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Websites Dedicated to Specific Authors
David Perdue's Charles Dickens Webpage Charles Dickens was born on Friday, February 7, 1812 at No. 1 Mile End Terrace, Landport, Portsmouth.
Complete Texts Online
Study Guides Online
Bulfinch's Mythology here is an online treatment of Thomas Bulfinch's classic guide to Mythology, covering god and heroes of ancient mythology, King Arthur, and the Middle Ages. Tales here are presented to be entertaining; an enticement to want to learn more. Largely text based for easy loading and printing, this site is ideal for advanced middle schoolers and beyond who want to immerse themselves in quality classic literature.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. When you were younger, did you ever make up stories about the people and places around your home? Maybe there was an abandoned house that in your imagination became haunted by ghosts, or an old neighbor woman that you envisioned as a witch. This fantasizing isn't very different from what many writers do when they transform their experiences into fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his invention of Middle-earth, has done this to a greater degree than most. The Hobbit and, even more so, The Lord of the Rings were the fruits of a lifetime's work, and Tolkien incorporated into them the landscape of his childhood, his interest in philology (the study of languages), his religious faith, his own vivid imagination, and his attitudes toward the world and the events happening around him.
Dracula by Bram Stoker.
Animal Farm 1929 by George Orwell. George Orwell was a quiet, decent Englishman who passionately hated two things: inequality and political lying. Out of his hatred of inequality came a desire for a society in which class privileges would not exist. This to him was "democratic socialism." His hatred of political lying and his support for socialism led him to denounce the political lie that what was going on in the Soviet Union had anything to do with socialism. As long as people equated the Soviet Union with socialism, he felt, no one could appreciate what democratic socialism might be like.
1984 1949 by George Orwell. Two days before he died, the author of 1984 left a will saying that he wanted no biography written. Like most novelists, he wanted his work judged for and by itself. This is ironic, since few novels reflect the author's progress through life- and the stormy political climate of his times- as clearly as George Orwell's 1984. Most Orwell scholars see the life as a logical "road to 1984." Knowing about Orwell's life, therefore, will help you know the novel.
FRANKENSTEIN by MARY SHELLEY.
Heart of Darkness 1902 by Joseph Conrad. Joseph Conrad didn't set out to become one of the great English novelists. He didn't set out to be a novelist at all, but a sailor, and besides, he wasn't English. English was his third language and he didn't begin learning it until after he was 20 years old!
THINGS FALL APART by CHINUA ACHEBE.
The Scarlet Letter 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was a brash, bustling, energetic country in which Hawthorne grew up and carved out his writing career. The covered wagons were rolling West, with signs that bravely declared "California or bust!" The first passenger railroad opened, and the trains went huffing and puffing along at the (then) incredible speed of 20 miles an hour. Jackson was elected president, throwing the conservative statesmen out of office and ushering in the age of democracy and the common man.
A Farewell to Arms 1929 by Ernest Hemingway. When Ernest Hemingway once gave some advice to his fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. If something in life hurts you, he said, you should use it in your writing. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway followed his own advice. The painful experiences of his own life that, consciously and unconsciously, he placed in this novel help make it a major artistic achievement.
The Red Badge of Courage 1895 by Stephen Crane. When The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895 (it first came out in installments in a Philadelphia newspaper at the end of 1894), the Civil War had been over for thirty years. In some ways Americans were forgetting the war. In the South, whites tried to undo some of the war's effects. By the 1890s many of the old Confederate leaders were back in power, and blacks had lost their right to vote, and couldn't go to school with whites. But in other ways Americans liked to remember the Civil War. In little towns in New England and the Middle West they built monuments to Civil War dead- something they had not done after the Revolution or the War of 1812. Stories about the war were tales of bravery and heroism. Its songs were stirring anthems like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. A graveyard nearly encircled the Haworth parsonage, where Emily Bronte lived for most of her thirty years. Emily's mother died in that parsonage in 1821, when the girl was three. Two years later, Emily and her three older sisters were sent to boarding school, where two of them, Maria and Elizabeth, succumbed to typhus and died. Other than such bare, depressing facts as these, we know very little about Emily Bronte's life.
Jane Eyre 1847 by Charlotte Bronte. Charlotte Bronte is one of those authors whose life has attracted as much attention as her writing. Charlotte and her family have been the subject of many books, a stage play, and a film by the French director Truffaut. For some people, interest in the Bronte family is almost on the level of a cult, and there are even organized tours to the places associated with the family's history.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884 by Mark Twain. In the final paragraph of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck says, "...so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd 'a' knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't 'a' tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more."
Tom Sawyer 1876 by Mark Twain. Mark Twain's life illustrates a point he makes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer- that there is no single, simple formula for success. A school dropout at eleven, he spent twenty years in a variety of jobs. He was a typesetter, but, by his own admission, not a very good one. He piloted riverboats, but the Civil War put him out of work. He tried soldiering- and deserted. He spent a disastrous year mining gold and silver.
IVANHOE by SIR WALTER SCOTT.
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME by Victor Hugo.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
A Tale of Two Cities 1859 by Charles Dickens. In his lifetime Charles Dickens achieved a popularity we associate nowadays with rock stars. His works were international best-sellers, and Dickens himself was in great demand: he excelled as a speaker, an actor-director of amateur theatricals, and a dramatic reader of his own fiction. At times Dickens' skill as a public performer threatened to overshadow his writing career. It was said that women fainted by the dozens on hearing his narration of the murder scene from Oliver Twist. On the whole he gloried in recognition and strove to be a crowd-pleaser. He wrote novels in monthly, even weekly installments, publishing them as newspaper serials. His goal was to satisfy the tastes and expectations of a mass audience.
David Copperfield 1850 by Charles Dickens. "I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World," Charles Dickens wrote in a letter just before he finished the final chapter of David Copperfield. Dickens, as a matter of course, became intensely involved with all his books while he was writing them. His daughter once recalled how her father would sit in his study, speaking the characters' speeches as he wrote them, making faces, giggling, or sighing with emotion. But in 1869, the year before he died, Dickens wrote that Copperfield was still his "favourite child." Why was he so attached to this novel, of all the masterpieces he had created?
Oliver Twist 1838 by Charles Dickens. Few writers are lucky enough to have their first novels become runaway bestsellers. Yet that is exactly what happened when 25-year-old Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist in 1837. Many readers already knew of young Dickens. As a journalist, he had written, under the pen name Boz, gripping newspaper accounts exposing social conditions in England. In another vein entirely, he had written a bestselling collection of humorous stories called The Pickwick Papers. His journalistic sketches showed descriptive power and the ability to influence people's political ideas; The Pickwick Papers showed how he could create marvelous characters and sustain lively comic scenes. But with Oliver Twist, Dickens surprised everyone by revealing yet another talent- for spinning a rich, suspenseful web of plot.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Pride and Prejudice 1813 by Jane Austen. Jane Austen was a country parson's daughter who lived most of her life in a tiny English village. She began writing her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, when she was still in her late teens. When she wrote the original version of her second and most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice (originally entitled First Impressions), she was not yet twenty-one. At that time she had never been away from home, except for a few years at a girls' boarding school before the age of ten. And yet, although she had seen almost nothing of the world beyond Steventon, the town where she grew up, she was able to write a witty, worldly novel of love, money, and marriage.
The Good Earth 1931 by Pearl Buck. Her house was a mud-walled Chinese farmhouse, her neighbors were Chinese farm families, and the only language she heard spoken was the slow, deep-voiced Chinese dialect of the eastern province of Anhwei not far from Shanghai and Nanking. That was where Pearl S. Buck spent the first four years of her marriage to the agricultural specialist John Lossing Buck.
Sounder by W. H. ARMSTRONG.
Shane by JACK SCHAEFER.
Lord of the Flies 1955 by William Golding. William Golding was born in 1911 and grew up in the years before World War II. That war changed thinking about man's essential nature. Before the war people generally believed that man was essentially good-hearted and society often was evil. However, the atrocities of the war made it impossible for many people to believe any longer in man's basic innocence. You can see the influence of this shift in thinking in Golding's works.
The Pearl 1947 by John Steinbeck. Have you ever wondered where an author gets his ideas or inspiration? In 1940, John Steinbeck and a good friend, Ed Ricketts, set out on a sailing trip that would later be described in Steinbeck's non-fiction work The Sea of Cortez. During the trip, Steinbeck heard a legend about the misfortunes of a poor fisherboy who had found a great pearl. Inspired by the legend, Steinbeck published The Pearl in a magazine in 1945 under the title "The Pearl of the World." The story was so successful that in 1947 it was published as a book and adapted as a film.
Fahrenheit 451 by RAY BRADBURY.
To Kill a Mockingbird 1960 by Joyce Milton. When To Kill a Mockingbird was first published in 1960, interviewers who met the author often felt as if they were coming face to face with a grownup version of Scout Finch, the six-year-old heroine of the novel. Although she was almost thirty-five years old, Harper Lee was a youthful looking woman with angular features and a casual, short-cropped hairstyle that marked her as a former tomboy.
THE GREAT GATSBY 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald. Have you ever felt that there were two of you battling for control of the person you call yourself? Have you ever felt that you weren't quite sure which one you wanted to be in charge? All of us have at least two selves: one who wants to work hard, get good grades, and be successful; and one who would rather lie in the sun and listen to music and daydream. To understand F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man and the writer, you must begin with the idea of doubleness, or twoness.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1929 by John Steinbeck. He didn't know it at the time, but John Steinbeck started getting ready to write The Grapes of Wrath when he was a small boy in California. Much of what he saw and heard while growing up found its way into the novel. On weekends his father took John and his three sisters on long drives out into the broad and beautiful valleys south of Salinas, the town where John was born in 1902. John passed vast orchards, and endless fields green with lettuce and barley. He observed the workers and the run-down shacks in which they lived. And he saw, even before he was old enough to wear long pants, that the farmhands' lives differed from his own.
Slaughterhouse-Five 1969 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In 1968, the year Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was writing Slaughterhouse-Five, the war in Vietnam was at its height. Each evening it invaded millions of American living rooms on the television news, and what viewers saw of the conflict night after night made them worried and uneasy about what was taking place. Opinion polls showed that most Americans were then in favor of the war, but a wave of antiwar protest had welled up across the country, mainly on college campuses. Peaceful demonstrations gave way to riots as hostility deepened between prowar and antiwar factions.
Invisible Man 1952 by Anthony S. Abbott.In 1952 a first novel by a virtually unknown black American named Ralph Waldo Ellison was published. Reviews of the novel were ecstatic, and in 1953 Ellison's Invisible Man won a prestigious National Book Award for Fiction. Suddenly the author was in great demand for interviews and lectures, and he found himself being compared not only with black writers like Richard Wright, but also with Herman Melville and Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Invisible Man was a phenomenon. In 1965 the phenomenon took on even greater proportions when a group of some 200 authors, critics, and editors named Invisible Man the most distinguished American novel of the previous twenty years.
ROBINSON CRUSOE by DANIEL DEFOE.
