Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis.

The first of Sinclair Lewis' great successes, Main Street shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism. Reflecting his own unhappy childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis' sixth novel attacked the conformity and dullness he saw in midwestern village life. Young college graduate Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local doctor, and tries to bring culture to the small town. But her efforts to reform the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed, conventionality, pitifully unambitious cultural endeavors, and--worst of all--the pettiness and bigotry of small town minds.

Lewis' portrayal of a marriage town by disillusionment and a woman forced into compromises is at once devastating social satire and persuasive realism. His subtle characterizations and intimate details of small town America make Main Street a complex and compelling work and established Lewis as an important figure in twentieth-century literature.

You can read Main Street online for free at The Literature Page.

Did you know? Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for one of his other works, but he refused it. He also won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he accepted.

Have you read this classic or anything else by Sinclair Lewis?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren.

Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, All the King's Men is one of the most famous and widely read works in American fiction. Its original publication by Harcourt catapulted author Robert Penn Warren to fame and made the novel a bestseller for many seasons. Set in the 1930s, it traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie Talos, a fictional Southern politician who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Talos begins his career as an idealistic man of the people, but he soon becomes corrupted by success, caught between dreams of service and a lust for power. All the King's Men is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago.

Generally considered the finest novel ever written on American politics, All the King's Men is a literary classic.

The title is taken from Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

All the King's Men is rated the 36th greatest novel of the 20th century by Modern Library.

There are 2 film adaptations, 1949 and 2006. The 1949 version won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The 2006 version starred Sean Penn.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Cyrano De Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand.

This is Edmond Rostand's immortal play in which chivalry and wit, bravery and love are forever captured in the timeless spirit of romance. Set in Louis XIII's reign, it is the moving and exciting drama of one of the finest swordsmen in France, gallant soldier, brilliant wit, tragic poet-lover with the face of a clown. Rostand's extraordinary lyric powers gave birth to a universal hero, Cyrano De Bergerac,—and ensured his own reputation as author of one of the best-loved plays in the literature of the stage.







The entire work is written in rhyming couplets.

Do you recognize this well-known quotation?

A kiss, when all is said, what is it?
An oath that's ratified, a sealed promise,
A heart's avowal claiming confirmation,
A rose-dot on the 'i' of 'adoration';
A secret that to mouth, not ear, is whispered ...

You can read it online for free at Questia.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The Brothers Karamozov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the "wicked and sentimental" Fyodor Pavlovich Karamozov and his three sons–the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, its social and spiritual strivings, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.

Dostoyevsky intended it to be the first part in an epic story, but he died soon after its publication. The Brothers Karamazov is known as one of the supreme achievements in literature.

You can read it for free online at Read Print.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

Today's (contemporary) classic is Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez.

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying love to the beautiful Fermina Daza, whom he lost to Dr. Juvenal Urbino so many years before, García Márquez has created a vividly absorbing fictional world, as lush and dazzling as a dream and as real and immediate as our own deepest longings.

If you've already read it, take a quiz to test your memory.

Here's Oprah's guide to Love in the Time of Cholera.

Have you read this classic? Did you read along when Oprah picked it for her book club?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy.

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy’s genius is seen clearly in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle—all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual’s place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: “To read him . . . is to find one’s way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane.”

War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men. As Napoleon's army invades, Tolstoy vividly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.

You can read War and Peace online for free at Read Print.

Did you know? Tolstoy wrote the original so that the characters would sometimes speak Russian and other times French.

Have you read this epic classic?

I read War and Peace in high school but must not have really understood it at the time. I don't remember it at all. I did also read Anna Karenina and remember everything about that one. I must have liked it much more!

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1947).

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most moving and eloquent accounts of the Holocaust, read by tens of millions of people around the world since its publication in 1947.

Describing the lives of eight people hiding from the Nazis in a concealed storage attic, The Diary of Anne Frank captures the claustrophobic realities of their daily existence their fear, their hope, their laughter, their grief. Each day of these two dark years, Anne's voice shines through: "When I write I shake off all my cares. But I want to achieve more than that. I want to be useful and bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death."

The Diary of Anne Frank is the story of a remarkable Jewish girl whose triumphant humanity in the face of unfathomable deprivation and fear has made the book one of the most enduring documents of our time.

You can explore the secret annex, where Anne and her family stayed in hiding for two years, online.

Have you read this amazing story? Did you read it in school?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Macbeth (1606?) by Shakespeare.

One of the great Shakespearean tragedies, Macbeth is a dark and bloody drama of ambition, murder, guilt and revenge. Prompted by the prophecies of three mysterious witches and goaded by his ambitious wife, the Scottish thane Macbeth murders Duncan, King of Scotland, in order to succeed him on the throne. This foul deed soon entangles the conscience-stricken nobleman in a web of treachery, deceit and more murders that ultimately spells his doom.

Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, and is believed to have been written some time between 1603 and 1606 with 1607 being the very latest possible date. The earliest account of a performance of what was likely Shakespeare's play is April 1611, when Simon Forman recorded seeing such a play at the Globe Theatre. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book for a specific performance. In the back-stage world of theater, some believe the play is "cursed" and will not mention its name aloud, referring to it instead as "The Scottish play". Over the centuries, the play has attracted the greatest actors in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The play has been adapted to film, television, opera, novels, comic books, and other media.

You can read Macbeth for free online at Read Print.

Even if you haven't read it, you probably recognize this section with the witches' spell:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

Have you read Macbeth? What other Shakespeare tragedies have you read?

I've read Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad.

A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, Heart of Darkness exposes the tenuous fabric that holds "civilization" together and the brutal horror at the center of European colonialism. Conrad's crowning achievement recounts Marlow's physical and psychological journey deep into the heart of the Belgian Congo in search of the mysterious trader Kurtz.






Did you know? The most famous adaptation of Heart of Darkness is the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam.


You can read Heart of Darkness online for free at Read Print.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde.

A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy."

You can read it online for free at Read Print.

If you've already read it, take a quiz to test your memory.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

In keeping with the Edgar Allan Poe theme, today's classic is The Tell-Tale Heart (1843).

This is the story of the unnamed murderer in all his exquisite vileness and self-effacing insanity that poses rationality where none exists.

Remember the vulture eye? If you don't, you can read the entire story online for free at Read Print.

The Tell-Tale Heart is considered a classic of Gothic fiction. It is one of Poe's most famous short stories.



Which Poe tales have you read?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka.

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis.

It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing -- though absurdly comic -- meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

You can read The Metamorphosis online for free at Read Print. It's pretty short and only has 3 chapters; it's officially a novella.

Have you read it?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Persuasion (1817/8) by Jane Austen.

'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances. Persuasion celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future.

Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. It was published just months after her death (at age 41).

You can read Persuasion online for free at Read Print.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner.

A landmark in American fiction, Light in August explores Faulkner's central theme: the nature of evil. Joe Christmas - a man doomed, deracinated and alone - wanders the Deep South in search of an identity, and a place in society. After killing his perverted God-fearing lover, it becomes inevitable that he is pursued by a lynch-hungry mob. Yet after the sacrifice, there is new life, a determined ray of light in Faulkner's complex and tragic world.

Time included the novel in its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

If you've read it, take a quiz to test your memory.

Have you read this classic or anything else by Faulkner?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self.

Here's the beginning:

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was
never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in
discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and
yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was
to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye;
something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but
which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner
face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was
austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a
taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not
crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved
tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at
the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in
any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. "I incline
to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go
to the devil in his own way." In this character, it was
frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and
the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men. And to
such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never
marked a shade of change in his demeanour.

You can read the whole story online for free at Read Print.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh.

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

In 2005, Brideshead Revisited was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to present.

Have you read this classic (or seen the 2008 movie adaptation starring Matthew Goode)?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is I Capture the Castle (1948) by Dodie Smith.

Dodie Smith's first novel transcends the oft-stodgy definition of "a classic" by being as brightly witty and adventuresome as it was when published over sixty years ago.

Lovingly passed down from generation to generation and long unavailable in American stores, I Capture the Castle has become one of the most requested items of used book dealers. However, in the author's native England, the novel has never been out of print.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over a six-month period, first in a sixpenny book, then in a shilling book, and, finally, in a splendid two-guinea book, to hone her writing skills. And it is within these pages that she candidly chronicles her encounters with the estate's new, young, and handsome American landlords, the effects of her sister Rose's marital ambitions, her writer's-blocked father's anguished and ultimately renewed creativity, and her own hopeless, first descent into love.

By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle"--and the heart of the reader--in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments.

Did you know? Dodie Smith also authored The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Have you read this classic?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Pygmalion (1912) by George Bernard Shaw.

Written in 1912, Pygmalion quickly became a legend in its own time. The characters, situations, and dialogue supplied are rich, ebullient, and unmatched in wit as the infamous Henry Higgins prepares to "make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe."

Thus begins this classic tale as Shaw pokes fun at smugness and priggish conventionality. Who can forget professor Henry Higgins with his passionate interest in the science of phonetics and the improvement of British speech, or of course, poor Eliza Doolittle, who is one of the great heroines of the 20th century?

Get ready to enjoy the greatest Shaw romp of them all as Higgins prepares to transform a common flower girl into a creature "the king of England would accept as royalty."

You can read the play online for free at Read Print.

Did you know? The famous musical My Fair Lady is based on the play Pygmalion.

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is A Passage to India (1924) by E.M. Forster.

What really happened in the Marabar caves? This is the mystery at the heart of E.M. Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India, the puzzle that sets in motion events highlighting an even larger question: Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends?

"It is impossible here," an Indian character tells his friend, Dr. Aziz, early in the novel.

Arguably Forster's greatest novel, A Passage to India limns a troubling portrait of colonialism at its worst, and is remarkable for the complexity of its characters. Here the personal becomes the political and in the breach between Aziz and his English "friends," Forster foreshadows the eventual end of the Raj.

It is listed at #25 of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.

Read an original review from 1924 at The Guardian.

Have you read this classic (anything else by Forster)?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic (in honor of its 50th anniversay and since we just selected it for next month's book) is To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee.

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

(Although there have been rumors that Truman Capote actually wrote it, they are unfounded.)

Did you know? Several people and events from Harper Lee's childhood parallel those of the fictional Scout.

We'll be reading (or re-reading) it next month, but have you seen the movie starring Gregory Peck?