The 7 best classic literature for 2022
Finding the best classic literature suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Best classic literature
1. To Kill a Mockingbird
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Harper PerennialDescription
Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read
Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep Southand the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred
One of themost cherishedstories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her fathera crusading local lawyerrisks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
2. The Catcher in the Rye
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The Catcher in the RyeJ.D. Salinger
First Little, Brown and Company mass market paperback edition
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Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories, particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme--With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children.The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.
There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices--but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
3. It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics)
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It Can t Happen HereDescription
The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trumps authoritarian appeal.SalonIt Cant Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewiss later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitlers aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
Called a message to thinking Americans by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Cant Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as todays news.
With an Introduction by Michael Meyer
and an Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst
4. Little Black Classics Box Set (Penguin Little Black Classics)
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Penguin BooksDescription
A stunning collection of all 80 exquisite Little Black Classics from PenguinThis spectacular box set of the 80 books in the Little Black Classics series showcases the many wonderful and varied writers in Penguin Black Classics. From India to Greece, Denmark to Iran, the United States to Britain, this assortment of books will transport readers back in time to the furthest corners of the globe. With a choice of fiction, poetry, essays and maxims, by the likes of Chekhov, Balzac, Ovid, Austen, Sappho and Dante, it won't be difficult to find a book to suit your mood. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of the Penguin Classics list - from drama to poetry, from fiction to history, with books taken from around the world and across numerous centuries.
The Little Black Classics Box Set includes:
The Atheist's Mass (Honor de Balzac)
The Beautifull Cassandra (Jane Austen)
The Communist Manifesto (Fredrich Engels and Karl Marx)
Cruel Alexis (Virgil)
The Dhammapada (Anon)
The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon (Aesop)
The Eve of St Agnes (John Keats)
The Fall of Icarus (Ovid)
The Figure in the Carpet (Henry James)
The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows (Rudyard Kipling)
Gooseberries (Anton Chekhov)
The Great Fire of London (Samuel Pepys)
The Great Winglebury Duel (Charles Dickens)
How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher's Dog (Johann Peter Hebel)
How Much Land Does A Man Need? (Leo Tolstoy)
How To Use Your Enemies (Baltasar Gracin)
How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing (Michel de Montaigne)
I Hate and I Love (Catullus)
Il Duro (D. H. Lawrence)
It was snowing butterflies (Charles Darwin)
Jason and Medea (Apollonius of Rhodes)
Kasyan from the Beautiful Mountains (Ivan Turgenev)
Leonardo da Vinci (Giorgio Vasari)
The Life of a Stupid Man (Ryunosuke Akutagawa)
Lips Too Chilled (Matsuo Basho)
Lord Arthur Saviles Crime (Oscar Wilde)
The Madness of Cambyses (Herodotus
The Maldive Shark (Herman Melville)
The Meek One (Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mrs Rosie and the Priest (Giovanni Boccaccio)
My Dearest Father (Wolfgang Mozart)
The Night is Darkening Round Me (Emily Bront)
The nightingales are drunk (Hafez)
The Nose (Nikolay Gogol)
Olalla (Robert Louis Stevenson)
The Old Man in the Moon (Shen Fu), Miss Brill (Katherine Mansfield)
The Old Nure's Story (Elizabeth Gaskell)
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (Thomas De Quincey)
On the Beach at Night Alone (Walt Whitman)
The Reckoning (Edith Wharton)
Remember, Body (C. P. Cavafy)
The Robber Bridegroom (Brothers Grimm)
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (Anon)
Sindbad the Sailor
Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Socrates' Defence (Plato)
Speaking of Siva (Anon)
The Steel Flea (Nikolai Leskov)
The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allan Poe)
The Terrors of the Night (Thomas Nashe)
The Tinder Box (Hans Christian Andersen)
Three Tang Dynasty Poets (Wang Wei)
Trimalchio's Feast (Petronius)
To-morrow (Joseph Conrad), Of Street Piemen (Henry Mayhew)
Traffic (John Ruskin)
Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls (Marco Polo)
The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe (Richard Hakluyt)
The Wife of Bath (Geoffrey Chaucer)
The Woman Much Missed (Thomas Hardy)
The Yellow Wall-paper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
Wailing Ghosts (Pu Songling)
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
5. Fahrenheit 451
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Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.249 pages. Paperback.
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Ray Bradburys internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television family. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didnt live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
6. Pride and Prejudice
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Penguin BooksDescription
Austen's most popular novel, the unforgettable story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.Nominated as one of Americas best-loved novels by PBSs The Great American ReadFew have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austens beloved classicPride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows us the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life. This Penguin Classics edition, based on Austen's first edition, contains the original Penguin Classics introduction by Tony Tanner and an updated introduction and notes by Viven Jones.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
7. Of Mice and Men
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Great product!Description
A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great DepressionThey are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.
Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.
"A thriller, a gripping tale . . . that you will not set down until it is finished. Steinbeck has touched the quick." The New York Times
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