A legendary bestseller for more than forty years, The Norton Anthology of English Literature is the classic survey to the field from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. With more than ninety authors, the Major Authors Edition deepens its representation of essential works in all genres, ranging from Seamus Heaney's award-winning translation of Beowulf and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to the greats of the nineteenth century—Blake and Wordsworth, Tennyson and Barrett Browning—to twentieth-century classics of a truly global English literature—Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, poetry by Derek Walcott, and prose by Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie, to name but a few. Color plates—over seventy-five in all—bring to life the cultural concerns of each period. Concise glosses and annotations, period introductions, biographical headnotes, timelines, and selected bibliographies help readers understand and enjoy the rich diversity of English literature.