A timeless tale of adventure, romance, intrigue, and revenge, «The Three Musketeers» is the captivating story of d'Artagnan, a young man of Gascony, who is determined to become a Musketeer of the Guard. Through his wit and skill with a sword, he befriends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis and begins on the path toward his dream. They must foil the nefarious plotting of Cardinal Richelieu against the King and Queen, despite his appearance as an all ...
Scottish novelist David Lindsay (1876-1945) was born to a middle-class Calvinist family, forced by poverty to work as an insurance clerk instead of attending university, and at the age of forty took up the cause and worked his way to Corporal of the Royal Army Pay Corps in World War I. After the war he moved to Cornwall with his wife and began writing full-time, publishing his first novel, «A Voyage to Arcturus», in 1920. Although the science fi ...
Despite a decreasing popularity throughout his career, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) has become one of the most notable and respected English novelists of the Victorian Era. His penetrating novels on political, social and gender issues of his day have placed him among such nineteenth century literary icons as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Trollope penned 47 novels in his career, in addition to various short stories, travel books ...
Considered one of Dumas' most beloved novels and one of the best-selling works of its day, «The Count of Monte Cristo» is an expansive adventure novel with a huge cast of characters, all revolving around the young sailor Edmond Dantes. Wrongfully accused of aiding the exiled Napoleon, Dantes is arrested on the day of his wedding and imprisoned on the island prison, Chateau d'If. He survives years of cramped confinement and eventually b ...
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), dreamed since his childhood of becoming a poet. However, he produced several popular works that cemented his reputation as a great novelist of the Victorian period, and earned him the admiration of later writers like D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Hardy's stories are noted for their nuances of Romantic and Enlightenment thinking, particularly elements of the supernatural. One of what Hardy called his Novels of ...
Though only the third novel Dickens wrote, «Nicholas Nickleby» is a well-crafted and significant precursor to his other great works. The tale follows the fortunes of the young man Nicholas, the son of an imprudent gentleman who leaves his family without resources. Fiercely devoted to his mother and sisters, as well as his true friends, Nicholas is occasionally emotional and even violent, yet always idealistic. He seeks the aid of his villainous ...
American novelist William Hill Brown wrote during the eighteenth century and is credited with writing the first American novel, «The Power of Sympathy.» Brown used his work to teach women the dangers of seduction and passion, attempting to lead them toward morality and propriety. The novel follows the forbidden romance of Harrington and Harriot, two young lovers who become engaged after a whirlwind romance. Much to their surprise, they discover ...
"It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands. It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to h ...
This early twentieth century socialistic novel didn't win the Pulitzer Prize, that honor would go to Ernest Poole's next novel, «His Family,» which relates the struggles of a middle-class family in New York City in the 1910s. It has been conjectured though that the prize committee was actually honoring «The Harbor,» which they had to pass over two years before since the award for fiction did not exist yet. Like «His Family,» Poole&apos ...
