A Tale of Two Cities

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This set includes one each of the following titles:

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Analects by Confucius

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy

The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Histories by Herodotus

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The Iliad by Homer

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The Odyssey by Homer

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

The Republic by Plato

Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Ulysses by James Joyce

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo

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A Tale Of Two Cities ends in the Paris of the French Revolution with one of the most famous acts of self-sacrifice in literature, and it begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama.

This collection from Everymans Library provides the greatest works from one of the literary worlds most legendary authors. Each of Charles Dickenss masterpieces is filled with compellingly and masterfully written prose, an adept understanding of human nature, and some of literatures most iconic characters. These beautiful, clothbound classics are essentials for any home library.

Titles included:

Bleak House

A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books

David Copperfield

Great Expectations

Oliver Twist

A Tale of Two Cities

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)A Tale of Two Cities begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama, and it ends in the Paris of the French Revolution with one of the most famous acts of self-sacrifice in literature. In between lies one of Charles Dickenss most exciting books- a historical novel that, generation after generation, has given readers access to the profound human dramas that lie behind cataclysmic social and political events. Famous for the character of Sydney Carton, who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine-“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”-the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, and is illuminated by Dickenss lively comedy.This edition reprints the original Everyman introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes sixteen illustrations by Phiz.

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He received some education at a small private school but this was curtailed when his father's fortunes declined. More significant was his childhood reading, which he evoked in a memory of his father's library: 'From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time.'

When Dickens was ten the family moved to Camden Town, and this proved the beginning of a long, difficult period. (He wrote later of his coach journey, alone, to join his family at the new lodgings: 'I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.') When he had just turned twelve Dickens was sent to work for a manufacturer of boot blacking, where for the better part of a year he labored for ten hours a day, an unhappy experience that instilled him with a sense of having been abandoned by his family: 'No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!' Around the same time Dickens's father was jailed for debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he remained for fourteen weeks. After some additional schooling, Dickens worked as a clerk in a law office and taught himself shorthand; this qualified him to begin working in 1831 as a reporter in the House of Commons, where he was known for the speed with which he took down speeches.

By 1833 Dickens was publishing humorous sketches of London life in the Monthly Magazine, which were collected in book form as Sketches by 'Boz' (1836). These were followed by the publication in installments of the comic adventures that became The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), whose unprecedented popularity made the twenty-five-year-old author a national figure. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who would bear him ten children over a period of fifteen years. Dickens's energies enabled him to lead an active family and social life, including an indulgence in elaborate amateur theatricals, while maintaining a literary productiveness of astonishing proportions. He characteristically wrote his novels for serial publication, and was himself the editor of many of the periodicals--Bentley's Miscellany, The Daily News, Household Words, All the Year Round--in which they appeared. Among his close associates were his future biographer John Forster and the younger Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on fictional and dramatic works. In rapid succession he published Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and Barnaby Rudge (1841), sometimes working on several novels simultaneously.

Dickens's celebrity led to a tour of the United States in 1842. There he met Longfellow, Irving, Bryant, and other literary figures, and was received with an enthusiasm that was dimmed somewhat by the criticisms Dickens expressed in his American Notes (1842) and in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). The appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 sealed his position as the most widely popular writer of his time; it became an annual tradition for him to write a story for the season, among the most memorable of which were The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845). He continued to produce novels at only a slightly diminished rate, publishing Dombey and Son in 1848 and David Copperfield in 1850; of the latter, his personal favorite among his books, he wrote to Forster: 'If I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.'

From this point on his novels tended to be more elaborately constructed and harsher and less buoyant in tone than his earlier works. These late novels include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, was his last completed novel, and perhaps the most somber and savage of them all. Dickens had separated from his wife in 1858--he had become involved a year earlier with a young actress named Ellen Ternan--and the ensuing scandal had alienated him from many of his former associates and admirers. He was weakened by years of overwork and by a near-fatal railroad disaster during the writing of Our Mutual Friend. Nevertheless he embarked on a series of public readings, including a return visit to America in 1867, which further eroded his health. A final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a crime novel much influenced by Wilkie Collins, was left unfinished upon his death on June 9, 1870, at the age of 58.

From the Hardcover edition.