Books in Classics You Should Know series

...Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.""The Raven" is a classic narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk, mythological, religious, and classical references.Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically, intending to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explained in his 1846 follow-up essay, "The Philosophy of Composition". The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty by Charles Dickens. Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and makes use of internal rhyme as well as alliteration throughout."The Raven" was first attributed to Poe in print in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. Its publication made Poe widely popular in his lifetime, although it did not bring him much financial success. The poem was soon reprinted, parodied, and illustrated. Critical opinion is divided as to the poem's literary status, but it nevertheless remains one of the most famous poems ever written.About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Where Have Your Old Toys Gone? They May Have Become Real...The Velveteen Rabbit is not a 'real' rabbit, like the rabbits he meets in the forest. He has seams and is full of stuffing. Still, the Velveteen Rabbit doesn't mind as long as the boy who owns him loves him. One of the rabbit's friends tells him that a toy becomes real if its owner truly loves it. But when the boy leaves home to recover from an illness and is forced to leave his Velveteen Rabbit behind, what will become of his beloved toy? The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) is a children's book written by Margery Williams (also known as Margery Williams Bianco) and illustrated by William Nicholson. It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit and his desire to become real, through the love of his owner. The book was first published in 1922 and has been republished many times since.The Velveteen Rabbit was Williams' first children's book. It has been awarded the IRA/CBC Children's Choice award. Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the book one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children."Margery Williams Bianco (July 22, 1881 in London, England – September 4, 1944 in New York City) was an English-American author, primarily of popular children's books. A professional writer since the age of nineteen, she achieved lasting fame at forty-one with the 1922 publication of the classic that is her best-known work, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922).Sir William Newzam Prior Nicholson (5 February 1872 – 16 May 1949) was an English painter of still-life, landscape and portraits, also known for his work as a wood-engraver, illustrator, author of children's booksand designer for the theatre.

Before Women Had Rights, They Worked - Regardless.Life in the Iron Mills is a short story (or novella) written by Rebecca Harding Davis in 1861, set in the factory world of the nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest American realist works, and is an important text for those who study labor and women's issues. It was immediately recognized as an innovative work, and introduced American readers to "the bleak lives of industrial workers in the mills and factories of the nation."Reviews: Life in the Iron Mills was initially published in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 0007, Issue 42 in April 1861. After being published anonymously, both Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne praised the work. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was also greatly influenced by Davis's Life in the Iron Mills and in 1868 published in The Atlantic Monthly"The Tenth of January," based on the 1860 fire at the Pemberton Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts.About the Author: Rebecca Harding Davis (June 24, 1831–September 29, 1910; born Rebecca Blaine Harding) was considered one of the nation's first social historians and pioneering literary artists. Throughout her lifetime, Harding Davis sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.Throughout her long career, Davis challenged traditional subjects and older styles of writing. Her family lived briefly in Big Springs, Alabama, before moving in 1837 to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), on the Ohio River. Its iron mills and immigrant populations inspired the setting of Life in the Iron Mills.

If You Could Talk To The Animals in Your Life, What Would They Tell You?The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts (1920), written and illustrated by Hugh Lofting, is the first of his Doctor Dolittle books, a series of children's novels about a man who learns to talk to animals and becomes their champion around the world.Doctor John Dolittle is a doctor who shuns human patients in favour of animals, with whom he can speak in their own languages. He later becomes a naturalist, using his abilities to speak with animals to better understand nature and the history of the world.The character Doctor Dolittle first appeared in the author's illustrated letters to children, written from the trenches during World War I when actual news, he later said, was either too horrible or too dull. The stories are set in early Victorian England, where Doctor John Dolittle lives in the fictional English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in the West Country.Dolittle has a few close human friends, including Tommy Stubbins and Matthew Mugg, the Cats'-Meat Man. The animal team includes Polynesia (a parrot), Gub-Gub (a pig), Jip (a dog), Dab-Dab (a duck), Chee-Chee (a monkey),Too-Too (an owl), the Pushmi-pullyu, and a White Mouse later named simply "Whitey".The original edition of the book included language and plot elements that are considered racist by present-day standards, though probably not intended as malicious by the writer. Some consider that his Black African characters are clearly intended by the writer to be sympathetic, that our modern views tend to assign more meaning where perhaps none was intended.About the Author: Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was a British author, trained as a civil engineer, who created the character of Doctor Dolittle, one of the classics of children's literature.He traveled widely as a civil engineer, before enlisting in the Irish Guards regiment of the British Army to serve in the First World War. Not wishing to write to his children about the brutality of the war, he wrote imaginative letters which later became the foundation of the successful Doctor Dolittle novels for children. Seriously wounded in the war, in 1919 Lofting moved with his family to Killingworth, Connecticut, in the US. He was married three times and had three children, one of whom, his son Christopher, is the executor of his literary estate.

Is There Meaning To Life? "The Madman: His Parables and Poems" is an early collection of English poems written by Lebanese American author Kahlil Gibran. This volume includes the following poems: God, My Friend, The Scarecrow, The Sleep-Walkers, The Wise Dog, The Two Hermits, On Giving and Taking, The Seven Selves, War, The Fox, The Wise King, Ambition, The New Pleasure, The Other Language, The Pomegranate, The Two Cages, The Three Ants, The Grave-Digger, On the Steps of the Temple, The Blessed City, The Good God and the Evil God, Defeat, Night and the Madman, Faces, The Greater Sea, Crucified, The Astronomer, The Great Longing, Said a Blade of Grass, The Eye, The Two Learned Men, When My Sorrow Was Born, And When My Joy Was Born, and 'The Perfect World'. ". . . the greatest of Arab Romantics and father of a 20th-century Romantic tradition whose impact on Arab writers has been at least as strong as that of 19th-century figures such as Wordsworth and Keats on their English-speaking counterparts." - Dr. Suheil Bushrui, Director of the Kahlil Gibran Chair on Values and Peace, University of MarylandAbout the Author Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese artist, poet, and author. Born in Bsharri, Lebanon, Gibran immigrated with his parents to Boston in 1895 before settling in New York City where he studied art and began his literary career, writing in both English and Arabic. His best-known work is The Prophet, published in 1923, which has become one of the best-selling books of all time. Like the majority of Gibran s works, The Prophet dealt with spiritual love and religion. Gibran passed away in 1931.

It Was Going to Be The Perfect Wedding - Until He Showed Up...The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s New York society, it never develops into an outright condemnation of the institution.The novel is noted for Wharton's attention to detail and its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, and the social tragedy of its plot. Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she had lived in that world and had seen it change dramatically by the end of World War I.The title is an ironic comment on the polished outward manners of New York society when compared to its inward machinations. It is believed to have been drawn from the popular 1785 painting A Little Girl by Sir Joshua Reynolds that later became known as The Age of Innocence and was widely reproduced as the commercial face of childhood in the later half of the 18th century. The title, while ironic, was not as caustic as the title of story featured in the The House of Mirth, published in 1905.The Age of Innocence was a softer and more gentle work than The House of Mirth, set in the time of her childhood. Wharton wrote, "I found a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914." Scholars and readers alike agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new. Wharton was raised in that old world of rigid and proper New York society which features in the story. She spent her middle years, including the first World War in Europe where the devastation of new mechanized warfare was felt most deeply.As explained by Millicent Bell in the Cambridge companion to Wharton, “The Age of Innocence was composed and first read in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s death and in the immediate wake of World War I. We frame the ending remembering the multiple losses… not only the loss of Roosevelt but the destruction of the prewar world and all that Wharton valued in it." With the first World War, a definitive line was crossed. There would be no return to the New York of old from which Wharton was raised. And for all that can be condemned in that, there is a certain tenderness with which she crafts the world, "as if she had forgotten nothing." This intones the title word innocence, as the novel seems to connect personal innocence with that of national innocence. To Robert Martin, The Age of Innocence, was "fundamentally about America and its failure to fulfill its own possibilities".The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee agreed to award the prize to Sinclair Lewis, the judges rejected his Main Street, on political grounds and "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'", the irony being that the committee had awarded The Age of Innocence the prize on grounds that negated Wharton's own blatant and subtle ironies which constitute and make the book so worthy of attention. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s, during the Gilded Age. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she had established herself as a strong author with publishers clamoring for her work. (Wikipedia)Get Your Copy Now.

Stranded at Sea With Three Others - Survivor"The Open Boat" is a short story by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). First published in 1897, it was based on Crane's experience of surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida earlier that year while traveling to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent.Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar. He and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat; one of the men, an oiler named Billie Higgins, drowned after the boat overturned.Crane's personal account of the shipwreck and the men's survival, titled "Stephen Crane's Own Story", was first published a few days after his rescue.Crane subsequently adapted his report into narrative form, and the resulting short story "The Open Boat" was published in Scribner's Magazine. The story is told from the point of view of an anonymous correspondent, with Crane as the implied author, the action closely resembles the author's experiences after the shipwreck.A volume titled The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure was published in the United States in 1898; an edition entitled The Open Boat and Other Stories was published simultaneously in England.Praised for its innovation by contemporary critics, the story is considered an exemplary work of literary Naturalism, and is one of the most frequently discussed works in Crane's canon. It is notable for its use of imagery, irony, symbolism, and the exploration of such themes as survival, solidarity, and the conflict between man and nature. H. G. Wells considered "The Open Boat" to be "beyond all question, the crown of all [Crane's] work".About the Author: American author Stephen Crane began writing early in life, and was already a published author by the age of sixteen.Among Crane s best known works are Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which is considered to be the first literary work in the early American tradition of Naturalism, a literary movement marked by detailed realism and the acknowledgement of social conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and The Red Badge of Courage, which was influenced by his own experiences in military school and personal contact with Civil-War veterans.Crane died in 1900 at the age twenty-eight of tuberculosis, but had a significant and lasting impact on twentieth-century literature, influencing early modernist writers such as Ernest Hemingway.

Jane Austen's Fairy Tale that Lampoons Romantic Conventions.Love and Freindship [sic] is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790. From the age of eleven until she was eighteen, Jane Austen wrote her tales in three notebooks. The notebooks still exist – one in the Bodleian Library; the other two in the British Museum. They include among others Love and Freindship, written when Jane was fourteen, and The History of England, when she was fifteen.Written in epistolary form, like her later unpublished novella, Lady Susan, Love and Freindship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family; it was dedicated to her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, "La Comtesse de Feuillide". The instalments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend Isabel, may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Freindship (the misspelling is one of many in the story) is clearly a parody of romantic novels Austen read as a child. This is clear even from the subtitle, "Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love", which completely undercuts the title.In form, it resembles a fairy tale as much as anything else, featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, right down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters.In this story one can see the development of Austen's sharp wit and disdain for romantic sensibility, so characteristic of her later novels.About the author: Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known principally for her five major novels which interpret, critique and comment upon the life of the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Her most highly praised novel during her own lifetime was Pride and Prejudice which was her second published novel. Her plots often reflect upon the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favorable social standing and economic security.

What Is It About Wild Nature That Brings Out Our Best?Walking, or sometimes referred to as "The Wild", is a lecture by Henry David Thoreau first delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. Written between 1851 and 1860. Thoreau read the piece a total of ten times, more than any other of his lectures. "Walking" was first published as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly after his death in 1862. He considered it one of his seminal works, so much so, that he once wrote of the lecture, "I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter." Thoreau constantly reworked and revised the piece throughout the 1850s, calling the essay Walking.This is a Transcendental essay in which Thoreau talks about the importance of nature to mankind, and how people cannot survive without nature, physically, mentally, and spiritually, yet we seem to be spending more and more time entrenched by society. For Thoreau walking is a self-reflective spiritual act that occurs only when you are away from society, that allows you to learn about who you are, and find other aspects of yourself that have been chipped away by society."Walking" is an important cannon in the transcendental movement that would lay the foundation for his best known work, Walden. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, and George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, it has become one of the most important essays in the environmental movement.Originally given as part of a lecture in 1851, "Walking" was later published posthumously as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. Now being a chief text in the environmental movement, Thoreau's "Walking" places man not separate from Nature and Wildness but within it and lyrically describes the ever beckoning call that draws us to explore and find ourselves lost in the beauty of the forests, rivers, and fields.About the AuthorHenry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, and philosopher, who is best known for his works Walden, a treatise about living in concert with the natural world, and Civil Disobedience, in which he espoused the need to morally resist the actions of an unjust state. Thoreau s work heavily reflects the ideologies of the American transcendentalists, and he has long been considered a leading figure in the movement along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and, at first, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who changed his views later in life). In addition to his writing, which totaled more than twenty volumes, Thoreau was an active abolitionist, and lectured regularly against the Fugitive Slave Law. Thoreau died in 1862, and is buried along with Louisa May Alcott, Ellery Channing, and other notable Americans in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.