Reading Rat

What to read, 1826-1850

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The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we admire the most; we choose and revisit them for many and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. --Robert Louis Stevenson

One hour of steady thinking over a subject (a solitary walk is as good an opportunity for the process as any other) is worth two or three of reading only. --Lewis Carroll

\/ Earlier Mid-19th Century

Guy de MAUPASSANT (1850-1893) The Online Books Page post
a popular French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents. --Wikipedia
His people are of many kinds: peasants, priests, soldiers, merchants, clerks, prostitutes--every kind, it would seem. But all of them are driven, as their creator also is while he works out the ironies of their lives; for irony is his matter, as intensity is his manner. --Mark Van Doren

Short Stories (1917)
Maupassant contributed this masterly story ['Boule de Suif' (1880)] while still unknown to the 'Soirees de Medan', a collection of short stories by such as Zola and Huysmans. It made his reputation overnight. --Raphael and McLeish

Robert Louis STEVENSON (1850-1894) The Online Books Page Walter Alexander Raleigh biography Ben Downing review
a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. --Wikipedia

The New Arabian Nights (1882)

Treasure Island (1883)
The very model of an adventure story--buried treasure, secret maps, pirates, mutiny on the high seas. --Raphael and McLeish

Kidnapped (1886)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
While as a youngster I was undoubtedly first captivated by its 'mystery and horror' aspects, I think even then I was aware of the moral tragedy Stevenson depicted so wonderfully. --Gordon R. Willey

The Master of Ballantrae (1889)

Weir of Hermiston (1896)

Essays (1906)

Edward BELLAMY (1850-1898) The Online Books Page Andy Wood fan site
an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle-like tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. --Wikipedia

Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

Pierre LOTI (Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud 1850-1923) The Online Books Page
a French novelist and naval officer. --Wikipedia

The Desert (Le Desert, 1895)

William Erenest HENLEY (1849-1903) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation
an English poet, critic and editor, best remembered for his 1875 poem "Invictus". --Wikipedia

Pro Rege Nostro (1900)

Sarah Orne JEWETT (1849-1909) The Online Books Page
an American novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast of Maine. --Wikipedia

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

August STRINDBERG (1849-1912) The Online Books Page August Strindberg & Helium
a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. ... A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. --Wikipedia

The Father (Fadren, 1887)

Miss Julie (Froken Julie, 1888)

To Damascus I and To Damascus II (Till Damaskus, forsta delen, and Till Damaskus, andra delen, 1898)

A Dream Play (Ett dromspel, 1901)

The Dance of Death (Dodsdansen, 1901–05)

The Ghost Sonata (Spoksonaten, 1907)

Max NORDAU (1849-1923) The Online Books Page
a Zionist leader, physician, author, and social critic. ... Although not his most popular or successful work whilst alive, Degeneration is the book most often remembered and cited today. --Wikipedia

Degeneration (1892)

Frances Hodgson BURNETT (1849-1924) The Online Books Page
an English-American playwright and author. She is best known for her children's stories, in particular Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885-6), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911). --Wikipedia

The Secret Garden (1911)
a deeply moving testimony to the power of nature to heal and renew broken souls. --Michael Dirda

Ivan PAVLOV (1849-1936) The Online Books Page

Conditioned Reflexes (1927)
(or in his own words the conditional reflex... .) --Wikipedia
taught me the importance of controlling laboratory conditions... --B. F. Skinner

also

Physiology of Digestion Nobel Lecture (December 12, 1904)

1848: Year of Revolution

Joris-Karl HUYSMANS (1848-1907) The Online Books Page
a French novelist... . First considered part of Naturalism in literature, he became associated with the decadent movement... . In later years, his novels reflected his study of Catholicism, religious conversion, and becoming an oblate. --Wikipedia

Against the Grain or Against Nature (A rebours, 1884)
Inspiring the transcontinental movement called decadence, Huysmans shocking and altogether singular novella Against the Grain tells the often hilarious, mortifying, and fascinating tale of Duc Jean des Esseintes, a world-weary Parisian whose rejection of the bourgeois world and search for aesthetic satisfaction influenced a generation of readers and writers. --Emily Allen

Down There (La-Bas, 1891)
weaves together the monstrous Gilles de Rais, a war between two nineteenth-century necromancers, and a detailed re-creation of a black mass. --Michael Dirda

Vilfredo PARETO (1848-1923) The Online Books Page | U. Virginia Steve Crislip post
an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher. ... responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis. ... also the first to discover that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. --Wikipedia

The Mind and Society (1916)

Auguste FOREL (1848-1931) The Online Books Page
a Swiss myrmecologist, neuroanatomist and psychiatrist, notable for his investigations into the structure of the human brain and that of ants. ... he is considered a co-founder of the neuron theory. ... also known for his early contributions to sexology and psychology. --Wikipedia

The Senses of Insects (Les Fourmis de la Suisse, 1900)
His work on insects has served the study of human psychology, an is in itself perhaps the most important contribution to insect psychology ever made by a single student. --J. A. Hammerton

Bram STOKER (1847-1912) The Online Books Page post
an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. --Wikipedia

Dracula (1897)
Today, more than ever, Dracula seems a text built, if only half consciously, on sexual anxieties. --Michael Dirda

Georges SOREL (1847-1923) The Online Books Page
a French philosopher and theorist of revolutionary syndicalism. His notion of the power of myth in people's lives inspired Marxists and Fascists. --Wikipedia

Reflections on Violence (Reflexions sur la violence, 1908)
argues that the success of the proletariat in class struggle depended on the creation of a catastrophic and violent revolution achieved through a general strike. --Wikipedia

Tristan CORBIERE (1845-1875) The Online Books Page
a French poet... . one of the masters acknowledged by the Symbolists, and he was subsequently rediscovered and treated as a predecesoor by the surrealists. --Wikipedia

These Jaundiced Loves (Les Amours jaunes, 1873) David Shook interview
Corbiere is hard-bitten, perhaps the most poignant poet since Villon, in very much Villon's manner. --Ezra Pound

Georg CANTOR (1845-1918) The Online Books Page The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive post
a German mathematician, best known as the inventor of set theory --Wikipedia

Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (1915, Beitrage zur Begrundung der transfiniten Mengelehre)

Gerard Manley HOPKINS (1844-1889) The Online Books Page Amanda Shaw review | post
an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. --Wikipedia
a Jesuit with a mind as intricate as unfolding leaves, a mystic in love with Christ in nature and in mankind. His poetry gives a marvellous sense of the world we hunger for but can never have again. --Raphael and McLeish

Carrion Comfort (Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918, edited by Robert Bridges)

God's Grandeur (Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918, edited by Robert Bridges)

Pied Beauty (Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918, edited by Robert Bridges)

Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord (Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918, edited by Robert Bridges)

Paul VERLAINE (1844-1896) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation | Academy of American Poets | Poetry in Translation
a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siecle in international and French poetry. --Wikipedia

Selected Poems (1948)

Friedrich NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) The Online Books Page | Great Books and Classics Holtof Donne fan site post
a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. ... key ideas include the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism, the Will to Power, the "death of God", the Ubermensch and eternal recurrence. --Wikipedia
You would not like Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound. --Jeeves

Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (edited by Daniel Breazeale, 1979)
A revolutionary series of treatises on the transvaluation of all inherited values. --Robert Brustein

The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Sterf [pdf]
A 'scholarly' discourse on Greek tragedy that boldly celebrates the passionate, the lyrical, the personal--as contrasted to the dryly rational, the 'soundly' balanced, the impersonal 'virtue' of mainstream scholarship. --Ricard D. Parker

Human, All-Too-Human (1878, 1879, 1880) Sterf [doc]

The Gay Science or Joyful Wisdom (Die froehliche Wissenschaft 1882)

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Sterf [doc]
Representative, thunderous work by the fallen angel of Western philosophy, about whom it is impossible to have a placid opinion. --Raphael and McLeish
To keep Europe from its ultimate degeneration we must go beyond the slave distinction between good and evil and replace it with the aristocratic distinction between noble and contemptible, strong and weak. --Benjamin Wiker

Toward a Genealogy of Morals (1887) R. R. Reno essay

Twilight of the Idols (1888) Sterf [rtf]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1892) Sterf [pdf]
outlines the doctrines of the Ubermensch or Superman, eternal recurrence, and the Will to Power. --Philip Ward

The Antichrist (1895) Sterf [pdf]

The Will to Power (1895) Sterf [pdf]

Ecce Homo (1908)

also

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (Uber Wahrheit und Luge im auszermoralischen Sinn, 1873) Sterf [pdf]

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fur das Leben, 1874) Sterf [pdf]

Thoughts Out Of Season - Part One (1909) Sterf [txt]
includes David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer (David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller, 1873) and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876) --ed.

Anatole FRANCE (1844-1924) The Online Books Page
a French poet, journalist, and novelist. ... won the Nobel Prize for Literature [1921] in recognition of his literary achievements. --Wikipedia

Thais (1890)

Penguin Island (L’Ile des Pingouins, 1908)

Robert BRIDGES (1844-1930) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation | Sonnet Central see Gerard Manley Hopkins
a British poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930. --Wikipedia

Selected Poems (1974)

Jose Maria de ECA DE QUEIROZ (1843-1900) The Online Books Page
generally considered to be the greatest Portuguese writer in the realist style. ... never officially rejected Catholicism, and in many of his private letters he even invokes Jesus and uses expressions typical of Catholics, but was very critical of the Catholic Church of his time, and of Christianity in general (also Protestant churches) as is evident in some of his novels --Wikipedia
The first [in this trilogy], set in Leiria, attacks the corrupt clergy, the second dissects the morals of a middle-class family in Lisbon, and the third observes with bitter irony the antics of high society in metropolitan Portugal. --Philip Ward

The Sin of Father Amaro (Nan Flanagan translation, 1962; O Crime de Padre Amaro, 1875, 1876, 1880)
...A priest, prey to erotic reverie and without a true clerical vocation, half seduces, half falls in love with the daughter of his landlady. --Michael Dirda

Dragon's Teeth (1896, Mary Jane Serrano translation; or Cousin Bazilio, 1953, Roy Campbell translation; O Primo Basilio 1878)
Cousin Bazilio, translated by the poet Roy Campbell, is another tale of seduction, in which a young married woman succumbs to the blandishments of her sophisticated and grossly predatory cousin. --Michael Dirda

The Maias (1965, Patricia McGowan Pinheiro and Ann Stevens translation; Os Maias, 1888)
(Margaret Jull Costa translation, 2007) Michael Wood review
a masterwork partly about a love affair between a brother and sister... --Michael Dirda

Frederick William Henry MYERS (1843-1901) The Online Books Page
a poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers' work on psychical research and his ideas about a "subliminal self" have not been accepted by the scientific community. --Wikipedia

Human Personality (1903)

Robert KOCH (1843-1910) The Online Books Page
the founder of modern bacteriology, is known for his role in identifying the specific causative agents of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax and for giving experimental support for the concept of infectious disease. --Wikipedia

The Etiology of Tuberculosis (Die Aetiologie der Tuberkulose, 1882)

Henry JAMES (1843-1916) The Online Books Page | Great Books and Classics Times Topics | Guardian: Authors | Guide to Web Sites post
an American-born British writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. --Wikipedia
the amount of unhappiness in the world of Henry James's novels and of lost opportunities, due to misunderstandings which could have been disposed of with a few straight words, is far greater than in real life. Unhappiness due not to passionate causes but to a 'sense of style' in esthetic living is what really gives an air of artificiality to the Jamesian world--far more than the aristocrats and their golden hangings. --Stephen Spender

The Story of a Year (1865)

Daisy Miller (1878)

The Europeans (1878)

French Poets and Novelists (1878)

Hawthorne (1879)

Washington Square (1880)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James Wood review
The master of novel-as-art. 'The Portrait of a Lady', the most accessible, if long-drawn-out, describes Isabel Archer, an American heiress, and her fortunes in Europe. --Raphael and McLeish

The Point of View (1882)

Pandora (1884)

A New England Winter (1884)

The Bostonians (1886)
Apart from its quality as a novel, this book was prophetic: the author foresaw the disappearance from the world of the masculine spirit and the sentiment of sex. --Howard Green

The Princess Casamassima (1886)

Partial Portraits (1888)

Europe (1889)

Historical Essays (1891)

Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893)

Picture and Text (1893)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)
It is a study of evil in the form of a ghost story--a ghost story unless the governess who tells it has imagined it all. Opinions differ as to this; but the evil, whether outside the governess's mind or in it, is real enough for horror of immense dimensions. --Mark Van Doren
One of the finest ghost stories in English, all the better for containing no explicit ghosts. --Raphael and McLeish

The Awkward Age (1899)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)
What made him so compelling? Perhaps it was his complexities--of character, incidents and style. --Jeanne S. Chall

The Ambassadors (1903)
for James, mental concepts, far from being opposed to the ordinariness of laundry lists and drains, seem themselves to have belonged to a lower category of inanimate objects, like the small article of 'the commonest domestic use' manufactured by the Newsome family in 'The Ambassadors'... --Mary McCarthy

The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
This is a story about a man who waits throughout his life for a great destiny to reveal itself and about the woman who waits with him. --Emily Allen
so lacerating to those of a certain age--the heartbreaking evocation of a missed life... --Michael Dirda
It's like saving your good underwear. --Karen A. Berres

The Golden Bowl (1904)
a 21 carat, dense, abstruse evocation of sexual guilt and innocence. --Raphael and McLeish

The American Scene (1904-1907)

Julia Bride (1908)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Views and Reviews (1908)

Crapy Cornelia (1909)

Italian Hours (1909)

A Round to Visits (1910)

A Small Boy And Others (1913)

Notes on Novelists (1914)

The Ivory Tower (1917)

The Art of the Novel (1934)

Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999) Colm Toibin review
Throughout his life he wrote hundreds and hundreds of magnificent letters, which allow us to better understand why this odd, roly-poly American was so beloved by nearly everyone who met him. --Michael Dirda

Benito Perez GALDOS (1843-1920) The Online Books Page
a Spanish realist novelist. Some authorities consider him second only to Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist. --Wikipedia
Spain's Dickens --Maria Elena de las Carreras-Kuntz

Nazarin (1895)

Halma (1895)

Misericordia (1897)

Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-87)

Sidney LANIER (1842-1881) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation | Academy of American Poets
an American musician and poet. --Wikipedia

The Revenge of Hamish (1878)

Stephane MALLARME (1842-1898) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation | Poem Hunter
a French poet and critic. ... his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism (art), Dadaism, and Surrealism. --Wikipedia

Selected Poetry and Prose (1982)
The crucial move by this prominent French poet of the Victorian age was the conscious repudiation of the idea that language refers to a reality beyond itself. Mallarme was the precursor of a school of poets who held that what really matters about poetry is sound, not sense. --Russell Shaw

William JAMES (1842-1910) The Online Books Page | Great Books and Classics Frank Pajares fan site post
an American philosopher and psychologist ... . considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism ... . He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. --Wikipedia

The Sentiment of Rationality (in Mind, 1879)

Great Men and Their Environment (Atlantic Monthly, October 1880)
lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society

The Principles of Psychology (1891)
James is the founder of functionalism in psychology. --V. J. McGill
He always remained faithful ... to the observed world as he saw it, and especially to facts which, however unusual, had a bearing on the life and aspirations of the individual. --Seymour Cain

Is Life Worth Living? (1896)
Originally given before the Young Men's Christian Association of Harvard University, in May, 1895.

Stanford's Ideal Destiny (Science, May 1906)

Letter to B. P. Blood (June 28, 1896)

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, 1899)

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
From James's book I learned how hazardous it is to generalize about something as complex as religion. --D. Quinn Mills

Remarks at the Peace Banquet (October 7, 1904) The Atlantic Monthly (December 1904)

The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
The psychological realism of Luther, Edwards, and other Protestant theologians--whose analysis of conversion, James thinks, can hardly be surpassed by modern psychologists--does not mean that religion should be replaced by psychology. It means only that psychological understanding has been part of religion all along. --Christopher Lasch

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)
Though denigrated by those who misunderstand the essential nobility of James's conviction that emotion and action can be transform the world and that truth can be found in experience, this book is a monument to the effort to make ideas influential and transform them into action. --Kenneth Andrews

Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth (1907)

A Pluralistic Universe (1909)

Some Problems of Philosophy (1911)

Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

Ambrose BIERCE (1842-1914) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation
an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. He wrote the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. --Wikipedia

Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)
Bierce disappeared into Mexico in 1913--in search, he said, of 'the good, kind darkness'. Reasons for such a wish can be found here: sardonic wit barely conceals despair. --Raphael and McLeish

William Henry HUDSON (1841-1922) The Online Books Page
an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. --Wikipedia

The Naturalist in La Plata (1892)

Oliver Wendell HOLMES, Jr. (1841-1935) The Online Books Page post
an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932 ... . ... Holmes helped move American legal thinking towards legal realism --Wikipedia

The Common Law (1881)
A valuable account of some of the great formative ideas of English law. --Samuel Thorne

Collected Legal Papers (1921)

Emile ZOLA (1840-1902) The Online Books Page
a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus --Wikipedia

Therese Raquin (1867)
deals with a married woman and her lover, the shadowy Laurent, who determine to murder Camille Raquin in order to live together openly. But Camille's paralyzed old mother gradually becomes aware of what has happened... --Philip Ward

L'Assommoir (1877)
...Gervaise Macquart comes to Paris with her lover Lantier and their two children. Lantier deserts her, but she marries Coupeau and starts a laundry on borrowed money. For a while all goes well, but then Coupeau has an accident, and spends most of his time (and the housekeeping money) in the drinking-shop of the title. --Philip Ward

Nana (1880)
'Nana' is a sensational, purportedly 'naturalistic' account of the belle epoque in Paris as revealed by the lurid career of a striptease artist who strips more than she teases. --Raphael and McLeish

Germinal (1885)
...Gervaise's son Etienne loses his job in Lille and finally obtains employment in the coal-mines. Ethienne forms a friendship with the Russian nihilist Suvarin and together they incite the miners to strike for bearable living conditions. --Philip Ward

also

I Accuse: Open Letter to the President of the French Republic (J'Accuse: Lettre au President de La Republique, L'Aurore, January 13, 1898, translated by Shelley Temchin and Jean-Max Guieu 2001) Dr. Jean-Max Guieu Le Dossier secret de l'affaire Dreyfus

William Graham SUMNER (1840-1910) The Online Books Page
an American academic... He is credited with introducing the term "ethnocentrism," a term intended to identify imperialists' chief means of justification --Wikipedia

Socialism (Scribner's, October 1878)

Folkways (1906)

The Challenge of Facts: and Other Essays (1914)

Alfred Thayer MAHAN (1840-1914) The Online Books Page
a United States Navy flag officer, geostrategist, and historian... . His concept of "sea power" was based on the idea that countries with greater naval power will have greater worldwide impact --Wikipedia
the geopolitical theorist who coined the term 'Middle East'. --Harvey Sicherman

The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890)
Command of the sea is essential for any nation aspiring to leadership in world affairs and to maximum properity and security at home. Land powers, no matter how great, are doomed to eventual collapse and decay without access to the sea. --Robert B. Downs

Giovanni VERGA (1840-1922) The Online Books Page
an Italian realist (Verismo) writer, best known for his depictions of life in Sicily, and especially for the short story (and later play) Cavalleria Rusticana and the novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree). --Wikipedia
He poured his genius into many bottles, haphazardly it sometimes seems. Only in the one he initially most despised, the short and shamelessly regional novella, did it yield its full and explosive flavor. --Tim Parks

Life in the Fields (Vita dei campi, 1880)

The House by the Medlar Tree (I Malavoglia, 1881)

Little Novels of Sicily (Novelle rusticane, 1883)

Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889, "Sir-Workman")

Thomas HARDY (1840-1928) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation | Academy of American Poets post
an English novelist and poet. ... Most of his fictional works – initially published as serials in magazines – were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. --Wikipedia
His theory of life was bleak, but his account of it in song and story--he is rich in examples of both--is warm and wonderful. He is most at home in mist and gloom, and then, lo, in brilliant sun. His verse is crabbed and peculiar; but once we are accustomed to his voice it is something we want to keep on hearing. --Mark Van Doren

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
earliest, liveliest masterpiece: Bathsheba Everdene is a new woman in an old Wessex setting... . --Raphael and McLeish

The Return of the Native (1878)

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

The Woodlanders (1887)

Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' is full of memorable images, flawed by Hardy's appetite for rigged doom... . --Raphael and McLeish

Jude the Obscure (1895)
Jude the Obscure's scandalous reception turned Hardy from fiction to poetry. --Raphael and McLeish

The Well-Beloved (1897)
Serialized in 1892

Hap (Wessex Poems and Other Verses 1898)

Selected Poems (1993)
In his rhythms, his truthfulness and honesty, his subtlety of tone and experience of life, Hardy is one of the most rewarding of English poets. --Raphael and McLeish

Henry GEORGE (1839-1897) The Online Books Page post
an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "single tax" on land. --Wikipedia

Progress and Property (1879)
A fine book about the perennial conflict between rich and poor, this famous work proposed a method of resolving all economic problems--so-called 'single tax'--and lead to Single Tax candidates all over the country for generations. --Raphael and McLeish

Josiah Willard GIBBS (1839-1903) The Online Books Page
an American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. --Wikipedia

On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1875-1878)

Elementary Principles of Statistical Mechanics (1902)

Charles Sanders PEIRCE (1839-1914) The Online Books Page Joao Queiroz and Ricardo Gudwin fan site | Gary Richmond and Ben Udell fan site | Charles S. Peirce Studies Edward T. Oakes essay
[pronounced] like "purse" ... was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". --Wikipedia

The Fixation of Belief (1877)

How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)

Evolutionary Love (1893)

What Pragmatism Is (1905)

The Red and the Black

Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays (anthology 1923)
Peirce, the son of mathematician Benjamin Peirce, was especially interested in symbolic representations of logic. --Byron E. Wall

Collected Papers (8 vol. 1931-1934)

Walter PATER (1839-1894) The Online Books Page Roger Kimball essay | Louis Auchincloss essay
an English essayist, literary and art critic, and writer of fiction. --Wikipedia

Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)

Marius the Epicurean (1885)

Imaginary Portraits (1887)

Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889)

William Edward Hartpole LECKY (1838-1903) The Online Books Page
an Irish historian and political theorist. --Wikipedia

Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (1865)

History of European Morals (1869)

Henry ADAMS (1838-1918) The Online Books Page Henry Adams, Globe Trotter post
an American historian and member of the Adams political family --Wikipedia

History of the United States of America from 1801 to 1817 (1889-91)
Comparable in every respect to Macaulay's great Whig history of England in the later 17th century, this is possibly the best single work by an American historian. Its vast scope is too much for many people; the fascinating first six chapters of volume I are separately collected in 'The United States in 1800'. --Raphael and McLeish

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904)

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
A rich, knotty, idiosyncratic evocation of what time, as it speeds up with the industrial and scientific revolutions, does to values, attitudes, institutions and elites in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, and to the terms and conditions of employment on which political power can be held, and by whom--all from the standpoint of a specially invested historian, grandson of the sixth, gret-grandson of the second U.S. president. --Richard E. Neustadt

Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919)

Algernon Charles SWINBURNE (1837-1909) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation
an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form --Wikipedia

Atalanta in Calydon (1865)

Letters (1919)

William Dean HOWELLS (1837-1920) The Online Books Page James W. Tuttleton essay
an American realist author and literary critic. --Wikipedia

A Modern Instance (1882)

The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

J. J. THOMSON (1837-1921, Joseph John Thomson) The Online Books Page Center for History of Physics
a British physicist. In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of a previously unknown negatively charged particle, and thus is credited with the discovery and identification of the electron. --Wikipedia

Conduction of Electricity Throught Gases (1903)

also

Carriers of Negative Electricity (December 11, 1906) Nobel Lecture

Gustavo Adolfo BECQUER (1836-1870) The Online Books Page
a Spanish post-romanticist poet and writer (mostly short stories), also a playwright, literary columnist, and talented drawer. --Wikipedia

Collected Poems (Rimas) (2007)

W. S. GILBERT (1836-1911) The Online Books Page post
an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for the fourteen comic operas (known as the Savoy operas) produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. --Wikipedia

Bab Ballads (in Fun, 1861-1871)

Plays (1871-1896, with Arthur Sullivan, 1842–1900)

Kalevala (1835) The Online Books Page see Elias Lonnrot (1802-1884) Wikipedia entry post
a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lonnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology.
It is regarded as the national epic of Karelia and Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature. --Wikipedia

Samuel BUTLER (1835-1902) The Online Books Page
an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. --Wikipedia

Erewhon (1872)
Erewhon is elegant satire: illness as social crime, crime as illness have unhappily manifold modern reverberations. --Raphael and McLeish

The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Creepy classic of the relationship between a British Victorian father and his floundering, rationalist son. --Raphael and McLeish

Giosue CARDUCCI (1835-1907) The Online Books Page
an Italian poet and teacher. ... In 1906 he became the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. --Wikipedia

Hymn to Satan (l'Inno a Satana, 1865)

The Barbarian Odes (Odi Barbare, 1878-1889)

Rhymes and Rhythms (Rime e Ritmi, 1966)

Mark TWAIN (1835-1910) The Online Books Page post
Samuel Langhorne Clemens ... better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. --Wikipedia
For Americans who want to know who they are and how they got that way, Twain is center stage. --Harold Howe II
'Mark Twain' is a slang phrase used on the river to mean 'two fathoms deep' and indeed Clemens wrote his best work on and around the Mississippi. --Philip Ward

Letter from New York to the [San Francisco] Alta California (May 28, 1867)

The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation (1867)

The Innocents Abroad (1869)
manages to be simultaneously amused and appalled, and by things that are mostly just appalling. --Algis Valiunas
deflated American illusions about the [Middle East] region and, mordantly, about themselves. --Harvey Sicherman

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
The first manuscript submitted to the publisher typewritten. --Goldstein and Lieberman

Remarkable Gold Mines (letter to New York Post 1880)

Life on the Mississippi (1883)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. --Ernest Hemingway
reveals more about nineteenth-century America than any work I know. Yet it also displays a moral sensibility that resonates clearly with the values and beliefs of our own era. --Alan Brinkley

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar (from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson 1894)

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (in Following the Equator 1897)

The Disappearance of Literature (1900)

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909) Twain, Extract from Captain Stormfield's
Takeoff of religious pretensions and, in fact, of all pretensions--Captain Stormfield discovers a heaven that makes so much sense it could never be sold to the faithful. --Raphael and McLeish

The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

Notebook (1936)

Complete Short Stories (anthology 1956)

Life as I Find It (anthology 1961)

Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger (1969)

What Is Man? And Other Philosophical Essays (1973, Paul Baender, editor)

The Devil's Racetrack: Mark Twain's "Great Dark" Writings: The Best from 'Which Was the Dream?' and 'Fables of Man' (anthology, John S. Tuckey, ed. 1980)

Concerning the Jews (1985)

also

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1865)
Interesting mostly for the way it foreshadows Twain's superb use of the vernacular in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Title piece, based on an old California folk tale, still has charm. --Raphael and McLeish

Mendele Mocher SFORIM (1835-1917) The Online Books Page
a Jewish author and one of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. --Wikipedia

The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (1878)

also

Charles William ELIOT (1834-1926) The Online Books Page post
an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university. --Wikipedia

The Harvard Classics (Editor, 51 vol. 1909) Bartleby
Eliot had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. --Wikipedia

Dmitri MENDELEEV (1834-1907) The Online Books Page
a Russian chemist and inventor. He formulated the Periodic Law, created his own version of the periodic table of elements, and used it to correct the properties of some already discovered elements and also to predict the properties of elements yet to be discovered. --Wikipedia

Principles of Chemistry (2 vol., 1868–1870) Tom Lehrer song

also

On the Relationship of the Properties of the Elements to their Atomic Weights (Zeitschrift fur Chemie 12, 405-406, 1869) Le Moyne College
Mendeleev's first Periodic Table is discussed; observations on the abundance or scarcity of elements with different weights; atomic weights determine properties of the element; one can predict the discovery of unknown elements; corrections that need to be made concerning atomic weights; his Periodic Law is introduced here for the first time. --F. Ramos

James THOMSON (1834-1882) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation
wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian-era poet --Wikipedia

The City of Dreadful Night (1874)

John Robert SEELEY (1834-1895) The Online Books Page
an English essayist and historian. --Wikipedia

Ecce Homo (1865)
presented Jesus Christ as a man of astonishing influence but not a divine Being --J. A. Hammerton

William MORRIS (1834-1896) The Online Books Page
an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and English Arts and Crafts Movement. --Wikipedia

The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870)

A Dream of John Ball (1888)

News from Nowhere (1890)

The Well at the World's End (1896)

Ernst HAECKEL (1834-1919) The Online Books Page post
a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms --Wikipedia

The Evolution of Man (1874)

The Riddle of the Universe (1901)

Louisa May ALCOTT (1832-1888) The Online Books Page post
an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels --Wikipedia

Little Women (1868)
One of the great progenitors of the family story. Alcott writes from her own life with a sincerity and warmth which transcend the often pious particulars. --Raphael and McLeish

Lewis CARROLL (1832-1898) The Online Books Page Times Topics
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. --Wikipedia
An ounce of Lewis Carroll is in my opinion worth a ton of his contemporaries sermons... --Philip Ward

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Ruthann Zaroff fan site Victor Sonkin essay
In Alice four worlds meet, worlds that he knew either consciously or intuitively. They are the worlds of childhood, dream, nonsense, and logic. ... Their strange interaction gives Alice its complexity, and, more important, its strange reality. --Clifton Fadiman
The images of Alice in Wonderland are unforgettable; we can never get them out of our heads. (Partly this is because of John Tenniel's wonderful illustrations for the original edition; when reading Alice you should seek an edition with reproductions of these old illustrations.) --Charles Van Doren

Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)
The two books make up one great fantasy, and it is hard to keep them apart in the memory. In fact, it is not worth trying to do so. --Charles Van Doren

Horatio ALGER, Jr. (1832-1899) The Online Books Page Bill Roach fan site
a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. --Wikipedia

Ragged Dick, or, Street Life in New York (1867)

Wilhelm WUNDT (1832-1920) The Online Books Page post
a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. --Wikipedia

Principles of Physiological Psychology (Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, 1874)

Outline of Psychology (Grundriss der Psychologie, 1896)

James Clerk MAXWELL (1831-1879) The Online Books Page
a Scottish mathematical physicist. His most prominent achievement was to formulate a set of equations that describe electricity, magnetism, and optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon, namely the electromagnetic field. --Wikipedia
before Maxwell people conceived of physical reality--in so far as it is supposed to represent events in nature--as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions, which are subject to total differential equations. After Maxwell they conceived physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable, which are subject to partial differential equations. --Albert Einstein

Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873)

Nikolai Semyonovich LESKOV (1831-1895) The Online Books Page
a Russian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitskiy (or M. Stebnitsky). --Wikipedia

Selected Tales (1856-58)

Paul DU CHAILLU (1831-1903) The Online Books Page
a French-American traveler, zoologist, and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. --Wikipedia

Equatorial Africa (1861)

Richard DEDEKIND (1831-1916) The Online Books Page MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
a German mathematician who made important contributions to abstract algebra (particularly ring theory), algebraic number theory and the foundations of the real numbers. --Wikipedia

Essays on the Theory of Numbers (1924)

Emily DICKINSON (1830-1886) The Online Books Page | Poetry Foundation | Academy of American Poets Dickinson Electronic Archives | Emily Dickinson International Society post
an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. --Wikipedia
No reader of Emily can be so insensitive as to leave this extraordinary woman (who could be relentlessly sarcastic on occasion) and her poetry without a sense of exhilaration. --Philip Ward

Complete Poems (1960)
Her style is terse to the limit; she lights landscapes, actual or imagined, temporal or eternal, as lightning does. --Mark Van Doren
probably no poet of comparable reputation has been guilty of so much unpardonable writing. --Yvor Winters
The poems of this reclusive New England lady have the same kind of purity as those of Hopkins --Raphael and McLeish

Christina ROSSETTI (1830-1894) The Online Books Page
an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is perhaps best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem Remember, and for the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter. --Wikipedia

Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862; Author's revised edition 1876)

James Fitzjames STEPHEN (1829-1894) The Online Books Page
an English lawyer, judge and writer. ... he wrote a series of articles which resulted in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873–1874)--a protest against John Stuart Mill's neo-utilitarianism. --Wikipedia

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873-1874)

Frank A. HASKELL (1828-1864) The Online Books Page
a Union Army officer during the American Civil War who was killed during the Battle of Cold Harbor --Wikipedia

The Battle of Gettysburg (1863)

Dante Gabriel ROSSETTI (1828-1882) The Online Books Page The Complete Writings and Pictures; A Hypermedia Research Archive
an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais --Wikipedia

Sonnets (1880)

The King's Tragedy (1881)

Nikolay CHERNYSHEVSKY (1828-1889) The Online Books Page
a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, critic, and socialist --Wikipedia

What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat'? 1863)
Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution. --Joseph Frank

Jules VERNE (1828-1905) The Online Books Page
a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. --Wikipedia

A Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre, 1864)
three men climb down through the chimney of a volcano to discover another world underground. --Michael Dirda

From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terre a la Lune, 1865)

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1870)
dominated by the figure of the romantic antihero Captain Nemo, and by the wondrous submarine he has constructed to revenge himself on a world that--we eventually learn--destroyed his family. --Michael Dirda

Around the World in Eighty Days (Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, 1873)
Surely the various eccentricities of Phileas Fogg, nothing if not an orderly English gentleman, make for much of the charm... --Michael Dirda

The Mysterious Island (L'Ile mysterieuse, 1875)
we discover among other things the ultimate fate of Nemo and the Nautilus, even as Verne offers us a nineteenth-century version of Robinson Crusoe. --Michael Dirda

Henrik IBSEN (1828-1906) The Online Books Page Centre for Ibsen Studies post
a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. --Wikipedia

Brand (1866)

Peer Gynt (1867)

Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilaeer, 1873)

The Pillars of Society (Samfundets Stotter, 1877)

A Doll's House (Et Dukkehjem, 1879)
[W]ell-nigh perfect in its rendering of the young wife Nora who leaves her husband and shuts the door behind her--a famous door that no one forgets. --Mark Van Doren

Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881)
One of the group of plays on a favorite Ibsen theme: the way we are haunted, dominated by the past --Raphael and McLeish

An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende, 1882)

The Wild Duck (Vildanden, 1884)

Hedda Gabler (1884)
She is a Medea of the North, with no children to kill but with two men to hurt--her husband and the author whose manuscript she burns--before she ends the play by shooting herself: good riddance to all but divine rubbish. --Mark Van Doren

The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet, 1888)

The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness, 1892)

When We Dead Awaken (Nar vi dode vaagner, 1899)

George MEREDITH (1828-1909) The Online Books Page
an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. --Wikipedia

Modern Love (1862)
In 50 16-line sonnets that thinly fi ctionalize the widely publicized breakupof Meredith’s own marriage, Modern Love provides an unflinching portrait of married love and challenges the romantic plot that was the mainstay of the Victorian publishing market and shows that poetry might go to far darker and more realistic places than prose fiction. --Emily Allen

The Egoist (1879)
In fact, he has not lasted, except, I think, for The Egoist; the mock-heroic vein, which he worked and over-worked, failed to undermine the old structure and became a blind alley. --Mary McCarthy

Leo TOLSTOY (1828-1910) The Online Books Page post
a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Tolstoy was a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the world's greatest novelists. --Wikipedia

Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (1853)

Family Happiness (Semeynoe schast'e, 1859)

The Cossacks (1863)

War and Peace (1869)
What was originally intended as a story of family life, set against the background of the conflict between Russia and Napoleanic France, became a great historical novel, including a philosophy of history. --Seymour Cain
one can see Tolstoy trying to catch in a network of abstract concepts the multifarious, tidal flow of his own novelistic imagination, within which his characters, acting in the belief that they are distinctive, self-driven individuals, reveal themselves to be subject to internal and external forces over which they have little or no control. --Dan Jacobson
the most memorable statement of the relationship between men and history, between individuals and events, in all fiction. --Hale Champion

Anna Karenina (1878)
it is enough if a man is able to save his own soul by living for it, which is the same as living for God--the rest will take care of itself. --Mary McCarthy

Twenty-three Tales (1881)

The Death of Ivan Illych ((Smert' Ivana Il'icha, , 1886)
a powerfully wrought, ever-so-affecting reminder of what moral matters we had best try to settle before we take leave. --Robert Coles

The Power of Darkness (1886)

On Life (1887)

A Confession (1888)

The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova Sonata, 1889)

The Kingdom of God is Within You (c. 1894)

Religion and Morality (1894)

What Is Art? (1897)
Nothing is sacred except the search for the deepest truth, and that means the truth accessible to millions, not the refinements that coddle the chosen few. --Raphael and McLeish

What is Religion? (1902)

Critical Essay on Shakespeare (1903)

The Forged Coupon (Fal'shivyi kupon, 1911)

John Hanning SPEKE (1827-1864) The Online Books Page
an officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa and who is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile and the discovery and naming of Lake Victoria. --Wikipedia

Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863)

James Augustus GRANT (1827-1892) The Online Books Page
a Scottish explorer of eastern equatorial Africa. ... in 1860 joined John Hanning Speke in the memorable expedition which solved the problem of the Nile sources. --Wikipedia

A Walk Across Africa (1863)

Joseph LISTER (1827-1912) The Online Books Page
a British surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery. By applying Louis Pasteur's advances in microbiology, he promoted the idea of sterile surgery --Wikipedia

On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery (1867)

Bernhard RIEMANN (1826-1866) The Online Books Page | Mathematical Papers MacTutor History of Mathematics archive | Clay Mathematics Institute post
an influential German mathematician who made lasting contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry, some of them enabling the later development of general relativity. --Wikipedia

The Hypothesis of Geometry (1867)

Walter BAGEHOT (1826-1877) The Online Books Page Bagehot's notebook column post
a British journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, and literature. --Wikipedia

The English Constitution (1867)

also

The Economist (editor, 1861-1877) Website

Mikhail SALTYKOV-Shchedrin (1826-1889) The Online Books Page
a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. --Wikipedia

The Golovlovs (Gospoda Golovlyovy, 1876)
tracing the fifteen years of decay and corruption within a family of country nobles. The hypocrite Porfiri (Judas or Iudenshka) has become an eponymous figure in Russia, just as have Tartuffe in France and Uriah Heep in England. --Philip Ward

/\ Earlier Mid-19th Century

\/ 1801-1825 | 1851-1875 /\

Revised June 16, 2014.

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