50 Classic Books to Read Before You Die

by Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, Ayn Rand, Golgotha Press (Editor)

Overview

If there's one anthology you finish before you die, make it this one! From novels to epics and romances to humor, there's something for everyone here. The following works are included in this massive anthology:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
At the Back of the North Wind
The Beast in the Jungle
The Call of the Wild
The First Men In The Moon
The Jungle
Kidnapped
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Lord Jim
The Man Who Was Thursday
The Prince
The Sea-Hawk
Sense and Sensibility
Wuthering Heights
At the Mountains of Madness
Anthem
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Ethan Frome
Heart of Darkness
Metamorphosis
The Red Badge of Courage
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Afterglow
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Anne of Green Gables
Around the World in Eighty Days
Babbitt
The Beautiful and Damned

Captain Blood
Crime and Punishment
Emma
Far From the Madding Crowd
Frankenstein
Howards End
The Invisible Man
The Jungle Book
The Last of the Mohicans
Les Miserables
Main Street
My Man Jeeves
The Phantom of the Opera
Pride and Prejudice
The Rainbow
A Room with a View
The Scarlet Letter
Silas Marner
The Warden

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014030267
Publisher:	Golgotha Press
Publication date:	01/25/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri; his family moved to the port town of Hannibal four years later. His father, an unsuccessful farmer, died when Twain was eleven. Soon afterward the boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was writing newspaper sketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to licensed pilot.

After river shipping was interrupted by the Civil War, Twain headed west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. Settling in Carson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote humorous pieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first began using the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a riverboat term. Relocating to San Francisco, he became a regular newspaper correspondent and a contributor to the literary magazine the Golden Era. He made a five-month journey to Hawaii in 1866 and the following year traveled to Europe to report on the first organized tourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation as humorist and lecturer.

After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartford, Connecticut. His European sketches were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It (1872), an account of his Western adventures; both were enormously successful. Twain's literary triumphs were offset by often ill-advised business dealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failed attempt to develop a new kind of typesetting machine, and thousands more into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) and unrestrained spending that left him in frequent financial difficulty, a pattern that was to persist throughout his life.

Following The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, Twain began a literary exploration of his childhood memories of the Mississippi, resulting in a trio of masterpieces --The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), on which he had been working for nearly a decade. Another vein, of historical romance, found expression in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), the satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), while he continued to draw on his travel experiences in A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897). His close associates in these years included William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and George Washington Cable, as well as the dying Ulysses S. Grant, whom Twain encouraged to complete his memoirs, published by Twain's publishing company in 1885.

For most of the 1890s Twain lived in Europe, as his life took a darker turn with the death of his daughter Susy in 1896 and the worsening illness of his daughter Jean. The tone of Twain's writing also turned progressively more bitter. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a detective story hinging on the consequences of slavery, was followed by powerful anti-imperialist and anticolonial statements such as 'To the Person Sitting in Darkness' (1901), 'The War Prayer' (1905), and 'King Leopold's Soliloquy' (1905), and by the pessimistic sketches collected in the privately published What Is Man? (1906). The unfinished novel The Mysterious Stranger was perhaps the most uncompromisingly dark of all Twain's later works. In his last years, his financial troubles finally resolved, Twain settled near Redding, Connecticut, and died in his mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.

Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.

Date of Birth:

November 30, 1835

Date of Death:

April 21, 1910

Place of Birth:

Florida, Missouri

Place of Death:

Redding, Connecticut