The Everymans Library 100 Essentials brings together a selection of 100 of the bestselling titles from the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the worlds greatest works. An enduring hardcover library of classic and contemporary works from literature to history to philosophy, Everymans Library editions feature original introductions, up-to-date bibliographies, and complete chronologies of the authors lives and works.
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
Everymans Library continuesto maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.
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.
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.