns when her dress caught fire. After her death, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry for a time and focused on his translation. He died in 1882. Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and also had success overseas. He has been criticized, however, for imitating European styles and writing specifically for the masses. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0243 ] Lear, Edward. The Nonsense Books of Edward Lear. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502434. Foreword By Howard Moss. 320 pages. paperback. CT243. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'His poems shed light in several directions: toward the cartoon strip and the animated cartoon, and, more seriously, toward Joyce, Beerbohm, Beckett, and Ionesco.' Thus writes Howard Moss in his Foreword to this Signet Classic edition of The Nonsense Books of Edward Lear. In this collection the reader is transported far beyond the normal boundaries of the imagination. He will visit the land of the Dong and Pobble, the Quangle Wangle and Willeby-wat; he will wander upon the Gramboolian Plain and over the hills of Chankly Bore; he will set sail with the Owl and the Pussy-cat upon one of poetry's most unforgettable voyages into absurdity. Yet, strange though this world and its inhabitants may be, often they seem even more strangely familiar. For it was Edward Lear's genius to be able .to combine a singular innocence of vision with a unique form of artistry, touching upon a core of truth common to child and adult alike, and providing a secret shock of recognition in the midst of the rarest of fantasies. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Lear (12 or 13 May 1812 - 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0244 ] Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502442. Afterword By J. Hillis Miller. 916 pages. paperback. CQ244. Cover: Seymour Chwast. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Our Mutual Friend is about 'money, money, money, and what money can make of life.' This theme plays an important part in Dickens' earlier fiction, too, but never does Dickens so concentrate his attention on the power of money as in this last of his completed novels.' Thus writes J. Hillis Miller in his Afterword to a work that ranks among Dickens' greatest artistic triumphs. Utilizing in its dramatically constructed plot a mysterious inheritance, a bitter love triangle, and a cast of characters who range from the highest to the lowest social levels, the novel presents a witty indictment of a society fallen prey to the dehumanizing spirit of a burgeoning commercial age. Dickens' matchless powers of characterization plumb new depths of human complexity, his evocation of the physical world is charged with extraordinary poetic force, in a work that represents, as Edmund Wilson has declared, 'His final judgement on the whole Victorian exploit.' It is, in the words of J. B. Priestley, 'a dark mixture of anger and despair. an astonishingly sustained effort of Dickens' creative imagination.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0245 ] Trollope, Anthony. The Warden. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502450. Afterword By Geoffrey Tillotson. 215 pages. paperback. CD245. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A battle of wits and wills between two very different men of the cloth forms the basis of this, the first of the Barsetshire novels. The warden of the title, the aged and timorous Reverend Septimus Harding, is director of a charity home that provides the needy with sustenance and himself with a lucrative income. Attempting to extricate himself from his comfortable but compromising position, Harding runs afoul of the awesome Reverend Theophilus Grantly, implacable defender of thc status quo. From this seemingly unequal struggle emerges a tale of devious stratagem that ranks as one of Trollope's finest novels - a delightfully barbed fable of the eternal conflict between progress and reaction, the weak and the strong, the pure of heart and the tough of mind. It is, as Geoffrey Tillotson writes, 'a variant of the David and Goliath story. Trollope must have had no difficulty in accepting Darwin's conception of the survival of the fittest, and it is part of the comedy of THE WARDEN that he sees the fittest as sometimes the people who lack the most obvious sorts of strength.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 - 6 December 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0246 ] Kipling, Rudyard. The Mark of the Beast and Other Stories. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502469. Foreword By Roger Burlingame. 352 pages. paperback. CD246. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Throughout his lifetime Kipling roamed the world widely, recording its infinite variety with unique insight and unsurpassed artistry. No writer was more sensitive to the complex conflict of races and cultures in the colonial East or more finely keyed to the new tempos of the Age of the Machine; and none combined so knowledgeable an eye for colorful surface detail with so keen a sense of the loneliness, terror, and deprivation underlying human existence. These, his finest tales - set in India and England, America and Europe - are both vividly realistic and darkly shadowed, of their time yet timeless. They combine to offer a memorable introduction to a writer praised by T. S. Eliot for ‘an immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and all his senses.' INCLUDES the stories - The Mark of the Beast; Without Benefit of Clergy; Georgie Porgie; The Brushwood Boy; ‘They'; Baa Baa, Black Sheep; An Habitation Enforced; Brother Square-Toes; .007; The Gardener; The Man Who Was; The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney; The Man Who Would Be King; Garm-A Hostage; The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888). His poems include 'Mandalay' (1890), 'Gunga Din' (1890), 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings' (1919), 'The White Man's Burden' (1899), and 'If - ' (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting 'a versatile and luminous narrative gift'. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: 'Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.' In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George Orwell called him a 'prophet of British imperialism'. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: 'He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0247 ] Thackeray, William Makepeace. The History of Henry Esmond. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502477. Afterword By Walter Allen. 480 pages. paperback. CP247. Cover: James Hill. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - He is a Hamlet, but a Hamlet who acts, even though he constantly doubts the wisdom of his actions. It is through this painfully complex mind that we see the tangled politics, the clash of faiths and loyalties, the mixture of self - seeking ambition and disinterestedness, that characterize the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first of the, eighteenth.' Thus Walter Allen writes of Henry Esmond, whose struggle to overcome the stigma of illegitimate birth and the anguish of a hopeless love forms the central strand in this masterfully woven historical novel. Both an unsurpassed evocation of an age and a deeply moving portrayal of individual destiny, the book is superb in its delicate cadences and rich visual detail. It stands as Thackeray's greatest achievement in psychological portraiture, often prophetic in its insight, and is rivaled only by Vanity Fair as the highest expression of the author's extraordinary narrative art. As Thackeray's eminent contemporary George Saintsbury wrote: 'A greater novel than Henry Esmond I do not know; and I do not know many greater books.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 - 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0248 ] Bojer, Johan. The Last of the Vikings. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. Translated From The Norwegian By Jessie Muir.Afterword By Richard Vowles. 256 pages. paperback. CP248. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Set against the harsh beauty of the Lofoten Islands, The Last of the Vikings is a stirring depiction both of man's perseverance and of the end of an era. Its action centers upon a single fishing season, when the Norwegian peasantry, descendants of the Vikings, make their annual voyage to the Islands. Battling wind and sea as their ancestors have done for a thousand years, now they also must face a new challenge: the competition of the machine, inevitably dooming their age - old way of life. It is this way of life that dominates these pages. Masterfully portrayed are men and women whose intimate relationship to Nature invests them with an extra - human dimension; and recreated is a vanished rhythm of existence, a 'tenacious struggle with soil, sea, and self,' that holds special meaning amid the disjointed patterns of the modern age. Ranking The Last of the Vikings 'the finest of Bojer's novels,' Richard Vowles writes, 'The essential conflict of the novel is not man versus sea but sea versus land in the Norwegian sensibility - hence man's sensibility.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Johan Bojer (6 March 1872 - 3 July 1959) was a popular Norwegian novelist and dramatist. He principally wrote about the lives of the poor farmers and fishermen, both in his native Norway and among the Norwegian immigrants in the United States. Bojer was born Johan Kristoffer Hansen in the village of Ørkedalsøren, now the town of Orkanger, Sør-Trøndelag county. The son of unmarried parents, he grew up as a foster child in a poor family living in Rissa near Trondheim, Norway. Bojer learned early the realities of poverty. His early years were spent working on a farm and working as a bookkeeper. After the death of his father in 1894, he took the name Bojer. His literary work began with the publication of Unge tanker in 1893, and continued to gather strength through the 1920s. Because of the range of topics he addressed, he won critical acclaim in Norway. He gained international fame after many of his works were published in foreign languages. Critics generally recognize his best work to be his novel, Den siste viking, (English title: The Last of the Vikings). This novel powerfully and realistically depicts the lives of fishermen from Trøndelag, who spend the winter fishing in the Lofoten island archipelago within the Arctic Circle near the far north coast of Norway. Bojer is best remembered for The Emigrants, a major novel dealing with the motivations and trials of Norwegians emigrated on the plains of North Dakota. In 1923, Bojer journeyed to Litchville, North Dakota, to research the lives of the Norwegian immigrants who had settled there. The result of his visit became a novel originally published in Norway as Vor egen stamme . Bojer's novel of Norwegian homesteaders in the 1880s tells of young villagers who leave the Old World to seek a better life. Their trek takes them to homesteads in LaMoure County, south of Litchville, North Dakota, where they find that breaking the sod and surviving blizzards are easier than feeling at home in this new land. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0248 ] Bojer, Johan. The Last of the Vikings. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502485. Translated From The Norwegian By Jessie Muir.Afterword By Richard Vowles. 256 pages. paperback. CP248. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Set against the harsh beauty of the Lofoten Islands, The Last of the Vikings is a stirring depiction both of man's perseverance and of the end of an era. Its action centers upon a single fishing season, when the Norwegian peasantry, descendants of the Vikings, make their annual voyage to the Islands. Battling wind and sea as their ancestors have done for a thousand years, now they also must face a new challenge: the competition of the machine, inevitably dooming their age - old way of life. It is this way of life that dominates these pages. Masterfully portrayed are men and women whose intimate relationship to Nature invests them with an extra - human dimension; and recreated is a vanished rhythm of existence, a 'tenacious struggle with soil, sea, and self,' that holds special meaning amid the disjointed patterns of the modern age. Ranking The Last of the Vikings 'the finest of Bojer's novels,' Richard Vowles writes, 'The essential conflict of the novel is not man versus sea but sea versus land in the Norwegian sensibility - hence man's sensibility.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Johan Bojer (6 March 1872 - 3 July 1959) was a popular Norwegian novelist and dramatist. He principally wrote about the lives of the poor farmers and fishermen, both in his native Norway and among the Norwegian immigrants in the United States. Bojer was born Johan Kristoffer Hansen in the village of Ørkedalsøren, now the town of Orkanger, Sør-Trøndelag county. The son of unmarried parents, he grew up as a foster child in a poor family living in Rissa near Trondheim, Norway. Bojer learned early the realities of poverty. His early years were spent working on a farm and working as a bookkeeper. After the death of his father in 1894, he took the name Bojer. His literary work began with the publication of Unge tanker in 1893, and continued to gather strength through the 1920s. Because of the range of topics he addressed, he won critical acclaim in Norway. He gained international fame after many of his works were published in foreign languages. Critics generally recognize his best work to be his novel, Den siste viking, (English title: The Last of the Vikings). This novel powerfully and realistically depicts the lives of fishermen from Trøndelag, who spend the winter fishing in the Lofoten island archipelago within the Arctic Circle near the far north coast of Norway. Bojer is best remembered for The Emigrants, a major novel dealing with the motivations and trials of Norwegians emigrated on the plains of North Dakota. In 1923, Bojer journeyed to Litchville, North Dakota, to research the lives of the Norwegian immigrants who had settled there. The result of his visit became a novel originally published in Norway as Vor egen stamme . Bojer's novel of Norwegian homesteaders in the 1880s tells of young villagers who leave the Old World to seek a better life. Their trek takes them to homesteads in LaMoure County, south of Litchville, North Dakota, where they find that breaking the sod and surviving blizzards are easier than feeling at home in this new land. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0249 ] Howells, William Dean. A Modern Instance. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502493. Afterword By Wallace Brockway. 432 pages. paperback. CT249. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A Modern Instance, William Dean Howells' first major novel, ranks among the finest of his achievements. Set in rural New England, Boston, and the Middle West, his portrayal of the America of his day is a triumph of accurate reportage coupled with novelistic art. But, far more than a surface study of manners and mores, this is the story of the deterioration of a marriage - the marriage of a worldly, unscrupulous newspaperman and a woman whose initial love is gradual1y transformed into a fiercely possessive passion. Tracing the shifting balance of power between husband and wife, A Modern Instance is at once a richly ironic moral fable and an exploration of a man - woman relationship which displays a psychological acuity rare in American fiction. On first reading the novel, Mark Twain wrote to Howells, 'I am in a state of wild enthusiasm. It's perfectly dazzling - it's masterly - incomparable. You can never match this one.' Wallace Brockway adds, 'Nowhere else, not even in Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, did [Howells] ever probe characters as deeply, as relentlessly.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 - May 11, 1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed 'The Dean of American Letters', he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story 'Christmas Every Day', and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0250 ] Dreiser, Theodore. The Titan. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502507. Afterword By John Berryman. 511 pages. paperback. CQ250. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The theme of The Titan is one man's drive for absolute power. Power ruthlessly pursued, power blindly worshiped. Power over a business, a city, a life. The setting is Chicago and New York in the age of the Robber Barons; the protagonist is Frank Cowperwood, already wealthy, but out to build a financial empire vast enough to satisfy his appetite for what he thinks is success. The novel traces the career of this driven man as he seeks his elusive goal - only to find his marriage destroyed, his mistresses loveless, his mansions no better than mausoleums, his every triumph a hollow defeat. A powerful study of spiritual emptiness amid material opulence, The Titan represents Dreiser's social vision at its most piercing, his narrative vigor at its highest. It is a major contribution of a novelist who forced Americans to look without blinders both at their society and at their very selves. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 - December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0251 ] Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502515. Afterword By Marvin Mudrick. 384 pages. paperback. CD251. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Of Jane Austen's novels, Mansfield Park is unique in its moral design, with a heroine far different from the author's previous creations. This young lady, Miss Fanny Price, poor relation of a wealthy family, possesses only natural goodness to aid her against a dazzlingly witty and lovely rival as they compete for the man they both love. Her ultimate triumph is one of character over personality, purity of heart over brilliance of manner, in a tale that constitutes a sharply pointed attack on social sham Written with the stylistic grace and delicate perception that distinguish the entire Austen canon, Mansfield Park stands as one of the most complex and fascinating achievements of a writer ranked by Virginia Woolf as 'the most perfect artist among women.' It is, as Marvin Mudrick declares, 'the first novel that Jane Austen wrote in the maturity of her powers. a long novel, her longest, and its length is an index of magnitude.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is ‘famously scarce', according to one biographer. Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned ‘the greater part' of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of ‘good quiet Aunt Jane'. Scholars have unearthed little information since. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0252 ] Kipling, Rudyard. Captains Courageous. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502523. Afterword By C.A. Bodelsen. 172 pages. paperback. CD252. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of Rudyard Kipling's most enduringly popular works, Captains Courageous is both a stirring tale of the sea and a fable of a boy's initiation into the world of men. The boy in question is Harvey Cheyne, pampered son of an American millionaire; his initiation commences when he is saved from drowning by a New England fishing schooner and forced to prove his worth in the only way the captain and crew will accept: through the slow and arduous mastery of skills upon which common survival depends. Depicted with what C. A. Bodelsen terms 'Kipling's brilliant impressionism. his almost infallible sense of the right word,' the voyage of the We're Here is one of both physical and moral adventure; it serves to give memorable, dramatic definition to the author's rigorous concept of the laws governing human existence. As C. A. Bodelsen goes on to write: 'Kipling is making the same point here as he did in The Jungle Books: that the basic conditions of human life are those of Nature, and that the civilization we have created is only a thin screen between us and immutable forces only disregarded at our peril.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888). His poems include 'Mandalay' (1890), 'Gunga Din' (1890), 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings' (1919), 'The White Man's Burden' (1899), and 'If - ' (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting 'a versatile and luminous narrative gift'. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: 'Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.' In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George Orwell called him a 'prophet of British imperialism'. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: 'He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0253 ] Melville, Herman. The Confidence Man. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502531. Afterword By R.W.B. Lewis. 278 pages. paperback. CP253. Cover: Kossin. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Like Moby - Dick, The Confidence Man takes place aboard a ship - but one far different from the whaler Pequod. Its setting is a Mississippi steamboat, the Fidèle; and its protagonist, the mysterious Confidence Man, is on a voyage after human prey. He is a man of many guises, but a single role: in a complex series of impostures, this ever - ambiguous figure relentlessly strips away, one by one, the hypocritical pretenses of his fellow passengers. Charged with savage irony and black humor, the novel is merciless as a depiction of greed and selfishness, of a dark and wolfish world. It represents one of Melville's great later achievements, a roman noir that gives final expression to an intense and tortured vision of the human condition. 'It is,' as R. W. B: Lewis declares, 'the recognizable and awe - inspiring ancestor of. Nathaniel WEST'S THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, Faulkner's THE HAMLET, Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN and William Gaddis' RECOGNITIONS. Melville bequeathed. the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic, the self - extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters. ' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). When asked which of the great American writers he most admired, Vladimir Nabokov replied: ‘When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom I did not read as a boy.' Around his twentieth year he was a schoolteacher for a short time, then became a seaman when his father met business reversals. On his first voyage he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for a time. His first book, an account of that time, Typee, became a bestseller and Melville became known as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals'. After Omoo, the sequel to his first book, Melville began to work philosophical issues in his third book, the elaborate Mardi (1849). The public indifference to Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man, the last work of fiction published during his lifetime. During his later decades, Melville worked at the New York Customs House and privately published some volumes of poetry in editions of only 25 copies. When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the ‘Melville Revival' at the occasion of the centennial of his birth that his work won recognition. In 1924, the story Billy Budd, Sailor was published, which Melville worked on during his final years, and left in manuscript at his death. The single most Melvillean characteristic of his prose is its allusivity. Stanley T. Williams said ‘In Melville's manipulation of his reading was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0254 ] Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey & Journal To Eliza. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150254x. Afterword By Monroe Engel. 206 pages. paperback. CP254. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Ostensibly A Sentimental Journey is the story of a holiday abroad, a leisurely eighteenth - century continental tour. In reality, it represents a different sort of tour, a different kind of holiday - an exploration of the resources of narrative art, a free flight of sensibility. Sterne's encounters with Anglophile French noblemen and the petty French bureaucracy, with high - born lady and seductive chambermaid, his adventures in city and town, in inn and palace, shape a work of wit, delicate eroticism, and boundless love of life. Together with the Journal to Eliza, a series of epistles written from the Continent to a married woman with whom Sterne was in love, A Sentimental Journey stands as a reflection of a most remarkable personality, and as a brilliant product of per - haps one of the most delightful prose styles in the English language. Monroe Engel terms it 'a comic novel that is still read with immediate pleasure and that novelists still look to with a kind of envious admiration. a complete and highly ordered work' of extraordinary art.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 - 18 March 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0255 ] Smollett, Tobias. Roderick Random. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502558. Afterword By John Barth. 480 pages. paperback. CT255. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - It is for sheer narrative pleasure and exuberant inventiveness that we read Smollett, master of the picaresque. Of his novels, none better typifies his art than this chronicle of the career of Roderick Random, pursuing love and fortune through every conceivable twist and turn of fate. Before this indomitable protagonist achieves his final vindication, the reader is offered an unforgettable journey through a lusty, brawling Hogarthian world, in a work that stands as the very embodiment of that age's unflagging energy and boundless appetite for life. In the words of John Barth: 'Sailors, soldiers, fine gentlemen and ladies, whores, homosexuals, cardsharpers, fortune hunters, tradesmen of all description, clerics, fops, scholars, lunatics, highwaymen. , crowd a stage that extends from Glasgow to Guinea, from Paris to Paraguay, and among themselves perpetrate battles, debaucheries, swindles, shanghais, duels, seductions, rescues, pranks, poems, shipwrecks, heroisms, murders, and marriages. They wail and guffaw, curse and sing, make love and foul their breeches: in short, they live.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 - 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), which influenced later novelists such as Charles Dickens. George Orwell admired Smollett very much. His novels were amended liberally by printers; a definitive edition of each of his works was edited by Dr. O. M. Brack, Jr. to correct variants. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0256 ] Austen, Jane. Persuasion. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502566. Afterword By Marvin Mudrick. 255 pages. paperback. CD256. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In this, Jane Austen's last novel, appears her most memorable heroine - Anne Elliot, a young woman of perfect breeding, profound depth of emotion, and unswerving integrity. These virtues, however, exist in a world - the world of country gentry in Regency England - in which shallowness and hypocrisy thrive and ever threaten to win dominion. It is Anne's poised confrontation with these forces, as she vies for the affections of the man she loves, which gives shape to a work which displays Jane Austen's rich maturity of vision and her new-found sense of human potential. Blending sharp wit and warm sympathy, stylistic brilliance and tender insight, Persuasion represents the crowning achievement of Jane Austen's career, the final unfolding of her matchless art. As Marvin Mudrick writes: ‘The proper parochial society that for a quarter of a century Jane Austen had been laughing at and amusing, despising and defending, at all events copiously memorializing, comes to its late flower in the unassuming grace, the finely balanced feelings, the secret strength and charm of character, of Anne Elliot.' an Afterword by Marvin Mudrick. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is ‘famously scarce', according to one biographer. Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned ‘the greater part' of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of ‘good quiet Aunt Jane'. Scholars have unearthed little information since. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0257 ] Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451502574. Edited By William Burto.Introduction By W.H. Auden. paperback. CD257. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - While Shakespeare inserted sonnets into several of his plays, the designation 'Shakespeare's Sonnets' customarily denotes a group of 154 poems that were first published in collective form under the title of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Scholars have concluded that Shakespeare actually composed these 154 verse pieces over a comparatively long time span (most probably between 1592 and 1597 or so), and at a relatively early juncture in his literary career, i.e., around the time that he wrote his most famous early tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, a love story that includes examples of the Shakespearean sonnet within its text. The pieces included in the 1609 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets all conform to the standard format of 14 lines concluding with a rhymed couplet, and all (with one suspect exception) are written in the natural meter of iambic pentameter, lending them a stress pattern that approximates English language speech. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0258 ] Conrad, Joseph. Almayer's Folly and Other Stories. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502582. Afterword By Jocelyn Baines. 320 pages. paperback. CP258. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'A new great writer and a new and splendid region of romance have entered into our literature.' Thus the critic T. P O'Connor hailed the initial publication of this, Joseph Conrad's first work of fiction. The scene of Almayer's Folly is a trading post on the Malayan archipelago; its theme is that of physical and moral decay, as the tantalizing dreams of wealth which have sustained the novel's white protagonist elude him, leaving him in helpless isolation. Vividly contrasting the frailty of human hopes and designs with the fathomless power of Nature, the book embodies the qualities of style and vision which were to place its author among the masters of the English novel. It stands as both a striking psychological study and a portrayal of the confrontation of alien cultures, a work in which Conrad, as Jocelyn Baines declares, 'employs the full emotive force of his vocabulary to evoke the exotic, corrupting power of the East.' This Signet Classic volume includes two of Joseph Conrad's later stories of the East and the sea - Freya of the Seven Isles and The Planter of Malata. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, J. G. Ballard, John le CarrE, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0259 ] Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451502590. paperback. CP259. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - The 'terrible mistake' was the contemporary utilitarian philosophy, expounded in Hard Times (1854) as the Philosophy of Fact by the hard-headed disciplinarian Thomas Gradgrind. But the novel, Dickens's shortest, is more than a polemical tract for the times; the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father is one of Dickens's triumphs. When Louisa, trapped in a loveless marriage, falls prey to an idle seducer, the crisis forces her father to reconsider his cherished system. Yet even as the development of the story reflects Dickens's growing pessimism about human nature and society, Hard Times marks his return to the theme which had made his early works so popular: the amusements of the people. Sleary's circus represents Dickens's most considered defence of the necessity of entertainment, and infuses the novel with the good humour which has ensured its appeal to generations of readers. Hard Times--Dickens's shortest novel and one of his major triumphs--tells the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0260 ] Grimm, Jacob and Grimm, Wilhelm. The Frog King and Other Tales of the Brothers Grimm. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502604. Newly Translated From German, Edited and With An Introduction By Alfred & Mary Elizabeth David.Illustrated By Shelia Greenwald. 318 pages. paperback. CT260. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - These stories are pervaded by the same purity that makes children seem so marvelous and blessed to us.' Thus Wilhelm Grimm described the folk tales he and his brother so lovingly gathered and recorded. In the grace, simplicity, and seeming artlessness of these tales, the reader encounters the literary distillation of a verbal art whose origins extend far into the dim past. To read them is to enter an enchanted land, where nature and the supernatural are joined, where wicked stepmothers and fair princesses, poor lost children and gallant young men, all play their parts in the eternal conflict between light and darkness, good and evil. Retaining an almost magical power both to delight and to illumine, enacting with haunting symbolic truth the basic dramas of human existence, these archetypal tales, as Alfred and Mary Elizabeth David declare, 'still speak to us and tell us about ourselves: about our hopes and dreams. , our fears and anxieties.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The Brothers Grimm (or Die Brüder Grimm), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing folklore during the 19th century. They were among the best-known storytellers of folk tales, and popularized stories such as 'Cinderella' ('Aschenputtel'), 'The Frog Prince' ('Der Froschkönig'), 'Hansel and Gretel' ('Hänsel und Gretel'), 'Rapunzel', 'Rumpelstiltskin' ('Rumpelstilzchen'), and 'Snow White' ('Schneewittchen'). Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), was published in 1812. The brothers spent their formative years in the German town of Hanau. Their father's death in 1796 caused great poverty for the family and affected the brothers for many years after. They both attended the University of Marburg where they developed a curiosity about German folklore, which grew into a lifelong dedication to collecting German folk tales. The rise of romanticism during the 19th century revived interest in traditional folk stories, which to the brothers represented a pure form of national literature and culture. With the goal of researching a scholarly treatise on folk tales, they established a methodology for collecting and recording folk stories that became the basis for folklore studies. Between 1812 and 1857, their first collection was revised and republished many times, growing from 86 stories to more than 200. In addition to writing and modifying folk tales, the brothers wrote collections of well-respected German and Scandinavian mythologies, and in 1838 they began writing a definitive German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch), which they were unable to finish during their lifetime. The popularity of the Grimms' collected folk tales has endured well. The tales are available in more than 100 languages and have been later adapted by filmmakers including Lotte Reiniger and Walt Disney, with films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty. In the mid-20th century, the tales were used as propaganda by the Third Reich; later in the 20th century psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim reaffirmed the value of the work, in spite of the cruelty and violence in original versions of some of the tales, which the Grimms eventually sanitized. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0261 ] Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502612. Afterword By Alan Pryce-Jones. 918 pages. paperback. CQ261. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Dombey and Son marks the great turning point of Dickens' artistic career. In it, he departs forever from the picaresque world of his earlier novels, in which only individual villainy had marred the landscape of life; for the first time he envisions evil as inherent in the very structure of his society, and gives unified form to this vision in all its scope, depth, and complexity. Set in an England caught in the throes of industrial revolution and commercial expansion, this tale of a proud, ambitious, and morally blind businessman, and of his pernicious effect upon the multitude of lives around him, stands as a memorable indictment of a corrosive economic system, and as a profound plea for human values. Written with immense vitality, abounding in characters of extraordinary vividness, and superb in total design, Dombey and Son is, as Edgar Johnson has written, 'one of Dickens' greatest books' - 'the first great masterpiece of Dickens' maturity.' Alan Pryce - Jones declares: 'In a word, the book is carried through by its gusto. We do not have to suspend disbelief. Dickens has the air, the panache, to make us believe. ' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0262 ] Storm, Theodor. The Rider On the White Horse and Selected Stories. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502620. Newly Translated From The German & With A Foreword By James Wright. 262 pages. paperback. CT262. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This unique collection offers for the first time in English a broad survey of the Novellen of Theodor Storm - a master of that literary genre. 'The Novelle of today,' Storm wrote in 1881, 'like the drama. deals with the profoundest problems of human life.' Throughout his life, he used this form in several different ways. His youthful Novellen. are suffused with an elegiac resignation on the vanished happiness of childhood. His later ones become more dramatic, more realistic, though still retaining the subtle poetic quality that is perhaps his prime characteristic. Like many northern European writers, Storm was influenced by folk tales, particularly those dealing with the supernatural. This is particularly apparent in The Rider on the White Horse, a Novelle which Thomas Mann called 'the masterpiece with which Storm crowned his life - work.' Includes - The Rider on the White Horse, In the Great Hall, Immensee, A Green Leaf, In the Sunlight, Veronika, In St. Jurgen, Aquis Submersus. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Hans Theodor Woldsen Storm (14 September 1817 - 4 July 1888), commonly known as Theodor Storm, was a German writer. Storm was born in the small town of Husum, on the west coast of Schleswig, then a formally independent duchy ruled by the king of Denmark. His parents were the lawyer Johann Casimir Storm (1790-1874) and Lucie Storm, nEe Woldsen (1797-1879). Storm went to school in Husum and Lübeck and studied law in Kiel and Berlin. While still a law student he published a first volume of verse together with the brothers Tycho and Theodor Mommsen. From 1843 until his admission was revoked by Danish authorities in 1852, he worked as a lawyer in his home town of Husum. In 1853 Storm moved to Potsdam, moving on to Heiligenstadt in Thuringia in 1856. He returned to Husum in 1865 after Schleswig had come under Prussian rule and became a district magistrate ('Landvogt'). In 1880 Storm moved to Hademarschen, where he spent the last years of his life writing, and died of cancer at the age of 70. Storm was married twice, first to Konstanze Esmarch, who died in 1864, and then to Dorothea Jensen. Storm was one of the most important authors of 19th-century German Literary realism. He wrote a number of stories, poems and novellas. His two best-known works are the novellas Immensee (1849) and Der Schimmelreiter ('The Rider on the White Horse'), first published in April 1888 in the Deutsche Rundschau. Other published works include a volume of his poems (1852), the novella Pole Poppenspäler (1874) and the novella Aquis submersus (1877). Like Friedrich Hebbel Theodor Storm was a child of the North Sea plain, but, whilst in Hebbel's verse there is hardly any direct reference to his native landscape, Storm again and again revisits the chaste beauty of its expansive mudflats, menacing sea and barren pastures - and whilst Hebbel could find a home away from his native heath Storm clung to it with what may be called a jealous love. In Der Schimmelreiter, the last of his 50 novellas and widely considered Storm's culminating masterpiece, the setting of the rural North German coast is central to evoking its unnerving, superstitious atmosphere and sets the stage for the battleground of man versus nature - the dykes and the sea. His favourite poets were Joseph von Eichendorff and Eduard Mörike, and the influence of the former is plainly discernible even in Storm's later verse. During a summer visit to Baden-Baden in 1864, where he had been invited by his friend, the author and painter Ludwig Pietsch, he made the acquaintance of the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. They exchanged letters and sent each other copies of their works over a number of years. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0263 ] Scott, Sir Walter. Waverley. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502639. Afterword By Edgar Johnson. 576 pages. paperback. CT263. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Rebellion of 1745, when the Highland clans of Scotland rallied to support Charles Stuart, Pretender to the throne of England, forms the dramatic background to Waverley. Its hero, Edward Waverley, is a young man of divided loyalties, gallant but naïve, and thirsting for high romance. Won over to the Stuart cause, he encounters the adventure he seeks, but amid a steadily mounting tempo of action and intrigue, he also comes to learn the stern realities of love, warfare, and politics. Remarkable for its descriptions of the Scottish Highlands and for its host of superbly varied character portraits, Waverley stands as Sir Walter Scott's first great historical novel; it represents both the prototype of a major literary genre and an enduring triumph of storytelling art. As Edgar Johnson writes: 'It is a mistake to think of Scott primarily as a historical romancer. He is not interested in tin armor and cardboard battlements. A gifted historian he assuredly is. But he is above all a novelist, outstanding in his talent for dramatic narrative and penetrating in the vivid and accurate portrayal of human nature.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 - 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. A prominent member of the Tory establishment in Edinburgh, Scott was an active member of the Highland Society and served a long term as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–32). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0264 ] no information. Signet Classic title - no information. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451502647. paperback. 264.
DESCRIPTION - No information available. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0265 ] Lincoln, Abraham. Abraham Lincoln: A Documentary Portrait Through His Speeches & Writings. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502655. Edited & With An Introduction By Don E. Fehrenbacher. 288 pages. paperback. CT265. Cover: Kossin. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Around the figure of Abraham Lincoln an immense legend has grown - a legend that pays tribute to his greatness, but that tends to obscure the qualities upon which that greatness rests. It is to present a true portrait of this complex human being that this volume is designed, employing the materials best suited to this challenging task: Lincoln's own words. Dating from his entrance into political life to his final presidential message, these selections range from informal private letters to magnificently phrased public documents. They serve to record the drama of Lincoln's extraordinary career, and vividly reflect the development of his positions in a variety of significant areas: economics, presidential power, national purpose, and the crucial issue of slavery - positions often seriously distorted by latter - day partisan commentary. Addressed both to students of history and to those seeking to understand a heritage still actively shaping contemporary events, these selections combine to shed invaluable light upon the man who, as Don F. Fehrenbacher writes, 'saved and rededicated a nation.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War - its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy. Lincoln grew up on the western frontier in Kentucky and Indiana. Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, where he served from 1834 to 1846. Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy through banks, tariffs, and railroads. Because he had originally agreed not to run for a second term in Congress, and his opposition to the Mexican–American War was unpopular among Illinois voters, Lincoln returned to Springfield and resumed his successful law practice. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority in Illinois. In 1858, while taking part in a series of highly publicized debates with his opponent and rival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery, but lost the U.S. Senate race to Douglas. In 1860 Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state. With very little support in the slaveholding states of the South, he swept the North and was elected president in 1860. His election prompted seven southern slave states to form the Confederate States of America before he was sworn into office. No compromise or reconciliation was found regarding slavery and secession. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the North enthusiastically rallied behind the Union. Lincoln concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war. His primary goal was to reunite the nation. He suspended habeas corpus, leading to the controversial ex parte Merryman decision. Lincoln averted potential British intervention in the war by defusing the Trent Affair in late 1861. His complex moves toward ending slavery centered on the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Lincoln used the U.S. Army to protect escaped slaves, encouraged the border states to outlaw slavery, and helped push through Congress the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which permanently outlawed slavery. Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including his most successful general, Ulysses S. Grant. He also made major decisions on Union war strategy; for example: a naval blockade that shut down the South's normal trade; moves to take control of Kentucky and Tennessee; and using gunboats to gain control of the southern river system. Lincoln tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond; each time a general failed, Lincoln substituted another, until finally Grant succeeded in 1865. An exceptionally astute politician deeply involved with power issues in each state, Lincoln reached out to 'War Democrats' (those who supported the North against the South), and managed his own re-election campaign in the 1864 presidential election. As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican Party, Lincoln confronted Radical Republicans, who demanded harsher treatment of the South, War Democrats, who called for more compromise, anti-war Democrats (called Copperheads), who despised him, and irreconcilable secessionists, who plotted his assassination. Politically, Lincoln fought back by pitting his opponents against each other, by appealing to the American people with his powers of oratory, and by carefully planned political patronage. His Gettysburg Address of 1863 became an iconic endorsement of the principles of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. Lincoln held a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness. Six days after the surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Lincoln has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as one of the three greatest U.S. presidents. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0266 ] Musil, Robert. Young Torless. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502663. Translated From The German By Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser.Afterword By John Simon. 192 pages. paperback. CT266. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - '. there are two worlds within him [Törless] corresponding to two worlds without him: a quotidian existence of rational, routine activity. , and also a dark, exciting realm of violent, often destructive. impulses and adventures. Which is more real? Which is to be espoused?' Thus John Simon states the theme which animates this remarkable novel of sexual and intellectual awakening. Set within the confines of a military boarding school, the book has as its center the shifting, tension - ridden relationship of Törless and three fellow students. With near - hallucinatory vividness, the intense conflicts and fevered emotions of adolescence are evoked; yet always present is a note of cool, analytic detachment, tracing the pattern of future destiny as it emerges from this atmosphere of mingled youthful idealism and brutal sadism, rigorous discipline and perverse sensuality. A work of superb art and prophetic psychological insight, Young Törless offers a memorable introduction to a writer who has come to be recognized as one of the singular talents of the century. It is a novel, as John Simon writes, 'as unique in our day as it was sixty years ago.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Musil (6 November 1880 - 15 April 1942) was an Austrian writer. His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels. However, the novel has not been widely read both because of its delayed publication and intricate, lengthy plot. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0267 ] James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502671. Afterword By F.W. Dupee. 512 pages. paperback. CT267. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of the masterpieces of James's final period, The Wings of the Dove represents the author's artistic genius at its summit of formal perfection, his vision at its highest pitch of creative intensity. The setting is one James made singularly his own: the fashionable world of London mansion and Venetian palace, of drawing room and dinner party, of burnished elegance and grace. The theme is the human price this world exacts as it transforms two lovers - a man of good conscience and a woman of superb vitality - into conspirators set on victimizing an American millionairess, a naïve young woman in love with life, and inexorably doomed. Ranking among James's most memorable characterizations, these three act out a meticulously designed drama of treachery and self - betrayal in a work whose consummate artistry reflects a moral judgment all - pervading and profound. As F. W. Dupee writes, 'Les splendeurs et misères du monde remains James's principal subject; and nowhere in his work is the world, its beauty and its terror, better presented than in The Wings of the Dove.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime, though with limited success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0268 ] Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 045150268x. Afterword By Benjamin DeMott. 445 pages. paperback. CT268. Cover: Luvin?. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Set against a vividly depicted background of fin de siècle New York, this novel centers upon the conflict between a self - made millionaire and a fervent social revolutionary - a conflict in which a man of goodwill futilely attempts to act as mediator, only to be forced himself into a crisis of conscience. Evident throughout this multifaceted work is William Dean Howells' grasp of the realities of the American experience in an age of emerging social struggle; evident as well is his absolute determination to render justice to every point of view. Both a memorable portrait of an era and a profoundly moving study of human interrelatednness, A Hazard of New Fortunes fully justifies Alfred Kazin's ranking of Howells as 'the first great domestic novelist of American life.' Benjamin DeMott praises 'Howells' dream of bursting free from self, of entering with large imaginative understanding into the lives of others,' and goes on to declare: 'Howells' dream was. moral to the core.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 - May 11, 1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed 'The Dean of American Letters', he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story 'Christmas Every Day', and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0269 ] Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502698. Foreword By Asa Briggs. 224 pages. paperback. CT269. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STUART MILL deals with but one part of a life, the life of the mind - but a mind which ranks as one of the most remarkable and significant of the nineteenth century. The book memorably depicts the emergence of a brilliant child prodigy, the product of an extraordinary education which both hastened his development and brought him to the brink of suicide by the age of twenty - one; illumined with equal clarity is the story of John Stuart Mill's renewed commitment to life, and of the further conflicts which marked his long evolution toward maturity as a major philosopher and social thinker. Superb in its dispassionate objectivity, the Autobiography stands as a work of enduring stature and relevance, the final testament of a rare and luminous intelligence. As Asa Briggs Writes: 'Concerned as it is throughout with a remarkable 'age of transition' in English history and with many of the circles of thinkers who set out to interpret or to mould the age, the Autobiography is as important a document for the understanding of the nineteenth century as it is for the understanding of Mill himself. It will remain of profound importance. ' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Stuart Mill, (20 May 1806 - 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory and political economy. He has been called 'the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century'. Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. Mill expresses his view on freedom by illustrating how an individual's amelioration of personal quality and self-improvement is the sole source of true freedom. Only when an individual is able to attain such a beneficial standard of one's self, whilst in the absence of rendering external onerosity upon others, in their own journey to procure a higher calibre of self-worth, that true freedom prevails. Mill's attitude toward freedom and individual accomplishment through self-improvement has inspired many. By establishing an appreciable level of worthiness concerned with one's ability to fulfill personal standards of notability and merit, Mill was able to provide many with a principal example of how they should achieve such particular values. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. He worked on the theory of the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0270 ] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502701. Edited By J.A. Bryant Jr. 220 pages. paperback. CD270. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of Shakespeare's most popular and accessible plays, Romeo and Juliet tells the story of two star-crossed lovers and the unhappy fate them as a long bitter feud between families. The play contains some of Shakespeare's most beautiful and lyrical love poetry and is perhaps the finest celebration of the joys of young love ever written. Unique features of the Signet Classic Shakespeare An extensive of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet A special introduction to the play by the editor, J. A. Bryant, Jr., University of Kentucky Source from which Shakespeare derived Romeo and Juliet--Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Michael Goldman, Susan Snyder, Marianne Novy A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions of Romeo and Juliet, then and now Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type Up-to-date list of recommended readings. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0271 ] Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 045150271x. Afterword By Lawrance Thompson. 408 pages. paperback. CT271. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Parody, parody, parody-and an odd assortment of parody procedures-will be found throughout the context which Melville builds around the central narrative of Pierre's pilgrim-like progress to defeat and damnation.' Thus writes Lawrance Thompson, describing this story of the downfall of a highborn young man, whose unselfish love entraps him in an incestuous passion, and whose noble actions hasten his ignoble end. In theme and style the novel mocks both Christian allegory and the cheerful pastoral romances of the day; but neither irony nor virtuosity can mask its underlying seriousness of purpose, or the dark vision which shapes it. Written immediately after Moby Dick, Pierre represents Melville's further exploration of the meaning and nature of evil. A dramatic expression of its author's most profound anxieties and obsessions, it stands as the strangely compelling creation of an intensely troubled, eternally questioning mind. As William Ellery Sedgewick has written: 'Pierre was the only book of Melville's maturity as ambitious as Moby Dick.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). When asked which of the great American writers he most admired, Vladimir Nabokov replied: ‘When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom I did not read as a boy.' Around his twentieth year he was a schoolteacher for a short time, then became a seaman when his father met business reversals. On his first voyage he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for a time. His first book, an account of that time, Typee, became a bestseller and Melville became known as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals'. After Omoo, the sequel to his first book, Melville began to work philosophical issues in his third book, the elaborate Mardi (1849). The public indifference to Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man, the last work of fiction published during his lifetime. During his later decades, Melville worked at the New York Customs House and privately published some volumes of poetry in editions of only 25 copies. When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the ‘Melville Revival' at the occasion of the centennial of his birth that his work won recognition. In 1924, the story Billy Budd, Sailor was published, which Melville worked on during his final years, and left in manuscript at his death. The single most Melvillean characteristic of his prose is its allusivity. Stanley T. Williams said ‘In Melville's manipulation of his reading was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0272 ] Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502728. Afterword By G.S. Fraser. 224 pages. paperback. CD272. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - For sheer storytelling delight and pure adventure, TREASURE ISLAND has never been surpassed. From the moment young Jim Hawkins first encounters the sinister Blind Pew at the Admiral Benbow Inn until the climactic battle for treasure on a tropic isle, the novel creates scenes and characters that have fired the imaginations of generations of readers. Written by a superb prose stylist, a master of both action and atmosphere, the story centers upon the conflict between good and evil - but in this case a particularly engaging form of evil. It is the villainy of that most ambiguous rogue Long John Silver that sets the tempo of this tale of treachery, greed, and daring. Designed to forever kindle a dream of high romance and distant horizons, TREASURE ISLANd is, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, 'the realization of an ideal, that which is promised in its provocative and beckoning map; a vision not only of white skeletons but also green palm trees and sapphire seas' G. S. Fraser terms it 'an utterly original book' and goes on to write: 'There will always be a place for stories like TREASURE ISLAND that can keep boys and old men happy.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 - 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Cesare Pavese, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he 'seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins." |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0273 ] Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502736. Translated From The Spanish & With An Introduction By Walter Starkie. 1052 pages. paperback. CY273. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Here presented complete and unabridged, in the memorable Walter Starkie translation, is the epic tale of the most illustrious Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful, long - suffering squire, Sancho Panza. Their adventures in the picaresque world of sixteenth - century Spain form the basis of one of the great treasures of Western literature, both an immortal satire on an outdated chivalric code and a biting portrayal of an age in which nobility can be only a form of madness. Imbued with irrepressible comedy and superbly balanced irony, Don Quixote stands as the reflection of a vision ever rich in meaning and as the product of an artistry inexhaustible in delight. It is, as Walter Starkie writes, 'the first modern novel in the world, created Out of a life of disillusion, privation, and poverty by a maimed ex - soldier. whose noble nature and gentle sense of humorous tolerance taught him that life is an unending dialogue between a knight of the spirit who is ever striving to soar aloft, and a squire who clings to his master and strives with might and main to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground.' Translated and with an Introduction by Walter Starkie. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (29 September 1547 (assumed) - 22 April 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered to be the first modern European novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written. His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la lengua de Cervantes (‘the language of Cervantes'). He was dubbed El Príncipe de los Ingenios (‘The Prince of Wits'). In 1569, Cervantes moved to Rome where he worked as chamber assistant of Giulio Acquaviva, a wealthy priest who became a cardinal during the following year. By then, Cervantes had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish Navy infantry regiment and continued his military life until 1575, when he was captured by Algerian corsairs. After five years of slavery he was released on ransom from his captors by his parents and the Trinitarians, a Catholic religious order. He subsequently returned to his family in Madrid. In 1585, Cervantes published a pastoral novel named La Galatea. Because of financial problems, Cervantes worked as a purveyor for the Spanish Armada, and later as a tax collector. In 1597, discrepancies in his accounts of three years previous landed him in the Crown Jail of Seville. In 1605, he was in Valladolid, just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signaled his return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrid, where he lived and worked until his death. During the last nine years of his life, Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer; he published the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) in 1613, the Journey to Parnassus (Viaje al Parnaso) in 1614, and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote. Carlos Fuentes noted that, ‘Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be written.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0274 ] Ibsen, Henrik. Ibsen Four Major Plays: Volume 1. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502744. Newly Translated From The Norwegian & With A Foreword By Rolf Fjelde. 384 pages. paperback. CP274. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in mind through and through. I must penetrate to the last wrinkle of his soul. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.' Thus Henrik Ibsen described the process of visual creation by which he shaped the major works of his maturity. Brilliant in design, multi- leveled in meaning, these four plays project Ibsen's revealing criticism of society and his almost uncanny perception of the intricacies of human motivations and relationships. Exposed are the demonic forces of greed, fear, sexual hostility, and willful destructiveness, rising to shatter the prosaic surface of middle-class life. Here, presented in memorable new translations, are dramas of universal significance, the crowning achievements of the artist who stands as the father of the modern theater. As Rolf Fjelde writes, it was Ibsen's purpose 'not to lull-nor merely shock-the bourgeoisie, not to lecture the proletariat, but to instigate human beings into existence, to dare each individual to think, to feel, to question, to live. ' Includes - A Doll House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0275 ] Howe, E. W. The Story of a Country Town. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451502752. Afterword By John William Ward. 317 pages. paperback. CT275. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Story of a Country Town is both a pioneering triumph of realistic fiction and a landmark in the development of the American literary consciousness. Written by a Kansas newspaperman who was forced to publish the original edition himself, this novel represents a sharp departure from the nineteenth - century image of the 'idyllic' rural life. Howe's portrait of an American small town is a damning indictment of an arid way of life - of an environment that corrodes the spirit and cripples the mind. His view of village and farm is colored by harsh pessimism and filled with a pervasive sense of human waste. As John William Ward writes: 'The Story of a Country Town marks the moment when the myth of the garden in America gave way to the wasteland of broken dreams. After Edgar W. Howe came other American writers: Joseph Kirkland, Hamlin Garland, Edgar Lee Masters, Zona Gale, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis. They deepened, amplified; and finally made a tradition in American letters of what Howe, writing alone out of his own bitter experience, had first put down.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edgar Watson Howe (May 3, 1853 - October 3, 1937), sometimes referred to as E. W. Howe, was an American novelist and newspaper and magazine editor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was perhaps best known for his magazine, E.W. Howe's Monthly. Howe was well traveled and known for his sharp wit in his editorials. Howe was born May 3, 1853 in Wabash County, Indiana, in a community now known as Treaty. His father was Henry Howe, a farmer and Methodist circuit rider, and his mother Elizabeth Irwin Howe. Howe spent most of his childhood in Harrison County, Missouri, where his family moved when he was 3, first to Fairview, and then to Bethany around 1864. Howe's father was a vocal abolitionist, opposing slavery on religious grounds. When the Civil War broke out, Henry Howe joined to fight for the Union. Returning to Missouri before the end of the war, he purchased a newspaper in Bethany and informed his family of his intention of using it to advocate his cause. In 1870, while working at the Nemaha Valley Journal in Falls City, Nebraska, he met Clara Frank. They were married in 1875, when Howe returned to Nebraska from Colorado. Howe had five children with Clara. Two of their children, Bessie and Ned, died young within a few days of each other in 1878. Two sons, James and Gene, eventually followed Howe in the news business, and daughter Mateel became a novelist. Howe and Clara divorced in 1901, and Howe never remarried. Howe began his journalistic career in March 1873 when, as a 19-year-old, he came to Golden, Colorado, from Falls City, Nebraska, and partnered with William F. Dorsey to acquire the Golden Eagle newspaper. Renaming it the Golden Globe, it was the second main newspaper of Golden and served a Republican readership and political bent. Howe, who took over complete ownership by the end of the year, quickly gained a reputation as a sharp-witted editor in the community that would foreshadow his national fame. Within a couple of years Howe sold the Globe to his brother A. J. Howe and partner William Grover Smith, and moved to Falls City, Nebraska in 1875, where he established a new Globe newspaper, affectionately called the "Little Globe". In 1875, he merged this with the Nemaha Valley Journal to create the Globe-Journal. In 1877 Howe established the Atchison, Kansas newspaper Globe (Atchison Daily Globe), which he continued to edit for twenty-five years before retiring in 1911. Having been raised Methodist, he described himself as identifying with Methodism but is essentially a cultural Christian, according to his writing. Howe's first novel, The Story of a Country Town (1883), was also his best-known. He had difficulty getting the book published and eventually printed it himself. He sent copies to Mark Twain and William Dean Howells by whom the work was well-received, thus attracting a publisher for the work. Howe's subsequent novels were neither critically nor popularly successful. A 1919 edition of his Ventures in Common Sense featured a foreword by celebrated American writer (and cynic) H. L. Mencken, to whom Howe has been compared. Mencken was a fan of E. W. Howe's Monthly, which he called, "one of the most curious as it is certainly one of the most entertaining of all the 25,000 periodicals now issuing in the United States." Howe died in 1937, at the age of 84, near Atchison. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0276 ] Farrell, James T. Studs Lonigan. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502760. Afterword By Philip Allan Friedman. 840 pages. paperback. CQ276. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In the three decades since its original publication, Studs Lonigan has established itself as a classic of the American social novel, Its setting is the South Side of Chicago during the moral chaos of the Prohibition era. Its protagonist, Studs Lonigan, is a young man seeking a destiny he cannot find, leaving behind him only lost ideals and unanswered questions to mark his swift passage from youth to early death. In his frustrated ambitions, his gradual brutalization, and his final failure, Studs emerges as a prototype of the lost and self - alienated American, both product and victim of urban society.The trilogy is, in the words of Philip Allan Friedman, 'a monumental work in the tradition of American literary naturalism. Alfred kazin has called Studs Lonigan 'one of the most honest and important works of our time.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 - August 22, 1979) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is most remembered for the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979. The trilogy was voted number 29 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0277 ] Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502779. Edited By Kenneth O. Myrick. 176 pages. paperback. CD277. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE SIGNET CLASSIC SHAKESPEARE SERIES - The work of the world's greatest dramatist in authoritative texts edited by outstanding scholars. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Kenneth Myrick, Tufts University. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. A note on the sources from which Shakespeare derived THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Nicholas Rowe, William Hazlitt, Elmer Edgar Stoll, and an anonymous review of Henry Irving's important production. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0278 ] Eliot, George. The Mill On the Floss. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502787. Afterword By Morton Berman. 560 pages. paperback. CT278. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of George Eliot's finest achievements, The Mill on the Floss is famed both for its unsurpassed depiction of English rural 'life and for its striking, superbly drawn heroine, Maggie Tulliver. The novel's evocation of childhood in the English countryside - at once unsentimental, yet rich with delight - stands as an enduring triumph; but equally memorable are its portrayal of a narrow, tradition - bound society and its dramatic unfolding of tragic human destiny. The conflict between Maggie and1 her brother, Tom - a conflict between romance and reason, daring and caution, rebellion and acceptance - helps shape a work that explores the full moral complexities of human choice and action. The book is a work that gives vivid display of the author's mastery of narrative art, her broad range of understanding, and her profound sense of artistic purpose. As Morton Berman writes: 'George Eliot's concept of art is really very simple. art has a moral mission; it widens men's sympathies by affording, in addition to sensuous delight, 'a faithful depiction of humanity. The Mill on the Floss is earnest, moral, and long; it is hard, however, to see why anyone would want it otherwise.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0279 ] Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451502795. paperback. CP279. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Focused on the era of the Moscow trials, Darkness at Noon describes an aging Bolshevik's total loss of perspective when faced by the new regime's inquisitors. At given intervals, Rubashov leaves the rumor - ridden limbo of his prison cell for interrogation - or else is appeased with gifts - first by the reproachful ironist, Ivanov, then by his remote and sadistic colleague, Gletkin. The machine of guilt is brought fully to bear; and, in a nightmarish moment of failing logic, Rubashov makes his preposterous and fatal confession. 'The book reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most have made it into a polemical tract. from his European angle [Koestler] can see such things as purges and mass deportations for what they are. ' George Orwell AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arthur Koestler (5 September 1905, Budapest - 3 March 1983, London) was an author of essays, novels and autobiographies. Koestler was born in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His early career was in journalism. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating anti-totalitarian novel, DARKNESS AT NOON, which propelled him to international fame. Over the next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize ‘for outstanding contribution to European culture' and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, three years later, with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia in its terminal stages. He committed suicide along with his wife in 1983 in London. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0280 ] no information. Signet Classic title - no information. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451502809. paperback. 280.
DESCRIPTION - No information available. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0281 ] Ghosh, Oroon (translator). The Dance of Shiva and Other Tales From India. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502817. Newly Translated By Oroon Ghosh.Foreword By A.L. Basham. Illustrations By Baniprosonno. 341 pages. paperback. CT281. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Nowhere is the tradition of storytelling more deeply rooted than in India, where tales told three thousand years ago are still part of popular culture. In this volume, a rich sampling of the many strands that make up this tradition has been memorably rendered into English. These stories range over a wide human spectrum. They deal with love and adventure, religion and philosophy; among them are to be found animal stories that predate Aesop, and stories of Buddha that form part of India's great spiritual heritage. Some of these tales have the naïve purity of folk art; others are shaped with rare sophistication. All, however, help the reader understand - and delight in - one of the most fascinating of civilizations. Highly colored and exotic, of the spirit and of the flesh, they illumine universal human truth. In the words of A. L. Basham: 'The cultural heritage of the Western world is strengthened and deepened by the efforts of Dr. Ghosh and others like him, for thus new elements are injected into the intellectual stream. I hope that these stories will be enjoyed by a very wide circle of readers, wherever the English language is spoken.' Illustrations by Baniprosonno. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Calcutta, India, in 1917, Oroon K. Ghosh enjoyed a distinguished career as an economist and financial expert i the Indian Civil Service. He has participated in numerous International Aid programs and has traveled widely throughout the world. His published works include books on economics and finance; but he has gained his literary reputation through his collections of Indian tales, written in both English and Bengali. Dr. Ghosh also served with the High Commission of India in London |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0282 ] Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451502825. Afterword by Perry Miller. 381 pages. paperback. CT282. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Published in 1820, Washington Irving's celebrated SKETCH BOOK has proved as enduring as the enchanted Kaatskill Mountains he immortalized. From these masterpieces in miniature have emerged such universal figures of American fiction and fantasy as Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Sage, storyteller, wit, Washington Irving touched on many subjects and treated each with a master's hand. Included in his volume are tales of romance, vignettes on bygone English customs, travel pictures, reflections on historic landmarks, essays on the American Indian, biographical discourses, and literary musings. Fresh in theme, bewitching in style, and superb in craftsmanship, his stories earned Washington Irving his place as father of American literature. Thackeray called Washington Irving the 'first ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 - November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories 'Rip Van Winkle' (1819) and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' (1820), both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors and the Alhambra. Irving served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. He continued to publish regularly - and almost always successfully - throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Francis Jeffrey, and Charles Dickens. As America's first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0283 ] Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part 1. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502833. Edited & With An Introduction By Maynard Mack. paperback. CD283. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Henry IV: Part I is the second in a series of four English history plays that make up Shakespeare's major tetralogy. It continues the saga of the Bolingbrook family and the Plantagenet monarchy that begins with Henry IV's seizure of power in Richard II; it leads naturally to Henry IV: Part II; the tetralogy culminates in Henry V, as Prince Hal of Henry IV's reign becomes Henry V, the great and beloved warrior king of the English people. Quite obviously, Shakespeare drew upon chronicles of actual English history as the framework for Henry IV: Part I and the other three plays in the series. Just as clearly, the playwright compressed the timing of events for dramatic purposes and composed all of the play's dialogue. But even more important, the 'tavern' dimension of Henry IV: Part I is purely Shakespeare's creation. Its addition allows Shakespeare to use the dramatic techniques of juxtaposition, inversion, and antithesis as the plot shifts back and forth between the troubled realm of Henry IV's court and the madcap, vulgar world of the tavern in which Sir John Falstaff presides. Indeed, the counterpoint contrast between the high and the low that Shakespeare uses here was a radical stage innovation in its day, allowing for the inclusion of comic episodes within a deadly serious political history. At bottom, Henry IV: Part I is essentially a coming of age story in which the king's son, Prince Henry or Hal, emerges from his youthful role as a wastrel companion of the tavern crew, into the role of a genuine English monarch by virtue of both blood and character. -- R. Moore. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0284 ] Smollett, Tobias. Humphry Clinker. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451502841. paperback. CP284. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - With the sharp sensitivity of 'a man without skin' Tobias Smollett humorously attacked the frivolity and foibles of eighteenth - century England. Humphry Clinker is his mirthful tale of a tour by coach and four through cities and countryside. Five people embark on the journey: the crusty eccentric, Squire Bramble; his husband - hunting sister, Tabitha; her maid, Winifred; and Bramble's youthful niece and nephew,. Lydia and Jery. En route they are joined by Humphry Clinker, an honest Wiltshire lad of tattered cloth and empty purse. As misadventure follows misadventure, each character reveals his true self by giving his own conflicting view of the incidents, places, and people encountered along the way. The result is an entertaining and realistic picture of that wonderful age when gentlemen duelled, ladies swooned, and servants rose from rags to riches. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 - 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), which influenced later novelists such as Charles Dickens. George Orwell admired Smollett very much. His novels were amended liberally by printers; a definitive edition of each of his works was edited by Dr. O. M. Brack, Jr. to correct variants. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0285 ] Gogol, Nicolai. The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 045150285x. paperback. CP285. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - NIKOLAI GOGOL is universally regarded as the father of Russian realism. His stories are rooted in commonplace events; his characters are the underdog and the insignificant. A romantic at heart, he used a startling blend of broad comedy and weird fantasy to expose the stupidity, coarseness, and meanness of life. This Signet Classic includes five of Gogol's most famous stories: THE DIARY OF A MADMAN, THE NOSE, THE CARRIAGE, THE OVERCOAT, and a full - length historical romance: TARAS BULBA. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0286 ] Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Idylls of the King. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451502868. paperback. CT286. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - 'With regal melancholy and a superb sense of craft, Tennyson's poems evoke Past and Present - the Isle of the Lotos-Eaters, heraldic Camelot, his own twilit English gardens - seeking to reconcile the Victorian zeal for public progress with private despair. Using his own eloquence or masks of mythic figures, Tennyson was the stylist most imitated by poets of his day - praised over all the rest for his vigorous portrayals of the 'general conscience' of statesmen and common men alike.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (6 August 1809 - 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as 'Break, Break, Break', 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', 'Tears, Idle Tears' and 'Crossing the Bar'. Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister, but died from a brain haemorrhage before they could marry. Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, 'Ulysses', and 'Tithonus'. During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success. A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including 'Nature, red in tooth and claw', ''Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all', 'Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die', 'My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure', 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield', 'Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers', and 'The old order changeth, yielding place to new'. He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0287 ] Dickens, Charles. Martin Chuzzlewit. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502876. Afterword By Marvin Murdrick. 896 pages. paperback. CQ287. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A parable of selfishness, a grisly melodrama, and an exuberant triumph of comic invention, Martin Chuzzlewit gives full display to Dickens' genius. Peopled by many of the author's most famous character creations - among them the memorable Mr. Pecksniff and the inimitable Mrs. Sarah Gamp - it tells a story of innocence, treachery, and retribution, with a young hero who makes the near - fatal error of seeking his fortune in America. The complex plot marks the transition from Dickens' earlier picaresque narratives to the structural unity of his later works; the novel's depiction of American life represents a high point in Dickensian social satire, rendering a judgment since echoed by many foreign visitors to our shores, but never in a form so bitter, so biting, or so wonderfully entertaining. Writing of Dickens, Marvin Mudrick declares: 'The point is not that he is a master of the comic and the ridiculous, though of course he is. The operative word is 'extravagances': it is the unexpended and startling momentum, the reckless improvisation, the demoniacal gusto. that identify the special Dickensian ridiculous.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0288 ] Villon, Francois. The Poems of Francois Villon. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502884. Newly Translated From The French & With An Introduction By Galway Kinnell.Bilingual Edition. 224 pages. paperback. CT288. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Francois Villon lived five centuries ago. Of his life, little more than a shadowy legend remains - the legend of a student turned vagabond and thief, living amid desperate poverty and violence. Yet the poems Villon created strike the modern reader with singular clarity. He was the first of all great poets of the city; the first to encompass within his art the harsh physical realities and unsentimental vision of life lived in the urban lower depths. His is a poetry that is direct, forceful, yet infinitely supple, capable of biting satire, uninhibited ribaldry, gallows humor - and capable, too, of unsurpassed lyric flight and haunting, poignant beauty. In this Signet Classic bilingual edition - with French and English texts printed on facing pages - the poet Galway Kinnell has achieved memorable translations of poems which remain forever fresh, as vivid as the extraordinary sensibility which gave them birth. In the words of Mr. Kinnell: '[Villon's] poetry starts from the grossest base, it is made of pain and laughter, and it is indestructible.' The French text in this edition is based upon the authoritative Longnon - Foulet text of 1932. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois Villon (born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared from view in 1463), is the best known French poet of the late Middle Ages. A ne'er-do-well who was involved in criminal behavior and got into numerous scrapes with authorities, Villon wrote about some of these experiences in his poems. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0289 ] Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502892. Edited By Maurice Charney. 239 pages. paperback. CD289. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - In Timon of Athens, the wealthy, magnificent, and extravagantly generous figure of Timon expects that, having received as gifts all that he owned, his friends will be equally generous to him. Once his creditors clamor for repayment however, Timon finds that his idealization of friendship is an illusion. He repudiates his friends, abandons Athens, and retreats to the woods. Yet his misanthropy arises from the destruction of an admirable illusion, from which his subsequent hatred can never be entirely disentangled. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare - TIMON OF ATHENS. Special Introduction to the play by the editor, Maurice Charney, Rutgers University. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare serigs, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts, University. Sources from which Shakespeare derived TIMON OF ATHENS - Lucian: Timon, translated by Lionel Casson; Plutarch: from The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated by Sir Thomas North; William Painter: Selections from The Palace of Pleasure ~ Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by William Richardson, Roy Walker, David Cook ~ Text and commentaries printed in the clearest,: most readable type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0290 ] Chekhov, Anton. Ward Six and Other Stories. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. Newly Translated From The Russian By Ann Dunnigan.Afterword By Rufus W. Mathewson. 399 pages. paperback. CT290. Cover: Cliff Condak??. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - These six stories - here presented in memorable new translations - represent Chekhov's narrative genius at the full range and power of its maturity. As masterfully constructed as his earlier stories, but with far greater richness and dimension, they deal with human beings suffering the pain of existence, their lives illumined by the author's rigorous objectivity. The novella Ward Six, with its hauntingly symbolic depiction of the world of an insane asylum; The Duel, with its theme of moral degradation, its hint of regeneration; and A Dull Story, with its relentless depiction of a culture that corrupts and alienates. , these and others present a vivid portrait of what Rufus W, Mathewson calls a 'blighted' society, seen through the eyes of a writer whose understanding of 'human foolishness' is without equal. In his incisive Afterword Mr. Mathewson discards the accepted stereotypes, reappraising Chekhov's personality and work. He points out that Chekhov demands much of his readers, but gives much in return: 'The reader is challenged to collaborate in the experience of the story, to interpret it in the way an actor interprets the text of a play, or a musician a score. A good performance' by the reader will yield a very great reward.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife', he once said, ‘and literature is my mistress.' Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a ‘theatre of mood' and a ‘submerged life in the text.' Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0291 ] Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hyperion. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502914. Newly Translated From The German By Willard R. Trask.Foreword By Alexander Gode-von Aesch. 173 pages. paperback. CT291. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Here, presented in its first English translation, is Friedrich Hölderlin's great novel, Hyperion. Cast in the form of letters from its eighteenth - century protagonist to a German friend, this book charts the course of a desperate search for fulfillment in action, in love, and in final contemplation; its story is one of human disillusion and human rebirth. In it the reader will encounter one of the most vivid of all literary landscapes - a landscape the author never saw but to which he dedicated all the resources of his art - the landscape of Greece, bathed in blazing sunlight, infused with remembered glory. Written in a prose whose remarkable rhythmic power deeply influenced Nietzsche, Hyperion represents a triumph of the poetic imagination and a projection of a vision of the human condition that has caused the figure of Hölderlin to loom ever larger in the contemporary literary consciousness. In the words of Alexander Gode - von Aesch: 'if ever it seems a little 'absurd' that existentialism. has on its roster no name of a poet not hedged by excuses and qualifications, turn to Hölderlin.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (20 March 1770 - 7 June 1843) was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his seminary roommates and fellow Swabians Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0292 ] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502922. Edited & With A Foreword By William H. Gilman. 479 pages. paperback. CQ292. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Ralph Waldo Emerson stands as one of the great figures of nineteenth-century America. More than any other man he personifies the brilliant late flowering of the New England tradition. This Signet Classic edition of selections from Emerson's Journals, Letters, Essays, and Poetry offers a broad view of the author's finest work. Featured here is a considerable amount of new material from the Journals, including an entry discovered in 1964 in the Library of Congress which reveals Emerson's enlightened attitude about the Negro question. The writings range from homely descriptions of daily life to superbly polished meditations on human purpose and destiny, from sharply etched biographical studies to soaring, lyric, philosophical flights. Shaped by a passionate belief in individual freedom and a deep humility before the immensity of Nature, they reflect a life and a spirit whose independence and integrity speak out with resounding significance to the modern world. As the noted Emerson scholar and editor William H. Gilman writes: 'Emerson took constant risks in following the bent of his thought wherever it might go - all the risks a man can take when he grimly determines to abandon repose and seek the truth. The example to the twentieth century is obvious. A man or woman today might not want to imitate Emerson, but if he did, at least he would know what it meant to be fully alive.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled ‘The American Scholar‘ in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's ‘Intellectual Declaration of Independence'. Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays - Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 - represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's ‘nature' was more philosophical than naturalistic: ‘Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.' His essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was ‘the infinitude of the private man.' Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0293 ] Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. 0451502930. Edited By Herschel Baker. 208 pages. paperback. CD293. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Named for the twelfth night after Christmas, the end of the Christmas season, Twelfth Night plays with love and power. The Countess Olivia, a woman with her own household, attracts Duke (or Count) Orsino. Two other would-be suitors are her pretentious steward, Malvolio, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Onto this scene arrive the twins Viola and Sebastian; caught in a shipwreck, each thinks the other has drowned. Viola disguises herself as a male page and enters Orsino's service. Orsino sends her as his envoy to Olivia - only to have Olivia fall in love with the messenger. The play complicates, then wonderfully untangles, these relationships. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare - TWELFTH NIGHT. Special Introduction to the play by Herschel Baker, Harvard University. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. Source from which Shakespeare derived TWELFTH NIGHT - Barnabe Rich: OF APOLONIUS AND SILLA. Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Harley Granville - Barker, John Dover Wilson. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of time text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0294 ] Shakespeare, William. Pericles. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502949. Edited By Ernest Schanzer. 208 pages. paperback. CD294. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Pericles tells of a prince who risks his life to win a princess, but discovers that she is in an incestuous relationship with her father and flees to safety. He marries another princess, but she dies giving birth to their daughter. The adventures continue from one disaster to another until the grown-up daughter pulls her father out of despair and the play moves toward a gloriously happy ending. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare - PERICLES. Special Introduction to the play by the editor Ernest Schanzer, University of Munich. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. Sources from which Shakespeare derived PERICLES - John Cower: from Confessio Amantis ; Laurence Twine: from The Pattern of Painful Adventures. Major dramatic criticism: commentaries by G. Wilson Knight, John F. Danby, Kenneth Muir, M. St. Clare Byrne. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered lines of the text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0295 ] Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. 0451512596. Newly Translated From The French By Walter J. Cobb.Afterword By Andre Maurois. 512 pages. paperback. 295. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The setting of this extraordinary historical novel is medieval Paris: a city of vividly intermingled beauty and grotesquerie, surging with violent life under the twin towers of its greatest structure and supreme symbol, the cathedral of Notre - Dame. Against this background Victor Hugo unfolds the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the monstrous hunch back; Esmera Ida, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the specter of his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work which gives full play to the author's brilliant historical imagination, his remarkable powers of description. Whether depicting the frenzy of a brutish mob or the agony of a solitary soul, whether capturing the drunken blaze of sunlight or dungeon darkness, Victor Hugo's art never fails in its quest for the immediacy of felt experience. Immensely popular from its original publication to the present day, The Hunchback of Notre - Dame stands as an unsurpassed and enduring literary triumph. As AndrE Maurois writes: 'Hugo's characters were to live in the minds of men of all countries and all races. They are unforgettable because they possess the elemental grandeur of myths and epics.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La LEgende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the acclaimed novels Les MisErables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). He also produced more than 4,000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty, and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition of the death penalty. He was buried in the PanthEon. His legacy has been honored in many ways, including his portrait being placed on francs. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0296 ] Shakespeare, William. All's Well That Ends Well. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451502965. Edited By Sylvan Barnet. 200 pages. paperback. CD296. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well is the story of its heroine, Helen, more so than the story of Bertram, for whose love she yearns. Helen wins Bertram as her husband despite his lack of interest and higher social standing, but she finds little happiness in the victory as he shuns, deserts, and attempts to betray her. The play suggests some sympathy for Bertram. As a ward to the French king, he must remain at court while his friends go off to war and glory. When Helen cures the King, he makes Bertram available to her. To exert any control over his life, Bertram goes to war in Italy. Helen then takes the initiative in furthering their marriage, undertaking an arduous journey and a daring trick. Few today, however, see a fairy-tale ending. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0297 ] Edwards, Jonathan. Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451502973. Selected,Edited,& With A Foreword by Ola Elizabeth Winslow. 255 pages. paperback. CT297. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The writings selected for this Signet Classic edition form the principal legacy of one of the most remarkable thinkers our country has produced. As a Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards represented a major influence in American religious life; as a metaphysician he was the first American to gain an international reputation; as a human being he imbued every page he wrote with profound personal commitment and moral concern. These selections extend from his first essays as a youthful prodigy to the great sermons and treatises of his maturity; they offer both a fascinating record of spiritual evolution and a body of intellectual achievement of truly enduring import. Writing of Edwards, Ola Winslow declares him 'not only a master logician but also a great creative mind, calmly searching out meanings that have engaged great thinkers since the beginning of time - the meaning of God, the universe, and man in this world and in any future there may be. In the small but distinguished company to which he belongs, he is one of the few men of the far past who still have something to say to men of the present hour. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 - March 22, 1758) was a Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian. Edwards 'is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian,' and one of America's greatest intellectuals. Edwards's theological work is broad in scope, but he was rooted in Reformed theology, the metaphysics of theological determinism, and the Puritan heritage. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central The Enlightenment was to his mindset. Edwards played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening, and oversaw some of the first revivals in 1733–35 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards delivered the sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God', a classic of early American literature, during another revival in 1741, following George Whitefield's tour of the Thirteen Colonies. Edwards is well known for his many books, The End For Which God Created the World, The Life of David Brainerd, which served to inspire thousands of missionaries throughout the 19th century, and Religious Affections, which many Reformed Evangelicals still read today. Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation shortly after beginning the presidency at the College of New Jersey (Princeton). He was the grandfather of Aaron Burr, third Vice President of the United States. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0298 ] Porter, Katherine Anne. Pale Horse, Pale Rider. New York. 1967. Signet/New American Library. 0451502981. 175 pages. paperback. CP298. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Katherine Anne Porter is regarded as one of the most distinguished writers in the world today. Her style is a rare combination of subtlety and insight; her concern is 'human nature, the fatalities of life and the perils of human relationships.' In the three beautiful short novels that comprise PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER she explores the chaotic individualism experienced by those who cope with - and today outlive - their greatest crises. Miranda, the heroine of the first and last stories, survives the ghosts of a poignant but unreal childhood, the Great War, and a flu epidemic that claims her lover - to spend her days with a heightened sense of jeopardy. In 'Noon Wine', Farmer Thompson, though legally acquitted of the murder he commits, can find no justification for his crime and seeks release in a final and tragic act. 'Miss Porter is one of the finest writers of prose in America.' - Granville Hicks. 'There is a kind of magic about everything Miss Porter writes.' - New York Times. 'Katherine Anne Porter moves in the illustrious company headed by Hawthorne, Flaubert, and Henry; James.' - Saturday Review. With an Afterword by Mark Schorer AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 - September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. In 1990, Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 2905 was placed in Brown County, Texas, to honor the life and career of Porter. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0299 ] Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part 2. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 045150299x. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By Norman N. Holland. paperback. CD299. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Picking up where Henry IV, Part One left off after the Battle of Shrewsbury, Henry IV, Part Two is the story of England's King Henry IV during his final months of life, his reconciliation with his wayward heir, and his eventual death. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0300 ] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground/White Nights/The Dream of a Ridiculous Man & Selections From the House of the Dead. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503007. 240 pages. paperback. CT300. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, WHITE NIGHTS, THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN, and SELECTIONS FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD. In this Signet Classic volume can be seen Dostoyevsky's evolving outlook on man's fate. The works presented here were written at distinct periods in the author's life, at decisive moments in his groping for political philosophy and a religious answer. The characters are representative of the human hearts he probed with such surprising insight. They include a whole range of tormented people - from the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying a human life to the irritating, anxious antihero of NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, a man who both craves and despises affection. Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky as 'an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul' and NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND as 'an awe - and terror - inspiring example of this sympathy.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. VICTOR TERRAS is a professor of Slavic languages and chairman of the Department of Slavic languages at Brown University. He has also taught at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. Among his many publications as THE YOUNG DOSTOEVSKY, and translations of Dostoevsky's Notebooks for THE POSSESSED and A RAW YOUTH. EDWARD WASIOLEK is chairman of the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, and Avalon Foundation Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He edited and translated Dostoevsky's Notebooks for CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and edited the Notebooks for THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED, and A RAW YOUTH. He is the author of DOSTOEVSKY: THE MAJOR FICTION, coauthor of NINE SOVIET PORTRAITS, and author or editor of numerous other works. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0301 ] Shaw, George Bernard. Plays. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503015. paperback. CT301. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Includes: Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, & Man and Superman. George Bernard Shaw demanded truth and despised convention. He punctured hollow pretensions and smug prudishness - sugar - coating his criticism with ingenious and irreverent wit. In Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, and Man and Superman, the great playwright satirizes accepted attitudes toward: woman's place in society, military heroism, marriage, the pursuit of man by woman. From a social, literary, and theatrical standpoint, these four plays are among the foremost dramas of the ages - as, intellectually stimulating as they are thoroughly enjoyable. 'My way of joking is to tell the truth: it is the funniest joke in the world.' - G. B. Shaw. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Shaw, George Bernard. (Born July 26, 1856 ). .. George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 - 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Issues which engaged Shaw's attention included education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege. He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council. In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively. Shaw turned down all other awards and honours, including the offer of a knighthood. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0302 ] Jimenez, Juan Ramon. Platero and I. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503023. Translated From The Spanish By William H. and Mary M. Roberts. Introduction By William H. Roberts. paperback. CP302. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - He's the children's playmate, the gray goat's companion, and the poet's cherished friend. Small and downy soft, the donkey named Platero romps through the pages of a book that has captured the hearts of readers everywhere. Written by Juan Ramon JimEnez, the 1956 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Platero and I has been translated into the main languages of Western Europe as well as Hebrew and Basque. Like the great Spanish classic Don Quixote, it has found favor with the young, who delight in the adventures of the merry little donkey and the sad poet, and with their elders, who look beyond the narrative to see what the writer has to say about man and his world. Drawings by Baltasar Lobo. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Ramon JimEnez Mantecon (24 December 1881 - 29 May 1958) was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. One of JimEnez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the French concept of ‘pure poetry.' JimEnez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in Andalucia, on 24 December 1881. He studied law at the University of Seville, but he declined to put this training to use. He published his first two books at the age of eighteen, in 1900. The death of his father the same year devastated him, and a resulting depression led to his being sent first to France, where he had an affair with his doctor's wife, and then to a sanatorium in Madrid staffed by novitiate nuns, where he lived from 1901 to 1903. In 1911 and 1912, he wrote many erotic poems depicting romps with numerous females in numerous locales. Some of them alluded to sex with novitiates who were nurses. Eventually, apparently, their mother superior discovered the activity and expelled him, although it will probably never be known for certain whether the depictions of sex with novitiates were truth or fantasy. The main subjects of many of his other poems were music and color, which, at times, he compared to love or lust. He celebrated his home region in his prose poem about a writer and his donkey called Platero y Yo (1914). In 1916 he and Zenobia got married in the United States. Zenobia became his indispensable companion and collaborator. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he and Zenobia went into exile in Cuba, the United States, and Puerto Rico, where he settled in 1946. JimEnez was hospitalized for eight months due to another deep depression. He later became a Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. The university later named a building on campus and a living-and-learning writing program in his honor. He was also a professor at the University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Florida. While living in Coral Gables he wrote: ‘Romances de Coral Gables'. In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature; three days later, his wife died of ovarian cancer. JimEnez never got over this loss, and he died two years afterwards, on 29 May 1958, in the same clinic where his wife had died. Both of them are buried in Spain. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0303 ] Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451503031. Afterword by Kingsley Amis. 240 pages. paperback. CP303. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Disease is a crime punishable by imprisonment. Machines are considered dangerous; they have been destroyed and banished from the land. This is the way of the world in Erewhon, the imaginary country of simple, straightforward people that was created by Samuel Butler to serve as a foil for his attack on ‘modern' life and thought. With wit and imagination the master satirist lashed out at evolution, medicine, education, justice. And paradoxically he presented several sides of each issue in a many- sided tale of adventure, ideas, escape. As Kingsley Amis points out in his Afterword to this Signet Classic, EREWHON is the first modern Utopian romance, a novel which directly anticipates Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and Orwell's 1984. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Butler (4 or 5 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0304 ] Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 045150304x. 128 pages. paperback. CT304. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - This remarkable book has been described in many ways - as a masterpiece. a fairy story. a brilliant satire. a frightening view of the future. A devastating attack on the pig - headed, gluttonous and avaricious rulers in an imaginary totalitarian state, it illuminates the range of human experience from love to hate, from comedy to tragedy. 'A wise, compassionate and illuminating fable for our time. The steadiness and lucidity of Orwell's wit are reminiscent of Anatole France and even of Swift.' - NEW YORK TIMES AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0305 ] Tagore, Rabindranath. The Housewarming and Other Selected Writings. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451503058. Translated From The Bengali By Mary Lago,Tarun Gupta, & Amiya Chakravarty.Edited & With An Introduction By Amiya Chakravarty. 318 pages. paperback. CT305. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Thirty years ago, Rabindranath Tagore's was a name known to all readers, in several languages. Tagore was the sage of the East, the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the master of the story and novella who accommodated Eastern lore and color to Western literary techniques, the teacher who presented India to the rest of the world.' Today, continues the distinguished Indian scholar, lecturer, and author, Professor Amiya Chakravarty, the work of this 'greatest writer of modern India and one of the greatest writers in world literature remains largely unread in America. He points out that Tagore's earlier celebrity was at least partly a triumph of his towering personality, since many of his stories had not yet been translated from the original Bengali. This Signet Classic presents a broader selection of the author's work than has appeared before, the greater part newly translated especially for this edition, although some familiar favorites are included. The many facets of Tagore's creative genius are generously represented: prose sketches, short stories, narrative poems, and ballads based on historical events. Manifest throughout this collection is Tagore's startling ability to communicate to Western readers the nuances of Eastern lore and culture so that the color is not dimmed; to crystallize human experience so that it speaks with universal meaning. Here, too, is fresh evidence of the sweep and depth of Rabindranath Tagore's mind, of his lofty spirit, of his mastery of the very special art of the storyteller. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861 - August 7, 1941, Kolkata, India) was born in Bengal. Gitanjali, a group of over 100 prose poems, translated into English by Tagore himself and published in 1911 with the help of the poet Yeats, earned him the 1913 Nobel laureate for literature. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0306 ] Shakespeare, William. Love's Labors Lost. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503066. Edited By John Arthos. paperback. CD306. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to swear off the company of women for three years of study and fasting. Their subsequent infatuation with the Princess of France and her ladies makes them forsworn. In an untraditional ending for a comedy, the play closes with the death of the Princess's father, and all weddings are delayed for a year. The play draws on themes of masculine love and desire, reckoning and rationalization, and reality versus fantasy. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0307 ] Moffett, James and McElheny, Kenneth P. (editors). Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503074. 576 pages. paperback. CQ307. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The scope of this Signet Classic anthology is immense: its forty - one authors range from such figures as Dostoevski, Joyce, Conrad, Gogol, Chekhov, James, De Maupassant, Katherine Mansfield, and Stephen Crane to such modern writers as John Updike, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, Bernard Malamud, Dylan Thomas, Eudora Welty, and Alan Sillitoe. The stories presented here are not the familiar anthology pieces; they offer the reader fresh contact with masters of the short story form. Equally important is the anthology's unique arrangement: editors Moffett and McElheny have grouped the stories according to narrative method, thereby providing a total spectrum of the diverse fictional techniques inherent in the use of point of view. As they detail in their incisive commentary, the tale cannot be separated from the teller; subject and meaning alter as the form alters. 'Just imagine Vanity Fair told by one of its characters instead of by its godlike author, or The Great Gatsby narrated by Gatsby instead of Nick. Intuitively or not, an author chooses his techniques according to his meaning. Good art, as we all know, weds form to content, either through the dissonance of irony or the consonance of harmony. What makes such fusions possible is that our ways of apprehending and sharing experience are themselves a crucial part of what we call experience.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Moffett is an author and educator. His works include Points of Departure, Points of View, Teaching the Universe of Discourse, and Storm in the Mountains, among many others. The recipient of the California Association of Teachers of English's Distinguished Author Award and the Carnegie Corporation Grant, Moffett has taught at Harvard; San Diego State University; University of California, Berkeley; and Middlebury College. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0308 ] Roosevelt, Theodore. The Rough Riders. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451503082. Afterword by Lawrence Clark Powell. 216 pages. paperback. CD308. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - We Are Coming! There was a war to be fought with Spain in 1898,. and so they volunteered. Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees from the newly tamed Indian Territory. Cowpunchers, stage drivers, government scouts from the Great Plains states. Riflemen, trappers, miners from the Rocky Mountain West. As Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders they rode and fought to fame and glory at Las Guasimas, Santiago. and San Juan Hill. More than a chronicle of a war and men in battle, The Rough Riders endures as a living record of a time, a personality, and a legend. Reading it, we become witnesses to a young America emerging as a great power. a dynamic Roosevelt rushing to fulfill his destined place in her future. , and the cowboy hero's last glorious fling in tribute to her colorful past. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Theodore 'T.R.' Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 - January 6, 1919) was an American politician, author, naturalist, soldier, explorer, and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the Progressive Party insurgency of 1912. He is known for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his 'cowboy' persona and robust masculinity. Growing up, Roosevelt was a sickly child who suffered from asthma. To overcome his physical weakness, he embraced a strenuous life. He was home-schooled and became an eager student of nature. He attended Harvard College, where he studied biology, boxed, and developed an interest in naval affairs. He quickly entered politics, determined to become a member of the ruling class. In 1881, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where he became a leader of the reform faction of the GOP. His book, The Naval War of 1812 (1882), established him as a learned historian and writer. When Roosevelt's first wife, Alice, died two days after giving birth in February 1884 and when his mother died the same day in the same house, he was heartbroken and in despair. Roosevelt temporarily left politics and became a cattle rancher in the Dakotas. When blizzards destroyed his herd, he returned to New York City politics, running in and losing a race for mayor. In the 1890s, he took vigorous charge of the city police as New York City Police Commissioner. By 1897, under President William McKinley, Roosevelt was, in effect, running the Navy Department. When the war with Spain broke out in 1898, he helped form the famous Rough Riders, a combination of wealthy Easterners and Western cowboys. He gained national fame for his courage during the war in Cuba. Roosevelt then returned to United States and was elected Governor of New York. He was the GOP nominee for Vice President with William McKinley, campaigning successfully against radicalism and for prosperity, national honor, imperialism (regarding the Philippines), high tariffs and the gold standard. Roosevelt became President after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. He was inaugurated at age 42, making him the youngest person to become president, and the first President to receive full-time Secret Service protection (although this was not at his request). He tried to move the GOP toward Progressivism, including trust busting and increased business regulation. In November 1904, he was reelected in a landslide against conservative Democrat Alton Brooks Parker. Roosevelt called his domestic policies a 'Square Deal', promising a fair deal to the average citizen while breaking up monopolistic corporations, holding down railroad rates, and guaranteeing pure food and drugs. He was the first president to speak out on conservation, and he greatly expanded the system of national parks and national forests. By 1907, he propounded more radical reforms, which were blocked by the conservative Republicans in Congress. His foreign policy focused on the Caribbean, where he ordered the construction of the Panama Canal and guarded it. There were no wars, but his slogan, 'Speak softly and carry a big stick' was underscored by expanding the navy and sending the Great White Fleet on a world tour. He negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. At the end of his second term, Roosevelt supported his close friend, William Howard Taft, for the 1908 Republican nomination. After leaving office, he toured Africa and Europe, and on his return in 1910, his friendship with President Taft ended as a result of disputes on the issues of progressivism and personalities. In the 1912 presidential election, Roosevelt tried to block Taft's renomination, but failed. He then launched the Progressive ('Bull Moose') Party that called for progressive reforms, which split the Republicans, and captured almost 25 percent of all votes cast in the 1912 Presidential election. This allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the White House and Congress, while the Taft conservatives gained control of the GOP for decades. Roosevelt then led a major expedition to the Amazon jungles and contracted several illnesses. From 1914 to 1917, he campaigned for American entry into World War I, and reconciled with the GOP leadership. He was the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the 1920 presidential election, but his health collapsed and he died in 1919. Roosevelt has consistently been ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents. His face adorns Mount Rushmore alongside those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0309 ] Saint-Exupery, Antoine De. Night Flight. New York. 1961. Signet/New American Library. 0451503090. Translated From The French By Stuart Gilbert.Foreword By Andre Gide. 128 pages. paperback. CP309. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - In a novel of rare beauty and power, Saint - ExupEry charts the perilous world of pioneer aviation. Night Flight is the story of hazardous flights made by night through the dangers of darkness and the destructive splendor of sudden Andean storms. It is a story of men who risk their lives to deliver mail in flimsy crates. Fabien, the youthful pilot, who sees in flying a chance for heroic action. Rivière, his superior, who believes that man's salvation lies not in freedom but in the acceptance of duty. 'Aviation, like the exploration of uncharted lands has its early heroic age and Night Flight, which describes the tragic adventure of one of these pioneers of the air, sounds, naturally enough, the authentic epic note.' - AndrE Gide AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antoine de Saint-ExupEry (officially Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint ExupEry 29 June 1900 - 31 July 1944) was a French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and also won the U.S. National Book Award. He is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight. Saint-ExupEry was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa and South America. At the outbreak of war, he joined the French Air Force (ArmEe de l'Air), flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised from the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany. Following a 27-month hiatus in North America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, he joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, although he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared over the Mediterranean on his last assigned reconnaissance mission in July 1944, and is believed to have died at that time. Prior to the war, Saint-ExupEry had achieved fame in France as an aviator. His literary works - among them The Little Prince, translated into over 250 languages and dialects - posthumously boosted his stature to national hero status in France. He earned further widespread recognition with international translations of his other works. His 1939 philosophical memoir Terre des hommes became the name of a major international humanitarian group, and was also used to create the central theme (Terre des hommes - Man and His World) of the most successful world's fair of the 20th century, Expo 67 in Montreal, Canada. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0310 ] Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503104. Afterword By Leslie Fielder. 496 pages. paperback. CT310. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - One of the most famous travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land by an American, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's irreverent and incisive commentary on the 'New Barbarians' encounter with the 'Old World.' Twain's hilarious satire is a double - edged weapon, impaling with sharp wit the chauvinist and the cosmopolitan alike. His naïve Westerner is a blustering pretender to sophistication, a too - quick convert to culture. Turning the coin, the ruins of antiquity appear but a shadow of their heralded glory; the scenery of 'Europe and the Holy Land 'dwarfs in contrast to the splendor of a, Western landscape. With stunning agility Twain unconsciously uses his travelogue - as Leslie A. Fiedler points out - to search out the 'archetypal differences' between Americans and Europeans - the 'American identity.' As Mr. Fiedler points out in his pungent Afterword, this was a quest that was to obsess Mark Twain's literary career: '. over and over, he was to return to the themes of The Innocents Abroad. a classic work which, without ceasing to be amusing, marks a critical point in the development of our literature, and especially in our attempt through literature to find out who we Americans are.' The Signet Classic edition of The Innocents A broad is based on the text of the first edition, which was published in 1869. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0311 ] Orwell, George. 1984. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503112. paperback. CT311. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and George Orwell's 1984 are the great modern classics of 'Negative Utopia' - not dramas of what life might be. but nightmares of what it is becoming. The world of 1984 is one in which eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity, in which the Party keeps itself in power by complete control over man's actions and his thoughts. As the lovers Winston Smith and Julia learn when they try to evade the Thought Police, and then join the underground opposition, the Party can smash the last impulse of love, the last flicker of individuality. But let the reader beware: 1984 is more than a satire of totalitarian barbarism. 'It means us, too,' says Erich Fromm in his Afterword. It is not merely a political novel but also a diagnosis of the deepest alienation in the mind of Organization Man. George Orwell writes with a swift clean style that has come down from Defoe. Like Defoe, he creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing - from the first sentence to the last four words. words which might stand as the epitaph of the twentieth century. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0312 ] Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451503120. Afterword By Elizabeth Hardwick. 224 pages. paperback. CD312. Cover: Kessler. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Written during the same period as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, this novel represents Jane Austen's genius at its freshest and most enchanting. Its heroine is Catherine Morland, the mistakenly invited guest at an isolated, and quite mysterious, country manor. There the charming young husband - seeker falls in love with the young man of the house - and becomes willing prey to dark fancies bred in her by the fashionable Gothic horror novels of the day. Before Catherine's difficulties are resolved, the reader is permitted to witness the romantic chase in all its prescribed ritual, and its prime motivations: ambition, pleasure. greed, power, self - interest. , love. With Northanger Abbey Jane Austen created a superb blending of social comedy and barbed literary satire, shaped by a vision merciless toward human folly, yet acutely sensitive to every form of cruelty. Her book stands as the product of an art at once delicate and strong, seemingly fragile hut imperishable - an art which has made Jane Austen. as Elizabeth Hardwick declares, one of the glories of English literatureY In the words of F. R. Leavis, 'Jane Austcn is one of the trLtly great writers, and herself a major fact in the background of other great writers.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is ‘famously scarce', according to one biographer. Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant), and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned ‘the greater part' of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of ‘good quiet Aunt Jane'. Scholars have unearthed little information since. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0313 ] Browning, Robert. The Selected Poetry of Browning. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503139. Edited By George M. Ridenour. 464 pages. paperback. CQ313. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE SIGNET CLASSIC POETRY SERIES PRESENTS SELECTED. WORKS OF THE MAJOR BRITISH AND AMERICAN POETS IN AUTHORITATIVE TEXTS EDITED BY OUTSTANDING SCHOLARS. UNIQUE FEATURES OF THE SELECTED POETRY OF BROWNING: Concentrates on the longer poems of this major Victorian poet. The old favorites are well represented but the editor has placed emphasis on the poems that show us the Browning that modern scholarship reveals. Included among the forty poems are 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,' 'Two in the Campagna,' 'The Heretic's Tragedy,' 'A Toccata of Galuppi's' and selections from The Ring and the Book. General Introduction to the special character and development of Browning's poetry by the editor, George M. Ridenour, Professor of English at The University of New Mexico and author of critical studies on Browning, Byron and Coleridge. Chronology of Browning's life. Text printed in the clearest, most readable type. Footnotes at the bottom of page keyed to the text. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Browning (7 May 1812 - 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. It was an obscure early poem Pauline that brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, followed by Paracelsus, praised by Wordsworth and Dickens, among others. In 1846, Browning married Elizabeth Barrett, a poet more highly-regarded than him, and they went to live in Italy, a country that he called ‘my university'. At this time, he took exception to the spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home and denounced his sEances as fraudulent, though Elizabeth believed them to be genuine. By the time of her death in 1861, his stock was beginning to rise, with a major collection Men and Women, followed by the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book. He is better-known today for his shorter poems, such as The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. His recital of the latter work during a dinner-party, recorded on an Edison wax cylinder, is believed to be the oldest surviving record by a notable person in England. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0314 ] Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503147. paperback. CP314. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - She dances on the green with the maidens. She is raped in the wood at sixteen. She buries her child in secret. She milks a cow named Dumpling. She hacks turnips on a barren farm. She stabs a man. She hides in an old house with her lover. She wakes to a circle of police, to a noose in the morning.' Thus Donald Hall writes of the figure who dominates this classic novel of tragic destiny. In Tess, victimized by lust, poverty, and hypocrisy, Thomas Hardy created no standard Victorian heroine, but a woman whose intense vitality flares unforgettably against the bleak background of a dying rural society. Shaped by an acute sense of social injustice and by a vision of human fate cosmic in scope, her story is a singular blending of harsh realism and indelibly poignant beauty. The novel shocked its Victorian audience with its honesty; it remains a triumph of literary art and a timeless commentary on the human condition. In the words of Virginia Woolf 'If we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer in the English language.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Hardy (June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin. Most of his fictional works - initially published as serials in magazines - were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. As T. S. Eliot put it, 'The work of Thomas Hardy represents. a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs. at times his style touches sublimity.' |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0315 ] Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503155. paperback. CP315. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Hank Morgan, cracked on the head by a crowbar in nineteenth - century Connecticut, wakes to find himself in the England of King Arthur. The tough - minded Yankee, an embodiment of scientific enlightenment, faces a world whose idyllic surface only masks the dark forces of fear, injustice, and ignorance. This is the springboard which launches one of literature's most extraordinary excursions into fantasy. With the agility of Mark Twain's unique virtuosity, this acrobatic tour de force moves from broad comedy to biting social satire, and from the pure joy of wild high jinks to deeply probing insights into the nature of man, whose capacity for progress is matched only by his capacity for destruction. The reader is shaken by laughter - and something more than laughter - as he falls under the book's enchantment and finds that the grim truths of Mark Twain's Camelot strike a resoundingly contemporary note. 'This story is something other and greater than a funny book. It is a work written with a high purpose, to convey what seemed to its author the most profound and elemental truths about human society.' - Stephen Leacock AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would 'go out with it', too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the 'greatest American humorist of his age', and William Faulkner called Twain 'the father of American literature'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0316 ] De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of An English Opium Eater and Other Writings. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503163. Foreword By Aileen Ward. 335 pages. paperback. CT316. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - 'Opium gives and takes away. It ruins the natural power of life; but it develops preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power.' This is the theme which shapes Confessions of an English Opium Eater, one of the most brilliant achievements in the literature of addiction. Written in the sensuous prose style of which De Quincey was a master, this remarkable book does more than chart the course of the author's dependence upon opium; with kaleidoscopic vividness it evokes the opposing poles of pleasure and pain which comprise an addict's life, the world of dreams and the world of terrible realities. A singular blending of objective analysis and subjective revelation, the Confessions emerges as a superb depiction of a drug - and as a deeply moving self - portrait of a tragically flawed man. 'De Ouincey introduced a new dimension into biography,' writes Aileen Ward, who goes on to declare: 'It is an extraordinary life that De Quincey records - a sober testimony to the resilience of the human spirit and to the creative stimulus to be found in suffering.' This Signet Classic edition includes Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to the Confessions; a long and partly autobiographical essay 'The English Mail - Coach'; and three critical essays 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. 'On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth' and 'The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Penson De Quincey (15 August 1785 - 8 December 1859) was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). In publishing this work, many scholars suggest that De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West, changing the perception of drugs in the European imagination forever. De Quincey wrote his famous CONFESSIONS at a time when opium was as easily available as aspirin today, and almost as frequently used, and when its dangers were not understood. Though something of a fugitive from respectable society, he shared his addiction with some of the most distinguished men of his age. But the CONFESSIONS are not about drug-addiction. ‘They are a meditation on the mechanism of the imagination, an exploration of the interior life of an altogether exceptional being.' Brilliantly gifted and charming, De Quincey suffered from what he himself called a ‘chronic passion of anxiety' which led him from the security and success he might have enjoyed into the direst poverty, and into the experiences which form the subjects of the terrible, drug-induced dreams he describes so superbly. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0317 ] Guiraldes, Ricardo. Don Segundo Sombra. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503171. Translated From The Spanish & With An Afterword By Harriet de Onis.Illustrations By Alberto Guiraldes. 222 pages. paperback. CT317. Cover: Kessler. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - '[The work of Ricardo Guiraldes] is probably the most original and enduring that Spanish America has produced in this century' writes the noted editor and translator Harriet de Onis in her Afterword to this Signet Classic volume. His most famous novel, Don Segundo Sombra, centers on the adventures of Fabio, a wayward waif. On the surface it is the story oflthe young boy's apprenticeship to Don Segundo, the gaucho who schools him in the skills of broncobusting and cattle - wrangling and in the art of life - life lived according to the 'gaucho canons: patience in the face of adversity, endurance, the vocation and pursuit of freedom, self - discipline, prudence, loyalty.' But more than this, Don Segundo Sombra is the story of a land and its people; in it Guiraldes has 'distilled the essence' of the 'two cornerstones of Argentine mythology' - of the pampa, the vast, treeless plain of Argentina, and of the gaucho, the fabled cowboy of South America. 'Within [the novel's] simple framework,' Harriet de Onis continues, 'is packed all the beauty of the land, of work, of the companionship of men, of freedom, of adventure, told in a language that is a blend of the precise, sober, yet colorful speech of the gaucho, and Guiraldes's sensitive scintillating prose, in which classic and modern influence have been tempered by his genius into an instrument having the beauty and power of a Toledo blade.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ricardo Güiraldes (13 February 1886 - 8 October 1927) was an Argentine novelist and poet, one of the most significant Argentine writers of his era, particularly known for his 1926 novel Don Segundo Sombra, set amongst the gauchos. Güiraldes was born in Buenos Aires, the second son of a wealthy family of the old landowning aristocracy. His mother was Dolores Goñi, descendant of Ruiz de Arellano, who founded the village of San Antonio de Areco in 1730. Manuel Güiraldes, his father, later intendente (governmentally appointed mayor) of Buenos Aires, was a cultured, educated man, interested in art. Ricardo inherited that predilection; in his youth he sketched rural scenes and painted in oils. When Güiraldes was one year old, he travelled with his family to Europe, living for four years in Paris near the Rue Saint-Claude. By the age of six, he spoke not only Spanish but French and German. Indeed, French was his first language, and French-language literature would leave a strong mark on his literary style and tastes. Güiraldes's childhood and youth were divided between the family ranch, La Porteña in San Antonio de Areco, and Buenos Aires. In San Antonio he came into contact with the world of the gauchos, which would figure prominently in his novels Raucho and Don Segundo Sombra; there, too, he met Segundo Ramírez, upon whom he based the title character of the latter work. He loved the country life, but suffered from asthma that sometimes limited his own physical activity, though he generally presented an image of physical vigor. He was educated by several female teachers and, later, by a Mexican engineer, Lorenzo Ceballos, who recognized and encouraged his literary ambitions. He studied in various institutes and completed his bachillerato at the age of 16. Güiraldes was not a brilliant student; at the Colegio Lacordaire, the Vertiz Institute and the Instituto Libre de Segunda Enseñanza, he studied both architecture and law, but never practiced either one. He did make several attempts at business, all unsuccessful. He traveled to Europe in 1910 in the company of his friend Roberto Leviller, then travelled with another friend, his future brother-in-law Adán Deihl, with whom he visited Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Egypt, Japan, China, Russia, India, Ceylon, and Germany before settling in Paris, where (after his father decided he had had enough of paying the costs of his son's idleness) he stayed with the sculptor Alberto Lagos (to whom he later dedicated Xaimaca), and where he decided to become a writer. Despite that decision, Güiraldes threw himself into the French capital's social whirl, practically abandoning his literary ambitions. But one day he unpacked some draft stories he had written about rural Argentina and set to work; these would eventually become his Cuentos de muerte y de sangre (‘Stories of death and of blood'). He read the stories to friends, who encouraged him to publish them. Even the early drafts already showed a distinct, individual style. Finally truly committed to literature, he returned to Buenos Aires in 1912, becoming part of the circle of Alejandro Bustillo. On October 13, 1913 he married Adelina del Carril, also from one of the city's leading families, whom he had first met in 1905. In 1913–1914, he published several stories in the magazine Caras y Caretas; in 1915, these and others were published as Cuentos de muerte y de sangre; earlier that year he had published a book of poetry, El cencerro de cristal. He was encouraged in his writing by his wife and by Leopoldo Lugones, but when these early works did not meet with a receptive public, Güiraldes withdrew them from circulation, gathered up the unsold copies, and threw them into a well. His wife managed to rescue some; these surviving, water-damaged copies are now prized by book collectors. At the end of 1916, the couple traveled to the Pacific Ocean, to Cuba, and to Jamaica, where he wrote a ‘theatrical caprice' called El reloj (‘The clock', never published). These travels would eventually lead to his 1923 novel Xaimaca, but long before that, in 1917, came his first novel Raucho, followed in 1918 by a short novel Un idilio de estacion (‘A Season's Idyll') in Horacio Quiroga's magazine El cuento ilustrado; this would eventually be revised and published as a well-received book in 1922, with the new title Rosaura. In 1919, with his wife, Güiraldes again traveled to Europe. In Paris he established contact with many French writers and frequented literary salons and bookstores; there, too, he began Don Segundo Sombra. He has been described as particularly influenced by his friend ValEry Larbaud, but Güiraldes's English-language translator Harriet de Onís believes that influence to have been overstated. Güiraldes returned to Argentina, then went back to Europe in 1922, where besides returning to Paris he passed some time in Puerto de Pollensa, Majorca, where he rented a house. In this period he underwent an intellectual and spiritual change. He became interested in theosophy and Eastern philosophy, seeking spiritual peace; this is strongly reflected in his late poetry. At the same time, Güiraldes's writing became more accepted in his native Buenos Aires, where he became a supporter of new avant-garde writers; he was something of an elder and teacher to the Florida group. In 1924, along with Brandán Caraffa, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Rojas Paz he founded the short-lived magazine Proa, which was not particularly successful in its home city but met with a better reception elsewhere in Latin America. Güiraldes also co-founded the Frente Unico, opposed to pompierismo (the use of dry or pompous academic language in writing), and collaborated in the publication of the magazine Martín Fierro. In 1927, intending to head back to India because of his increasing interest in Hinduism, Güiraldes traveled once more to France. He went first to Arcachon, but it developed that he was sick with Hodgkin's disease. He was brought to Paris by ambulance, was met there by his wife, and died in the house of his friend Alfredo González Garaño. Güiraldes's body was brought back to Buenos Aires and finally entombed in San Antonio de Areco. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0318 ] Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 045150318x. Edited By William Green. 188 pages. paperback. CD318. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare, first published in 1602, though believed to have been written in or before 1597. The Windsor of the play's title is a reference to the town of Windsor, also the location of Windsor Castle, in Berkshire, England, and though nominally set in the reign of Henry IV, the play makes no pretence to exist outside contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life. It features the character Sir John Falstaff, the fat knight who had previously been featured in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. It has been adapted for the opera on several occasions. The play is one of Shakespeare's lesser-regarded works among literary critics. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0319 ] Lewis, Wyndham. A Soldier of Humor and Selected Writings. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503198. Edited & With An Introduction By Raymond Rosenthal. 461 pages. paperback. CQ319. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This Signet Classic volume is the first anthology to cover the full spectrum of Wyndham Lewis' writings. Spanning more than fifty years, these selections offer a creative self - portrait of one of the great, multifaceted talents of our century - a writer who received high critical acclaim but whose work, until now, has not, been readily accessible to the general reader. Included here are such superlative tales as 'A Soldier of Humor,' 'The Death of the Ankou' and others; the play, The Enemy of the Stars; the author's classic studies of Hemingway, Sartre and Malraux; and his boldly original essays on modern art, politics and society. Here, too, are vivid recollections 0ff World War I battlefields, and of the brilliant artistic circle who, with Lewis, set a decisive new course for modern literature. Ever on display are the enormous wit and honesty of an intellect constantly engaged with the problem of human individuality in the world of the machine and mass man. Saul Bellow called Wyndham Lewis 'a brilliant critic and observer,' and T. S. Eliot described him as 'the only writer among my contemporaries to create a new, an original prose style. the most fascinating personality of our time.' As Raymond Rosenthal writes, Wyndham Lewis 'discovered and described the absurd, the anguish of being caught between being and the void, long before these ideas reached us as an intellectual fashion. There is a prophetic quality to all of Lewis' writing.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 - 7 March 1957) was an English painter and author (he dropped the name 'Percy', which he disliked). He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST. His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr (set in Paris), and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a fragmentary state at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950). |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0320 ] Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York. 1962. Signet/New American Library. 0451503201. 432 pages. paperback. CP320. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS contains the classic portrait of the man of moral courage who severs all connections with a society whose values he can no longer accept. Despite his chosen exile, Hawk - eye (Natty Bumppo), the frontier scout, risks his life to escort two sisters through hostile Indian country. On the dangerous journey he enlists the aid of the Mohican Chingachgook. And in the challenging ordeal that follows, in their encounters with deception, brutality, and the deaths of loved ones, the friendship between the two men deepens - the scout and the Indian, each with a singular philosophy of independence that has been nurtured and shaped by the silent, virgin forest. '. in his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo [Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society A stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than Love.' - D. H. Lawrence. 'THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS raises again the question of the efficacy of human effort to control irrational forces at work in individual men, races, and nations. The question has never been more pertinent than now.' - James Franklin Beard. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0321 ] Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 045150321x. paperback. CP321. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Henry James wrote of The Marble Faun: 'Hawthorne has done few things more beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between his immature and dimly - puzzled hero, with his clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely - seeing feminine nature of Miriam. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but. the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes and the ecstatic wandering, afterward, of the guilty couple through the 'bloodstained streets of Rome,' it would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative productions of our day.' The cosmopolitanism of this novel foreshadows one of the most important themes in our literature - the 'international theme' which was 40 later dominate the work of Henry James. Of all Hawthorne's fiction, The Marble Faun clearly dispels the myth of Hawthorne's unwavering Puritan morality. It projects the author's fascination with the eternal struggle between, in Murray Krieger's words, 'the unfeeling virtue of moral severity and the yielding grace of faulty humanity. the profound conflict between the limited claims of American moralism and of European aestheticism.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a ‘w' to make his name ‘Hawthorne' in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0322 ] Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. Afterword by John William Ward. 496 pages. paperback. CT322. Cover by Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - ‘So this is the little lady who made this big war ‘Abraham Lincoln's legendary comment upon meeting Mrs. Stowe has been seriously questioned, but few will deny that this work fed the passions and prejudices of countless numbers. If it did not ‘make' the Civil War, it flamed the embers. That UNCLE TOM'S CABIN is far more than an outdated work of propaganda confounds literary criticism. The novel's overwhelming power and persuasion have outlived even the most severe of critics. As Professor John William Ward of Amherst College points out in his incisive Afterword, the dilemma posed by Mrs. Stowe is no less relevant today thin it was in 1852: What is it to be ‘a moral human being' ? Can such a person live in society -any society? Commenting on the timeless significance of the book, Professor Ward writes: ‘UNCLE TOM'S CABIN is about slavery but it is about slavery because the fatal weakness of the slave's condition is the extreme manifestation of the sickness of the general society, a society breaking up into discrete, atomistic individuals where human beings, white or black, can find no secure relation one with another. Mrs. Stowe was more radical than even those in the South who hated her could see. Uncle Tom's Cabin suggests no less than the simple and terrible possibility that society has no place in it for love. ‘ With an Afterword by John William Ward. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 - July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. She wrote more than 20 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stands on social issues of the day. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0323 ] Milton, John. Samson Agonistes and the Shorter Poems of Milton. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503236. Edited By Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey. 216 pages. paperback. CT323. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - UNIQUE FEATURES OF SAMSON AGONISTES AND THE SHORTER POEMS OF MILTON: Covers the full spectrum of Milton's, art ranging from the early hymn 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' to the tragic drama Samson Agonistes. More than forty selections are presented, including Lycidas, Comus, 'Il Penseroso,' 'L'Allegro' and selected Sonnets General Introduction to the special character and development of Milton's poetry by the editor, Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey, Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College and author of Paradise Lost as 'Myth '. Chronology of Milton's life. Text printed in the clearest, most readable type. Footnotes at the bottom of page keyed to the text Extensive bibliography AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Milton (9 December 1608 - 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse. Milton's poetry and prose reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644) - written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship - is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of the press. William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the 'greatest English author,' and he remains generally regarded 'as one of the preeminent writers in the English language,' though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death (often on account of his republicanism). Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as 'a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind,' though he (a Tory and recipient of royal patronage) described Milton's politics as those of an 'acrimonious and surly republican'. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0324 ] Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of the Speckled Band and Other Stories of Sherlock Holmes. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451503244. Introduction By William S. Baring-Gould. 287 pages. paperback. CD324. Cover: James McMullan. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Except for Hamlet, no fictional character has been the subject of more scholarly argument and speculation than Sherlock Holmes. His adventures have been translated into 41 languages. He has appeared in 21 plays, 121 movies, and is currently starring on Broadway in the musical, 'Baker Street.' To quote from Baring - Gould's brilliant - nay, Holmesian - lntroduction: '. it is the character of Holmes that grips us - a character so real that to this day letters are written to 'Mr. Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street, London, England.' Perhaps William Bolitho expressed it best when he said that 'Holmes is the spirit of a town and a time.' The town, of course, is London - a gaslit London where the fog swirls thick against the windowpanes, and four - wheelers and hansoms rumble down the cobblestoned streets - and the time is the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras. If you would see for yourself why Sherlock Holmes has for so long held his place in English literature, turn to the twelve stories in this volume. They have been selected with great discrimination, and each is explained in a lengthy, delightful note by William S. Baring - Gould, the editor of this Signet Classic and author of the definitive 'biography' of Sherlock Holmes. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer who is most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0325 ] Keats, John. The Selected Poetry of Keats. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503252. Edited & With An Introduction By Paul de Man. 352 pages. paperback. CQ325. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Signet Classic poetry series presents selected works of the major British and American poets in authoritative texts edited by outstanding scholars. Unique features of the selected poetry of Keats: Presents the major works of the great Romantic poet in full - EUDYMION, HYPERION, THE FALL OF HYPERION. the odes, including ‘On a Grecian Urn' and ‘ To a Nightingale'. as well as a representative selection of Keats's sonnets and his letters. General introduction to the special character and development of Keats's work by the editor, Paul de Man, Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University and author of THE POST - ROMANTIC PREDICAMENT and ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS. Chronology of Keats's life. Text printed in the clearest, most readable type. Footnotes at the bottom of page keyed to the text. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Keats was one of the main figures of the second generation of romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for four years before his death. Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life. The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0326 ] Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451503260. Edited By Harry Levin. paperback. CD326. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's early plays. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play. The Comedy of Errors (along with The Tempest) is one of only two of Shakespeare's plays to observe the Unity of Time (classical unities). It has been adapted for opera, stage, screen and musical theatre numerous times worldwide. The Comedy of Errors tells the story of two sets of identical twins that were accidentally separated at birth (Shakespeare was father to one pair of twins). Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, arrive in Ephesus, which turns out to be the home of their twin brothers, Antipholus of Ephesus and his servant, Dromio of Ephesus. When the Syracusans encounter the friends and families of their twins, a series of wild mishaps based on mistaken identities lead to wrongful beatings, a near-seduction, the arrest of Antipholus of Ephesus, and false accusations of infidelity, theft, madness, and demonic possession. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0327 ] Shakespeare, William. Henry V. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451503279. Edited By John Russell Brown. 240 pages. paperback. CD327. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - THE SIGNET CLASSIC SHAKESPEARE SERIES The work of the world's greatest dramatist in authoritative texts edited by outstanding scholars. Unique Features Of The Signet Classic Shakespeare, HENRY V: Special Introduction to the play by the editor, John Russell Brown, University of Birmingham. General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. Source from which Shakespeare derived HENRY V - Raphael Holinshed: from Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by William Hazlitt, W. B. Yeats, E. M. W. Tillyard. Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable Type. Name of each speaker given in full. Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play keyed to the numbered tines of the Text. Textual note. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0328 ] Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503287. Edited By Reuben Brower. paperback. CD328. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Coriolanus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1608. The play is based on the life of the legendary Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus. The tragedy is numbered as one of the last two tragedies written by Shakespeare, along with Antony and Cleopatra. Coriolanus is the name given to a Roman general after his more than adequate military success against various uprisings challenging the government of Rome. Following this success, Coriolanus becomes active in politics and seeks political leadership. His temperament is unsuited for popular leadership and he is quickly deposed, whereupon he aligns himself to set matters straight according to his own will. The alliances he forges along the way result in his ultimate downfall. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0329 ] Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York. 1965. Signet/New American Library. 0451503295. Afterword By Harold Bloom. 224 pages. paperback. CD329. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The story of Victor Frankenstein and of the monstrous creature he created has held the reading public spellbound since its publication almost a century and a half ago. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting horror; but on a more profound level, it offers searching illumination of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience and of a monster brought to life in an alien world, ever more desperately attempting to escape the torture of his solitude. A brilliant exercise in the macabre, written with near - hallucinatory intensity, Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination. Of its contemporary significance, Harold Bloom writes: 'The greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley's novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This nameless being, as much a modern Adam as his creator is a modern Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and more to be feared, and above all able to give the attentive reader that shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic recognition compels a heightened realization of the self.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Shelley (nEe Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Godwin's mother died when she was eleven days old; afterwards, she and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, were reared by her father. When Mary was four, Godwin married his neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont. Godwin provided his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his liberal political theories. In 1814, Mary Godwin began a romantic relationship with one of her father's political followers, the married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, they left for France and travelled through Europe; upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816 after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumour that was to kill her at the age of 53. Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46) support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0330 ] Shakespeare, William. King John. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503309. Edited By William H. Matchett. 224 pages. paperback. CD330. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Special Introduction to the play by William H. Matchett, University of Washington ~ General discussion of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University ~ The sources from which Shakespeare derived King John - Raphael Holinshed: from Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland; and Edward Hall: from The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York '~ Dramatic criticism: commentaries by Donald A. Stauffer, Harold C. Goddard, Muriel St. Glare Byrne '~ Text and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type ~ Name of each speaker given in full '~ Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page of the play. keyed to the numbered lines of the text ~ Textual note ~ Extensive bibliography AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0331 ] Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503317. Edited By Heilman. paperback. CD331. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A rough-and-tumble farce centered around a lively battle of the sexes, The Taming of the Shrew brims with action and bawdy humor. The unconventional romance between a lusty fortune-hunter and a bitter shrew unfolds to the accompaniment of witty, fast-paced dialogue and physical humor. Unique features of the Signet Classic Shakespeare An extensive of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet A special introduction to the play by the editor, Robert B. Heilman, University of Washington Sources from which Shakespeare derived The Taming of the Shrew Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Richard Hosley, Maynard Mack, Germaine Greer, Alexander Leggatt, Linda Bamber, Karen Newman, Camille Wells Sights A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions of The Taming of the Shrew, then and now Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type Up-to-date list of recommended readings AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0332 ] Shakespeare, William. Two Noble Kinsmen. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503325. Edited By Clifford Leech. 268 pages. paperback. CD332. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy, first published in 1634 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Its plot derives from "The Knight's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which had already been dramatised at least twice before. Formerly a point of controversy, the dual attribution is now generally accepted by the scholarly consensus. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0333 ] Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part 1. New York. 1967. Signet/New American Library. 0451503333. Edited By Lawrence V. Ryan. paperback. CD333. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - This edition of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 uses a variety of approaches to Shakespeare, including historical and cultural studies approaches. Shakespeare's text is accompanied by an intriguing collection of thematically arranged historical and cultural documents and illustrations designed to give a firsthand knowledge of the contexts out of which Henry IV, Part 1 emerged. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0334 ] Andersen, Hans Christian. The Snow Queen and Other Tales. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503341. Newly Translated From The Danish & With An Introduction By Pat Shaw Iversen.Illustrated By Shelia Greenwald. 318 pages. paperback. CT334. Cover: Tsao. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The settings of the stories range from the fragile porcelain palace of The Emperor of China to a pigsty; from the Gates of Heaven to the Devil's Anteroom; from the Cave of the Winds to the castle of the King of the Sea. We are transported in flying trunks or on the back of, the East Wind, in humble wheelbarrows or in airships yet to be invented. ' Thus writes Pat Shaw Iversen, who has provided splendid new translations of these forty - seven tales. In creating these wondrous narratives, Hans Christian Andersen reworked ancient folk tradition to harmonize with his own singular sensibility, blending unsurpassed fantasy with delightfully evocative realistic detail. His vision is rich in humor, and sharp with irony; his tales reflect the poignant sadness as well as the bright joy of existence. In them readers young and old alike encounter an enduring revelation of human truth - as clear as the nakedness of the Emperor in his new clothes, or the final beauty of the Ugly Duckling - illumined by the magic art of a storyteller who ranks, in the words of Pat Shaw Iversen, as 'one of the greatest literary geniuses the world has ever known.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Hans Christian Andersen (April 2, 1805 - August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories - called eventyr, or ‘fairy-tales' - express themes that transcend age and nationality. Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0335 ] La Fontaine, Jean de. Selected Fables and Tales of La Fontaine. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 045150335x. Newly Translated From The French By Marie Ponsot.Afterword By Wallace Fowlie. 190 pages. paperback. CT335. Cover: Lambert. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - As Racine gave new dimension to tragedy, and Moliere to comedy, La Fontaine transformed the genre of the fable. His fables are masterpieces of swift narrative, heightened by superlative poetic art, and sharpened by the insight of a shrewd, witty, worldly observer of mankind. Brought to near - magic are foxes, lions, wolves, donkeys, rats and all the other members of a wondrous bestiary, enacting dramas whose enchantment has remained undimmed over the centuries. Presented in new verse translations, these selected fables - along with a rich sampling of La Fontaine's sophisticated tales and highly engaging occasional poems - introduce a genius both representative of his age and far transcending it. As Wallace Fowlie writes, 'Mrs. Ponsot has made a judicious selection. The duplication of the La Fontaine line is quite remarkable, and this, all the more so, because the English here is strong, idiomatic, whimsical, and comical (when intended to be). This translation is obviously the work of a poet who draws upon rich resources of language and technique. She has caught that playfulness of La Fontaine which is combined with seriousness.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jean de La Fontaine (8 July 1621 - 13 April 1695) was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional languages. According to Flaubert, he was the only French poet to understand and master the texture of the French language before Victor Hugo. A set of postage stamps celebrating La Fontaine and the Fables was issued by France in 1995. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0336 ] Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part 2. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503368. Edited BY Arthur Freeman. paperback. CD336. Cover: Milton Glaser. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Picking up where Henry IV, Part One left off after the Battle of Shrewsbury, Henry IV, Part Two is the story of England's King Henry IV during his final months of life, his reconciliation with his wayward heir, and his eventual death. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) - 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0337 ] Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. New York. 1967. Signet/New American Library. 0451503376. Introduction By William S. Baring-Gould. 176 pages. paperback. CD337. Cover: James McMullan. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - A centuries - old family curse; an eerie mansion on the windswept Devon moors; a mysterious and violent death; and an urgent summons to London for the aid of 'the world's only consulting detective' - all combine to set the stage for Sherlock Holmes's most baffling and blood - chilling assignment. Accompanied by his faithful companion, the good Dr. Watson, the immortal master sleuth embarks upon a case whose only clues seem to defy all rational explanation. In this wonderfully wrought novel, the reader will encounter a spellbinding magic that many writers have imitated but none come close to equaling. Here are the singular qualities of narrative, atmosphere and characterization that have led so eminent a critic as Edmund Wilson to declare, 'Sherlock Holmes is literature. The Sherlock Holmes stories [have] a life of their own.' Here is vivid demonstration of Christopher Morley's assertion that 'perhaps no fiction character ever created has become so real to his readers.' In the words of William S. Baring - Gould, Holmesian expert and author of the definitive 'biography' of the great detective, 'Read, and enjoy. Here you will find Holmes and Watson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at their best.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer who is most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0338 ] Beerbohm, Max. Zuleika Dobson. New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 0451503384. Afterword By F.W. Dupee. 256 pages. paperback. CT338. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - The most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time' was E. M. Forster's assessment of Zuleika Dobson in 1927, sixteen years after its initial appearance. Since then, time has only increased the stature of this rare literary delight. Its setting is Oxford University; its heroine a dazzling enchantress in search of a man she cannot captivate; its artistry the product of one of the most elegant talents in the English language. As Zuleika Dobson decimates the undergraduate population, and destroys the proud young Duke of Dorset, 'the incomparable Max' fashions his tale with the blend of elfin charm and mordant human wit that was his alone. As the distinguished critic F. W. Dupee writes: 'All known devices of rhetoric and syntax are set to performing with unobtrusive gaiety. For [Max Beerbohm,] loving and dying were mysteries too inscrutable to be accounted for by the word 'tragedy.' Assuagement lay in laughter and the craftsmanship required to provoke it, to the right degree and in the right kind.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Henry Maximilian 'Max' Beerbohm (London 24 August 1872 - 20 May 1956 Rapallo) was an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0339 ] Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000-1887. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503392. paperback. CT339. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Edward Bellamy's classic look at the future has been translated into over twenty languages and is the most widely read novel of its time. A young Boston gentleman is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty - first century - - from a world of war and want to one of peace and plenty. This brilliant vision became the blueprint of utopia that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 - May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle-like tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of over 160 ‘Nationalist Clubs‘ dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0340 ] Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. Afterword By Angus Wilson. 534 pages. paperback. CT340. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - Great Expectations is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mystery and a profound examination of moral values. Written at a time when Dickens' relationship with Victorian society had reached a crisis, this novel is peopled by characters unmistakably bearing Dickens' familiar stamp-but here they appear in a new and questioning light. The orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch. the beautiful Estella, and her guardian, the embittered and vengeful Miss Havisham. the strangely ambiguous figure of the master lawyer, Mr. Jaggers. all play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shapes Dickens' searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class. From the agony of his disenchantment comes a work that gives an added dimension to his matchless genius. ‘. the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced. The only one perhaps that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfils the sort of demands that Flaubert or Henry James makes of the novelist.' Angus Wilson. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0341 ] Thomas, Dylan. Adventures in the Skin Trade. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503414. Afterword by Vernon Watkins. paperback. CT341. SIGNET CLASSIC REPRINT.
DESCRIPTION - One of the twentieth century's most gifted writers, Dylan Thomas created a vital, lusty, antic world of truly memorable characters. This Signet Classic offers a distinguished selection of his work - twenty stories plus all of his famous unfinished novel, ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE. The title piece relates the adventures of Samuel Bennet, a young innocent embarked on a wild pilgrimage through modern London. The stories range in theme from life and love to nature and madness, but all are written with the extravagant humor, the brilliant imagery, the magic awareness of the true poet. The New York Times wrote of ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE: 'The human warmth keeps bubbling up through the satire. Thomas' last work of fiction, in addition to its intrinsic interest, has a meaningfulness comparable to that of Keats' letters and Yeats' memoirs.' The New York Herald Tribune found it a 'vein of pure gold.' And The Saturday Review called Dylan Thomas 'a genius.' AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 - 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and 'And death shall have no dominion', the 'Play for Voices', Under Milk Wood, and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death in New York City. In his later life he acquired a reputation, which he encouraged, as a 'roistering, drunken and doomed poet'. Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. An undistinguished pupil, he left school at 16, becoming a journalist for a short time. Although many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager, it was the publication of 'Light breaks where no sun shines', in 1934, that caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937. Their relationship was defined by alcoholism and was mutually destructive. In the early part of his marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth, settling in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne. Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult, which resulted in his augmenting his income with reading tours and broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention and he was used by the Corporation as a populist voice of the literary scene. In the 1950s, Thomas travelled to America, where his readings brought him a level of fame, and his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in America cemented Thomas's legend, and he recorded to vinyl works such as A Child's Christmas in Wales. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma from which he did not recover. Thomas died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales where he was buried at the village churchyard in Laugharne. Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language. He has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century and noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and imagery. Thomas's position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed. He remains popular with the public, who find his work accessible. |
![]() | ![]() | [ 0342 ] Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Selected Poetry of Shelley. New York. [no date]. Signet/New American Library. 0451503422. Edited & With An Introduction By Harold Bloom. paperback. CQ342. SIGNET CLASSIC ORIGINAL.
DESCRIPTION - Shelley's short, prolific life produced some of the most memorable and well-known lyrics of the Romantic period. THE SIGNET CLASSIC POETRY SERIES PRESENTS SELECTED WORKS OF THE MAJOR BRITISH AND AMERICAN POETS IN AUTHORITATIVE TEXTS EDITED BY OUTSTANDING SCHOLARS. UNIQUE FEATURES OF THE SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE OF SHELLEY: Presents the major works of one of the greatest lyrical poets in Western tradition. Sixty selections include Prometheus Unbound, "Hymn of Apollo," The Triumph of Life, The Witch of Atlas, "Ode to the West Wind," Hellas, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," "To a Skylark," "Mont Blanc," Adonais, and the two prose works On a Future State and A Defense of Poetry. General Introduction to the special character and development of Shelley's poetry by Harold Bloom, Professor of English at Yale University. Winner of the John Addison Porter Prize (1956), a Morse Fellow at Yale (1958-59) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1962-63), Mr. Bloom is the author of Shelley's Mythmaking and Blake's Apocalypse. Chronology of Shelley's life. Text printed in the clearest, most readable type. Footnotes at the bottom of page keyed to the text. Extensive bibliography. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 - 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some critics as amongst the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Love Peacock; and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Shelley is perhaps best known for such classic poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy. His other major works include long, visionary poems such as Queen Mab (later reworked as The Daemon of the World), Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, the unfinished work The Triumph of Life; and the visionary verse dramas The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820). His close circle of admirers, however, included some progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin. Though Shelley's poetry and prose output rem |