Synopses & Reviews
From
A Christmas Carol and
Peter Pan to
Little Women and
The Three Musketeers, the best of childrens fiction and poetry in enduring hardcover editions with colorful cloth sewn bindings and charming illustrationsmany in full color.
This set includes one each of the following titles:
A Apple Pie and Traditional Nursery Rhymes Illustrated by Kate Greenaway
The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn Green
Aladdin and Other Tales from the Arabian Nights Illustrated by W. Heath Robinson
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear
A Childs Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster
Don Quixote of the Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes
English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs
The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children
Everyman Book of Nonsense Verse
Fables by Aeseop
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm
Jack the Giant Killer by Richard Doyle
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green
The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter
Little Red Riding Hood and Other Stories by Charles Perrault
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Mother Gooses Nursery Rhymes
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
Ride a Cock-horse and Other Rhymes and Stories Illustrated by Randolph Caldecott
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Russian Fairy Tales by Gillian Avery
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
The Secret Garden by Frances H. Burnett
Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sleeping Beauty by C. S. Evans
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Everymans Library continues to 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.
Synopsis
Dumas' most popular novel, The Three Musketeers, has long been a favorite with children, and its heroes are well-known from many a film and TV adaptation. Set in France in the seventeenth century, it follows the fortunes of d'Artagnan, a poor Gascon gentleman, who arrives in Paris to join the King's Musketeers and is befriended by three of them, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, with whom he embarks on a career of adventure and romance. Dumas is a brilliant story-teller: inexhaustibly inventive, a master of dialogue, and with a free sense of drama and of historical period, he seizes the reader's attention on the first page and holds it to the last. Everyman's Library reprints the first, and the best, English translation, by William Barrow.
Synopsis
Dumas's most popular novel has long been a favorite with children, and its swashbuckling heroes are well known from many a film and TV adaptation. Set in 17th-century France, this tale of the adventures of D'Artagnan and the three musketeers is the finest example of its author's brilliantly inventive storytelling genius.
Synopsis
It's "one for all and all for one!" as D'Artagnan and his three pals follow a course of swashbuckling intrigue and adventure in 17th-centry France.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Synopsis
It's "one for all and all for one!" as D'Artagnan and his three pals follow a course of swashbuckling intrigue and adventure in 17th-centry France.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Synopsis
This collection of beautiful, enduring hardcover editions features enchanting stories of swashbuckling heroes, noble knights, and sinister pirates, all from Everymans Library Childrens Classics. With colorful cloth sewn bindings, charming full-color illustrations, elegant gold stamped covers, and silk ribbon markers, these are books that children and adults will cherish for years.
Titles included:
The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn Green
King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
About the Author
Alexandre Dumas, who lived a life as dramatic as any depicted in his more than three hundred volumes of plays, novels, travel books, and memoirs, was born on July 24, 1802, in the town of Villers-Cotterêts, some fifty miles from Paris. He was the third child of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (who took the name of Dumas), a nobleman who distinguished himself as one of Napoleon's most brilliant generals, and Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret. Following General Dumas's death in 1806 the family faced precarious financial circumstances, yet Mme. Dumas scrimped to pay for her son's private schooling. Unfortunately he proved an indifferent student who excelled in but one subject: penmanship. In 1816, at the age of fourteen, Dumas found employment as a clerk with a local notary to help support the family. A growing interest in theater brought him to Paris in 1822, where he met François-Joseph Talma, the great French tragedian, and resolved to become a playwright. Meanwhile the passionate Dumas fell in love with Catherine Labay, a seamstress by whom he had a son. (Though he had numerous mistresses in his lifetime Dumas married only once, but the union did not last.) While working as a scribe for the duc d'Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe) Dumas collaborated on a one-act vaudeville,
La Chasse et l'amour ( The Chase and Love, 1825). But it was not until 1827, after attending a British performance of
Hamlet, that Dumas discovered a direction for his dramas. 'For the first time in the theater I was seeing true passions motivating men and women of flesh and blood,' he recalled. 'From this time on, but only then, did I have an idea of what the theater could be.'
Dumas achieved instant fame on February 11, 1829, with the triumphant opening of Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court). An innovative and influential play generally regarded as the first French drama of the Romantic movement, it broke with the staid precepts of Neoclassicism that had been imposed on the Paris stage for more than a century. Briefly involved as a republican partisan in the July Revolution of 1830, Dumas soon resumed playwriting and over the next decade turned out a number of historical melodramas that electrified audiences. Two of these works—Antony (1831) and La Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle, 1832)—stand out as milestones in the history of nineteenth-century French theater. In disfavor with the new monarch, Louis-Philippe, because of his republican sympathies, Dumas left France for a time. In 1832 he set out on a tour of Switzerland, chronicling his adventures in Impressions de voyage: En Suisse ( Travels in Switzerland, 1834-1837); over the years he produced many travelogues about subsequent journeys through France, Italy, Russia, and other countries.
Around 1840 Dumas embarked upon a series of historical romances inspired by both his love of French history and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. In collaboration with Auguste Maquet, he serialized Le Chevalier d'Harmental in the newspaper Le Siècle in 1842. Part history, intrigue, adventure, and romance, it is widely regarded as the first of Dumas's great novels. The two subsequently worked together on a steady stream of books, most of which were published serially in Parisian tabloids and eagerly read by the public. He is best known for the celebrated d'Artagnan trilogy—Les trois mousquetaires ( The Three Musketeers, 1844), Vingt ans après (Twenty Years After, 1845) and Dix ans plus tarde ou le Vicomte de Bragelonne ( Ten Years Later; or The Viscount of Bragelonne, 1848-1850)—and the so-called Valois romances—La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1845), La Dame de Monsoreau ( The Lady of Monsoreau, 1846), and Les Quarante-cinc ( The Forty-Five Guardsmen, 1848). Yet perhaps his greatest success was Le Comte de Monte Cristo ( The Count of Monte Cristo), which appeared in installments in Le Journal des debats from 1844 to 1845. A final tetralogy marked the end of their partnership: Mmoires d'un medecin: Joseph Balsamo ( Memoirs of a Physician, 1846-1848), Le Collier de la reine ( The Queen's Necklace, 1849-1850), Ange Pitou ( Taking the Bastille, 1853), and La Comtesse de Charny ( The Countess de Charny, 1852-1855).
In 1847, at the height of his fame, Dumas assumed the role of impresario. Hoping to reap huge profits, he inaugurated the new Theatre Historique as a vehicle for staging dramatizations of his historical novels. The same year he completed construction of a lavish residence in the quiet hamlet of Marly-le-Roi. Called Le Château de Monte Cristo, it was home to a menagerie of exotic pets and a parade of freeloaders until 1850, when Dumas's theater failed and he faced bankruptcy. Fleeing temporarily to Belgium in order to avoid creditors, Dumas returned to Paris in 1853, shortly after the appearance of the initial volumes of Mes Memoires ( My Memoirs, 1852). Over the next years he founded the newspaper Le Mousquetaire, for which he wrote much of the copy, as well as the literary weekly Le Monte Cristo, but his finances never recovered. In 1858 he traveled to Russia, eventually publishing two new episodes of Impressions de voyage: Le Caucase (Adventures in the Caucasus, 1859) and En Russie (Travels in Russia, 1865).
The final decade of Dumas's life began with customary high adventure. In 1860 he met Garibaldi and was swept up into the cause of Italian independence. After four years in Naples publishing the bilingual paper L'Independant/L'Indipendente, Dumas returned to Paris in 1864. In 1867 he began a flamboyant liaison with Ada Menken, a young American actress who dubbed him 'the king of romance.' The same year marked the appearance of a last novel, La Terreur Prussiene (The Prussian Terror). Dumas's final play, Les Blancs et les Bleus (The Whites and the Blues), opened in Paris in 1869.
Alexandre Dumas died penniless but cheerful on December 5, 1870, saying of death: 'I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me.' One hundred years later his biographer Andre Maurois paid him this tribute: 'Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As strong as Porthos, as adroit as d'Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantes, this superb giant strode across the nineteenth century breaking down doors with his shoulder, sweeping women away in his arms, and earning fortunes only to squander them promptly in dissipation. For forty years he filled the newspapers with his prose, the stage with his dramas, the world with his clamor. Never did he know a moment of doubt or an instant of despair. He turned his own existence into the finest of his novels.'