Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, tells the story of his war and his love in plain, retrospective first-person prose. In 1915-16 his unit is quartered in Gorizia, near the Isonzo front.
Medical tag
Alcohol
Drunkenness, alcoholism, delirium tremens, drink as social medicine.
Works
A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher.
A View from the Bridge is set among the Italian-American longshoremen of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and is framed by the commentary of Alfieri, a neighbourhood lawyer who acts as a chorus and who knows from the start that the story will end in blood. Eddie Carbone, a hard-working dock labourer, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine, whom they have raised.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Animal Farm is a short beast fable about a revolution that turns into a tyranny. On Manor Farm near Willingdon in England, the old prize boar Major gathers the animals one night and describes a dream of a world without Man, who takes their milk, eggs and labour and sends them to the knacker when they are old.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law. Dostoevsky makes the crime happen early, so the central drama becomes not detection alone but the decomposition of Raskolnikov's theory inside his body, mind, and relationships.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Essays on Education in a Republic gathers the six essays on schooling that open Benjamin Rush's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, published in Philadelphia in 1798. Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote them between 1786 and 1791 to ask what kind of education a free people needs once it has made itself a republic.
Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd farming his own small flock on Norcombe Hill, falls in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, lively girl staying with her aunt nearby. She saves his life when he nearly suffocates in his smoky hut, but refuses his plain proposal, saying she wants somebody to tame her.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is the collective title of five comic books about a dynasty of giants, written by François Rabelais and published between 1532 and 1564. Pantagruel appeared first, at Lyon in 1532, under the anagram pen-name Alcofribas Nasier; Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 or 1535 and is now printed as Book I. The Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (complete 1552) bore Rabelais's own name, and a Fifth Book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death; how much of it he wrote is disputed.
Hard Times, subtitled For These Times, is Dickens's shortest and most concentrated novel, set in Coketown, a smoky northern mill town of red brick, black canals, and identical streets. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant and later a member of Parliament, runs a model school and his own household on a single principle: children must be taught Facts and nothing else.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
Henry V follows the young King Henry, once the tavern-haunting Prince Hal, as he leads England to war with France and wins the battle of Agincourt in 1415. A Chorus opens each act, asking the audience to let their imaginations fill the small wooden theatre with the vasty fields of France.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
This volume collects three of Aristophanes' comedies (contents vary by edition; a long-standing selection is The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata). The Acharnians (425 BCE), the earliest surviving comedy, is set in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Borrowers is told within a frame. A girl called Kate, about ten, sits crocheting with old Mrs May, who lives in two rooms of Kate's parents' house.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it.
The Fall is a short novel in six chapters made up entirely of the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam, who over five days talks to a stranger he meets at a sailors' bar called Mexico City. The listener never speaks in the text; his replies are implied by Clamence's answers.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and war veteran who comes East in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, on Long Island, beside the vast mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a rich former Yale football player, along with Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a champion golfer.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot.
The Innocence of Father Brown collects the first twelve stories about Father Brown, a short, round-faced Roman Catholic priest from Essex with a shabby umbrella and an armful of brown-paper parcels, who solves crimes by understanding the sinners who commit them. In "The Blue Cross" Aristide Valentin, head of the Paris police, lands at Harwich hunting the giant French thief Flambeau and follows a trail of absurdities across London: salt in a sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, a window broken and paid for in advance, price labels swapped on a fruit stall.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
The Little Prince is told by a pilot who, as a boy of six, drew a boa constrictor digesting an elephant; every grown-up who saw Drawing Number One took it for a hat, and he gave up art for flying. Years later his engine fails in the Sahara, a thousand miles from anyone, with water for about a week.
The Magician's Nephew is the story of how Narnia began and how a wardrobe came to lead into it. In London around 1900, Digory Kirke has been sent to live with his Uncle Andrew and Aunt Letty because his father is in India and his mother is gravely ill.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Poetic Edda is the collection of anonymous Old Norse poems about the gods and heroes of the North, preserved chiefly in the Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, written about 1270. The library text is the complete translation by Henry Adams Bellows, published in 1923 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which renders thirty-five poems in alliterative verse and adds a general introduction, an introductory note to each poem and extensive notes.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Prose Edda is a handbook of Norse myth and of the art of skaldic poetry, written in Iceland around 1220 by the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. It was meant to teach young poets the old stories and the poetic names (kennings) that the court verse of Scandinavia depended on, at a time when Iceland had been Christian for more than two centuries.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. In the Induction, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is thrown out of an alehouse and falls asleep on the heath.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, published by Macmillan in New York in 1899, is Thorstein Veblen's study of how wealth, status and consumption shape economic life and taste. Written while he taught at the University of Chicago, during the Gilded Age of American fortunes, it treats the habits of the rich not as personal vices but as institutions with a long evolutionary history, and it describes them in a dry, ironic scientific vocabulary that made the book famous.
Richard Hannay, a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish-born mining engineer who has made his money in Rhodesia, has come home to London in the spring of 1914 and finds himself bored almost to despair. One May evening a neighbor from the top floor of his building, an American named Franklin P. Scudder, begs to be taken in.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
The Wind in the Willows (1908) follows Mole’s break into the sunlight, Rat’s river manners, Badger’s solid hospitality, and Toad’s reckless motorcar mania among the English riverbank and Wild Wood. Kenneth Grahame writes animal characters who keep human foibles without losing the feel of water, willow, and snow.
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Unbroken is Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini, an American runner and Army Air Forces bombardier who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift in the Pacific and more than two years as a prisoner of war in Japan. The book begins with Louie as the restless, thieving son of Italian immigrants in Torrance, California, in the 1920s.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- A Farewell to Arms, Book II, Chapter XXII
Frederic's jaundice; Miss Van Campen finds the empty bottles and accuses him of bringing it on with alcohol to avoid the front.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book III, Chapter XXV
Rinaldi, worn out by the summer's operations, drinks heavily and fears he has syphilis.
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 5
Carton works through the night for Stryver with wet towels on his head and a bowl of punch.
- A View from the Bridge, Act 2 (two-act version), opening
Eddie comes home drunk and kisses both Catherine and Rodolpho.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter V
Pap swears off drink before the new judge, who weeps over his reform; that night he gets drunk, rolls off the porch roof and breaks his arm.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter VI
Pap's delirium tremens in the cabin: visions of snakes, terror of the dead, and his chase of Huck with a clasp-knife.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter X
Jim is bitten by a rattlesnake, drinks Pap's whiskey as a remedy and ties the snake's rattles to his wrist; Huck blames handling the snakeskin.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXI
The will determined by present uneasiness; the drunkard who sees his health and estate decaying yet returns to drink.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXVII
Personal identity through consciousness; cases of forgetting, drunkenness, sleepwalking and alternating consciousness, and their bearing on punishment.
- Animal Farm, Chapter 8
The pigs find a case of whisky; Napoleon's hangover is announced as a dying illness, and the commandment against alcohol is quietly amended.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XVI
Diana drinks three tumblers of what she takes for raspberry cordial but is Marilla's currant wine and goes home intoxicated.
- Black Beauty, Part II
Reuben Smith rides drunk, Beauty falls and breaks his knees, Smith is killed; Beauty is left scarred and devalued.
- BUtterfield 8, Throughout
Speakeasy drinking, hangovers and the role of alcohol in every social encounter.
- Cannery Row, First and second parties
Drink fuels both parties, destructively and joyfully.
- Ceremony, Bar scenes with Harley, Leroy and Emo
Veterans' drinking, boasting and the outbreak of violence; Tayo's attack on Emo.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. II
Survey of methods of avoiding suffering: intoxication as the crudest and most effective chemical method, with the danger that it wastes energy; killing the drives as in yoga; sublimation; fantasy; flight into neurosis or psychosis; love; beauty.
- Complete Poems, Various poems across the collections
Drinking, hangovers and night-time wakefulness as part of the speaker's romantic misery.
- Confessions, Book IX.8
Monica as a girl falls into a habit of sipping wine from the cellar until rebuked by a servant.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- David Copperfield, Ch. 15–16, 25, 39
Mr Wickfield's increasing reliance on port wine and Heep's exploitation of it.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic
Physical discipline for students: diet, abstinence from spirits, manual labour, sleep, silence, solitude and cleanliness, and the claim that these physical causes act on intellect and morals.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Ch. VI
Troy plies the workers with brandy and water at the harvest supper while the storm gathers.
- Faust, Part One, Scenes V-VI, Auerbach's Cellar and Witches' Kitchen
Conjured wine for Leipzig drinkers, and the witch's potion that takes thirty years from Faust's body.
- Fragments, DK 117–118
The drunk man with a moist soul led by a boy; the dry soul as wisest.
- Hard Times, Book the First, Chapter XIII
Rachael nurses Stephen's drunken wife through the night; Stephen watches in a half-dream as his wife reaches toward the bottle marked poison, and Rachael wakes and takes it from her.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4 and Act 3, Scene 3
Falstaff's tavern bill, his age and girth, and his jokes on Bardolph's burning face.
- Henry V, Act 3, Scene 6
Fluellen describes Bardolph's face as all bubukles and whelks just before he is hanged; Henry admits his people are much enfeebled with sickness.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.
- Instructions for His Generals, Articles on subsistence and sutlers
Bread supply, field bakeries and the regulated sale of beer and brandy to troops.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, The Cyclops
Odysseus makes Polyphemus drunk on Maron's wine before blinding him.
- John Adams, Part III
Charles Adams's decline and death in 1800 during his father's last months as president.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Second, Ch. VII
After the college master's rebuff Jude drinks in a Christminster tavern and recites the Creed in Latin to the company.
- Kidnapped, Chapter VIII
The drunken mate Mr. Shuan beats the cabin boy Ransome to death, and the officers' later behavior shows the drink and guilt aboard.
- Laws, Book II
Age limits on wine, and wine as Dionysus' gift for softening the sourness of old age.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 5
Marlow visits the Patna's chief engineer in hospital, raving in delirium tremens about pink toads under the bed; the hospital doctor comments on the case.
- Lysistrata and Other Plays, The Acharnians, finale
Lamachus returns wounded and calls for the doctor Pittalus while Dicaeopolis revels.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3
The drunken Porter on the three things drink provokes.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 13–14 (Ch. 44–45)
News that Tom has fallen dangerously ill with fever after a drinking bout and a fall; his return home and nursing.
- Middlemarch, Book VII, Chapters LXIX-LXX
Raffles's illness at Stone Court, Lydgate's instructions on opium dosage and no alcohol, and Bulstrode's fatal omissions.
- On Liberty, Ch. IV, Of the Limits to the Authority of Society
The United Kingdom Alliance's case for prohibition and its doctrine of 'social rights' against the drink trade, which Mill rejects.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Drunkenness as self-regarding unless tied to violence; taxation of stimulants; the opium import ban in China and the Maine Law listed as interferences with buyers.
- On the Road, Throughout
Marathon drives, all-night jazz clubs and continuous drinking, with sleep deprivation treated as a kind of ecstasy.
- Othello, Act 2, Scene 3
Cassio, who says he has a poor brain for drinking, is pressed to drink on watch, brawls with Montano, and afterwards laments the loss of his reputation.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Samsara'
Siddhartha's gradual decline into gambling, wine and satiety, ending in self-disgust.
- Tales (Selection), The Cask of Amontillado, the descent into the vaults
Montresor plies Fortunato, who already has a cough from the damp, with Medoc and De Grâve as they pass through nitre-encrusted catacombs.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 50–52
In a drunken quarrel Alexander kills Cleitus, then lies prostrate with remorse for days.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Germania 22–23
German drinking habits, quarrels at feasts, and deliberation over drink; their beer-like beverage.
- The Arthashastra, Book 2 (superintendent of liquor)
Regulation of the production and sale of alcoholic drinks and the conduct of drinking houses.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, first messenger speech
The bacchants nurse animals, strike the ground for water and wine, and tear cattle apart.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Borrowers, Later chapters, Great-Aunt Sophy's bedroom
The bedridden old lady sees Pod borrowing and attributes him to her decanter of Madeira.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Rebellion and holiness
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet II
Among the shepherds Enkidu is given bread and beer for the first time; he drinks seven jugs, becomes merry, and washes and anoints himself.
- The Fall, Chapter 5
He describes trying to quiet the memory with alcohol and debauchery, and the sense of relief they gave.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 45
Marius, aged and drinking heavily, falls ill with pleurisy and in delirium imagines himself fighting Mithridates.
- The Great Gatsby, Chapter II
The drunken apartment party ends when Tom breaks Myrtle's nose with his open hand.
- The Great Gatsby, Chapter VII
Tom accuses Gatsby of selling grain alcohol over the counter through drugstores in New York and Chicago.
- The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, The Argonauts, Part VI
Cheiron is wounded by a poisoned arrow after the fight over Heracles's wine-jar and, unable to die, gives his immortality to Prometheus to end his pain.
- The Histories, Book 6.75, 84
Cleomenes goes mad and mutilates himself with a knife; the Spartans blame his habit of drinking unmixed wine.
- The Idiot, Part IV, Chapters IV-V
General Ivolgin's drinking, collapse in the street and death after a stroke.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Three Tools of Death, Brown's explanation
A teetotal philanthropist relapses into drink and tries to kill himself; the rope, knife and pistol were used to restrain him.
- The Koran, Sura 2:219; 5:90–91
Wine and gambling: first described as containing sin and some benefit, later forbidden as works of Satan.
- The Last of the Mohicans, Chapter XI
Magua tells Cora how fire-water led him into Munro's camp and to a public flogging.
- The Little Prince, Chapter XII
The tippler explains that he drinks to forget his shame, and that he is ashamed of drinking.
- The Magician's Nephew, Chapter 11 onward
The frightened Uncle Andrew, planted and watered by the animals, keeps asking for brandy.
- The Poetic Edda, Hovamol, stanzas 11-14
Warnings that ale weakens a man's mastery of his mind, followed by Othin's confession of drunkenness in Gunnloth's house and the heron of forgetfulness.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Power and the Glory, Opening section with Mr. Tench
The dentist's decayed professional life and the priest's search for brandy establish bodily and spiritual malaise together.
- The Power and the Glory, Village and flight chapters
The priest's craving for alcohol recurs alongside fear, fatigue, hunger and the need to perform sacraments.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IV: Habit
Plasticity of nervous tissue, practical maxims for breaking bad habits, and the drunkard who excuses each lapse though his nerve cells register it.
- The Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál, the mead of poetry
Kvasir's blood mixed with honey becomes a mead that makes whoever drinks it a poet or scholar; Odin wins it by seduction and shape-changing.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, Odour of Chrysanthemums
Walter Bates is brought home dead from the pit; his wife and mother wash and dress the body in the parlour.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 39–41
Food, drink, wine and meal times are regulated with moderation and adaptation.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Rip Van Winkle
Rip drinks repeatedly from the ninepin players' flagon, sleeps twenty years, and on waking at first blames the flagon; later he cannot say who he is before the village crowd.
- The Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, ch. 10
Laws about drinking and sobriety explained by the needs of hot and cold climates.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter X
Queen Borghild offers Sinfjotli the horn three times; Sigmund, by then very drunk, tells him to strain the venom out with his lip, and he dies at once.
- The Symposium, Symposium setting
The guests regulate drinking after earlier excess, making intoxication part of the social frame.
- The Symposium, Alcibiades speech
A drunken Alcibiades describes erotic fixation, shame and failed seduction of Socrates.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Induction, Scene 2
The Lord's servants persuade Sly that he has been mad for fifteen years, mention his physicians' orders, and announce a comedy as a remedy for melancholy.
- The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 2; Act 3, Scene 2
Stephano's wine makes Caliban drunk and devoted; the three conspirators plot while tipsy.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter IV
At the Markhams' tea party Lawrence defends Helen's plan of teaching her son to loathe wine, comparing it to the general wisdom of abstaining from laudanum.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter XXII
Huntingdon tells Helen how Lowborough forswore drink but kept a private bottle of laudanum, then relapsed into spirits at the club.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapters XXIX–XXXI
Huntingdon returns from London seasons worn out and irritable, and the gatherings at Grassdale descend into drunken scenes that Helen records.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter XLI
Helen describes giving her son wine dosed with tartar-emetic until he is disgusted by every kind of liquor, and her fear that he may inherit the taste.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapters XLVII–XLIX
Helen's letters report Huntingdon's hunting injury, his half-delirium and thirst, the doctor's order to bleed him, his relapse into wine, the onset of mortification, and his death.
- The Theory of the Leisure Class, Chapter Four
Intoxicating beverages and narcotics as honorific goods; infirmities from over-indulgence regarded among some peoples as manly attributes.
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, Chapter V
Turnbull, still drunk from his daughter's wedding, fears losing his job and gladly lets Hannay take his place.
- The Underdogs, Camp and march episodes
The fighters' drinking, hunger, fatigue and casual violence create a field medicine atmosphere without stable institutions.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures IX and X: Conversion
Sudden and gradual conversion explained through subconscious incubation, with cases of drunkards rescued by religious experience, including S. H. Hadley.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism
The four marks of mystical states; alcohol as the exciter of the 'Yes function'; nitrous oxide and ether revelations; epileptic auras and the darker 'diabolical mysticism' of insanity.
- This Side of Paradise, Book One, Ch. 1
Amory's appendix bursts on an ocean liner, the ship turns back, and after the operation Beatrice suffers a 'nervous breakdown' the narrator likens to delirium tremens; Amory is sent to Minneapolis.
- This Side of Paradise, Book Two, Ch. 2
Amory's three-week binge after Rosalind leaves him, ended by the coming of Prohibition.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 20
Dolphus Raymond shows the children that his paper sack holds only Coca-Cola.
- Travels with My Aunt, Travel episodes
Alcohol, risk and movement become comic antidotes to Henry's stagnant safety.
- Treasure Island, Admiral Benbow chapters
Billy Bones's heavy drinking, stroke-like collapse and death bring alcohol, vascular crisis and fear into the opening.
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Part V (homecoming)
Recurring nightmares of the Bird, flashbacks, drinking and despair before the 1949 crusade.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XII; Chapter XVIII
Lucy drowns herself from Haley's boat after her child is sold; old Prue drinks to forget the child she lost.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XLII
Legree drinks recklessly and dies raving and screaming of visions.
- Uncle Vanya, Act II
Serebrakoff, sleepless with gout, fears angina and complains of old age; he refuses to see Astroff, whom he had sent for, and is soothed by Marina with linden tea; Astroff drinks with Vanya.
- Understood Betsy, Chapters VIII-IX
'Lias Brewster's hunger and neglect, and his stepfather's selling the new clothes for whiskey.
- Walden, Higher Laws
Thoreau's case for water as the only drink for a wise man, set against wine, coffee, tea and the opium-eater's heaven.
- White Fang, Part IV, Chapter II
Beauty Smith plies Grey Beaver with whisky until the trader's craving consumes his money and goods and he sells White Fang for bottles.
- Wuthering Heights, Hindley's decline
Hindley's alcoholism, gambling and violence after Frances's death damage Hareton and the household.
Quotes
“But is not a man drunk and sober the same person? why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it”
“To define drunkenness, to know that it is caused by vapours which rise from the stomach and cloud the seat of intelligence, is quite a different thing to being drunk.”
“A man, when he gets drunk, is led by a beardless lad, tripping, knowing not where he steps, having his soul moist.”
“For the effect of the wine, does but remove Dissimulation; and take from them the sight of the deformity of their Passions”
“it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance”
“Drunkenness, for example, in ordinary cases, is not a fit subject for legislative interference”
Frequently cited
“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!”
“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts”
“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities”
“It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness”
“is it justice to make evil and then punish for it? Magua was not himself; it was the fire-water that spoke and acted for him!”
“Less good there lies | than most believe In ale for mortal men; For the more he drinks | the less does man Of his mind the mastery hold.”
“Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar”
Frequently cited
“It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.”
“I am determined to enlist all the powers of association in my service;”
“Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence.”
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”
“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”
“After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens”
“The advent of prohibition with the “thirsty-first” put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory’s sorrows”
“One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst.”