12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Death Dying
Deathbeds, the experience of dying, the good death, palliation, euthanasia.
Works
A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
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.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gathers Flannery O'Connor's early fiction around Southern households where manners, piety, resentment, and violence collide. In the title story, a grandmother's nostalgia and manipulations help divert a family trip toward the Misfit, whose murders expose both her shallow goodness and her final reach toward kinship.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter.
Al-Razi's treatise, known in Arabic as Kitab al-Judari wa al-Hasba (The Book of Smallpox and Measles), is a short practical monograph in fourteen chapters by the leading physician of the Abbasid world. It is usually described as the earliest surviving work devoted to these diseases and the first to set out clearly how to tell them apart at the bedside.
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.
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel about a real man who was born in Africa around 1710, enslaved in Massachusetts, and died free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Its ten chapters carry dates.
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.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua is John Henry Newman's defence of his honesty, written in 1864 in reply to the novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, who had written in Macmillan's Magazine that truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy and that Father Newman taught it need not be. After an exchange of letters and a pamphlet by Kingsley, Newman decided that the only adequate answer was a history of his own mind.
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie is the steel manufacturer's own story of his life, written mostly in summers at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands after his retirement and left unfinished when the First World War began in August 1914. His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, contributes a preface, and Professor John C. Van Dyke, who arranged the manuscript, adds an editor's note and footnotes; the book appeared in 1920, the year after Carnegie's death.
Because I could not stop for Death is Emily Dickinson's most famous poem about dying, written in Amherst around 1862-1863, the years of her greatest productivity and of the Civil War. It was not printed until 1890, four years after her death, when Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson included it in the first collection of her Poems under the title The Chariot.
Beowulf remembers a northern heroic world through three combats that join glory to mortality. Hrothgar's hall Heorot, built as a center of gift-giving and song, becomes a place of terror when Grendel attacks the sleeping retainers.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Black Ships Before Troy is Rosemary Sutcliff's prose retelling of the Trojan War for young readers, in nineteen short chapters. Although subtitled The Story of the Iliad, it begins long before Homer's poem and ends after it.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer is a full-length popular biography of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), written for a general Christian readership. It begins with the large, cultured Bonhoeffer family of Breslau and Berlin: his father Karl, a leading professor of psychiatry and neurology; his devout mother Paula, who schooled her children at home in their early years; his twin sister Sabine; and the death of his brother Walter in the First World War, which marked the family deeply.
Botchan is a comic first-person novel about a hot-tempered, stubbornly honest young man from Tokyo who spends a few months teaching mathematics in a provincial middle school and cannot bear the scheming he finds there. The narrator is never named; the old family servant Kiyo calls him Botchan, roughly 'young master', which this translation renders as Master Darling.
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.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
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.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is a fictionalized biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773–1838), the self-taught Salem mathematician whose New American Practical Navigator became the standard American guide to navigation at sea. It opens in Salem, Massachusetts, during the Revolutionary War, when Nat is a small boy in a seafaring family led by his father, Captain Habakkuk Bowditch.
Charlotte's Web opens at breakfast on the Arable farm, when eight-year-old Fern learns that her father is going out to kill the runt of a new litter of pigs. She protests so fiercely against killing a creature for being small that he gives her the piglet to raise.
Villehardouin's chronicle is the eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade by one of its leaders. It opens in 1198-99 with the preaching of Fulk of Neuilly and the indulgence proclaimed by Pope Innocent III, and with a tournament at Écry in Champagne where Count Thibaut of Champagne and Count Louis of Blois take the cross, soon joined by Count Baldwin of Flanders.
The Chronographia of Michael Psellos is a history of the Byzantine court across roughly a century, from the accession of Basil II in 976 to the reign of Michael VII Doukas in the 1070s. It is arranged by reign rather than by year and covers fourteen emperors and empresses.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
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.
Cranford is a small English country town, twenty miles by railway from the busy commercial city of Drumble, where nearly every householder of the better sort is a single lady or a widow. The narrator, Mary Smith, a young woman from Drumble, visits often and describes their code: calls of exactly fifteen minutes, card parties with wafer bread-and-butter, and an 'elegant economy' that treats spending as vulgar and never names poverty.
On the night of 11 January 1983 Nancy Beth Cruzan, a young Missouri woman, lost control of her car on a county road in Jasper County. Paramedics restored her breathing and heartbeat, but she never regained consciousness, and the trial court later found her to be in a persistent vegetative state, kept alive by a surgically implanted feeding tube in a state hospital.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
Cyrano de Bergerac is Edmond Rostand's five-act verse play about a seventeenth-century Gascon soldier, poet and swordsman whose enormous nose convinces him that no woman could love him. Act I opens in 1640 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in Paris.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
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.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
The Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731 at the monastery of Jarrow, tells how the peoples of Britain received the Christian faith. A dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria explains that history offers good examples to imitate and bad ones to shun, and names his informants, chief among them Abbot Albinus of Canterbury and the priest Nothelm, who searched the papal archives in Rome.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Gray's Elegy is a meditation spoken at dusk in a village churchyard. In the opening stanzas the curfew bell rings, the cattle wind home, the ploughman plods away, and the speaker is left alone with the darkening fields, an owl complaining from the ivied tower, and the grassy mounds where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one, is the clever, handsome and wealthy mistress of Hartfield, a house in the Surrey village of Highbury, where she keeps company with her fond, fretful and health-obsessed widowed father. When her governess and friend Miss Taylor marries the genial widower Mr. Weston, Emma credits herself with the match and resolves to arrange more.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an American city of an unspecified future where houses are fireproof and firemen no longer put out fires but start them, burning books and the houses of people who hide them. Guy Montag, a fireman of ten years, loves the work.
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is an anthology of Irish fairy lore, ghost stories, legends and comic tales chosen and introduced by the young W. B. Yeats. Rather than collecting stories himself, Yeats gathered the best versions already printed by nineteenth-century Irish writers and folklorists: Thomas Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Samuel Lover, Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, Letitia Maclintock, Douglas Hyde and others, along with poems by William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Edward Walsh and Yeats himself.
This selection gathers fourteen of Hans Christian Andersen's most loved fairy tales, written between 1835 and 1845, in the English versions revised and partly newly translated by the Scottish scholar W. A. Craigie for Oxford University Press in 1914. In The Tinder-Box a returning soldier fetches a magic tinder-box from a hollow tree for a witch, keeps it, and with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes wins a princess and a kingdom.
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.
Lou Gehrig's farewell speech was delivered at Yankee Stadium on 4 July 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, between the games of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators. Two months earlier Gehrig, whose strength had been failing for a season, had taken himself out of the lineup in Detroit, ending his streak of 2,130 consecutive games.
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Germ Theory Papers gathers four scientific papers that the Harvard Classics printed together in 1910, in the volume of Scientific Papers that also contains Harvey: one by the Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister and three by the French chemist Louis Pasteur. Each comes with the series' brief introductory note on its author.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months.
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.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
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.
The first two books of Procopius's History of the Wars tell the long contest between the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and Sasanian Persia, from the early fifth century to 549. Procopius opens by declaring that he writes so that great deeds will not be lost, that he was an eyewitness as adviser to Belisarius, and that truth alone suits history.
Death, be not proud is one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, a group of religious sonnets probably written around 1609-1610, circulated in manuscript among friends and printed only after his death in the Poems of 1633. In Herbert Grierson's 1912 edition, followed here, it is Holy Sonnet X; the numbering differs among manuscripts and early printings.
Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John are pastoral expositions of one of Christianity's most theologically dense texts. Preached to a congregation rather than composed as a detached treatise, they move through John's prologue, signs, discourses, passion narrative, resurrection appearances, and final scenes with Peter and the beloved disciple.
Household Stories is Lucy Crane's English translation of fifty-two tales chosen from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in London by Macmillan in 1882 with pictures by her brother Walter Crane; the library text follows a later reprint and omits the illustrations. The selection mixes the most famous wonder tales with comic stories, animal fables and short nursery pieces.
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.
I Will Fight No More Forever is the message of surrender that Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce sent to General Oliver O. Howard and Colonel Nelson A. Miles on 5 October 1877, at the end of the siege at the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana Territory. Since June the non-treaty Nez Perce bands, some 750 people including many women, children, and elderly, had retreated more than a thousand miles from Idaho, through the Bitterroot Mountains, across Yellowstone, and north toward refuge in Canada, fighting a series of engagements with the army along the way.
In Flanders Fields is a fifteen-line poem written in early May 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the battle in which German forces first used chlorine gas on the Western Front. By the traditional account, McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed by a shell on 2 May, in a small cemetery near his dressing station beside the Yser canal, where wild poppies were blooming among the graves.
Institutes of the Christian Religion is John Calvin's ordered account of Christian doctrine, written to train readers in godliness and to show the King of France what his persecuted evangelical subjects actually believed. The library text opens with the Prefatory Address to Francis I, which pleads that the Reformers teach nothing new but the faith of Scripture and the early fathers, and with Calvin's Epistle to the Reader, dated Geneva, 1 August 1559, in which he says he was never satisfied until the work was set in its present order.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is narrated by Karana, a girl of about twelve who lives in the village of Ghalas-at on a small island off the California coast in the early nineteenth century; her people call it the Island of the Blue Dolphins. A red-sailed ship brings Captain Orlov, a Russian, and a crew of Aleut hunters, who ask Karana's father, Chief Chowig, to let them take sea otter in exchange for goods.
Ivanhoe is set in England in 1194, when King Richard the Lion-Hearted is making his way home in secret after captivity in Austria and his brother Prince John is scheming to take the crown. More than a century after the Norman Conquest, Saxons and Normans are still bitterly divided.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
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.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
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.
The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral songs he and others gathered in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Its fifty runes, or cantos, follow the deeds of the people of Kalevala, chiefly the old singer and sage Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the reckless Lemminkäinen, and their long rivalry with Louhi, mistress of the cold northern land of Pohjola.
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.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Le Morte d'Arthur is Thomas Malory's English prose gathering of the Arthurian legend, from the hero's conception to the death of the last knights of the Round Table. Uther Pendragon, with Merlin's help, begets Arthur on Igraine, and the child is raised secretly by Sir Ector.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West. The narrative begins with Martin's birth in Pannonia, upbringing in Italy, and reluctant military service.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is a collection of biographies of Italian artists from the late thirteenth century to Vasari's own day, arranged to tell the story of how the arts of design, after their decline in late antiquity, were reborn in Tuscany and brought to perfection in the age of Michelangelo. The library text is the first of the ten volumes of Gaston du C. de Vere's English translation of the 1568 edition, published 1912-1915.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives set the life of a famous Greek beside that of a famous Roman, so that each could be measured by the other. Twenty-three pairs survive, most closed by a short Comparison in which Plutarch weighs the two men, together with four single Lives: Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho.
Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives.
This volume gathers comic pieces that Jane Austen wrote as a teenager at Steventon rectory, between about 1790 and 1793, and copied into the notebook she called Volume the Second. The title work, 'Love and Freindship', dated 13 June 1790 when she was fourteen, is a novel in fifteen letters parodying the sentimental fiction of the day.
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.
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.
Mark Antony's funeral oration, which opens Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, is the turning point of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599). Caesar has been stabbed to death in the Capitol by Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman nicknamed Mother Courage, who hauls her covered wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years' War selling food, drink, boots and belts to soldiers. The play covers twelve years, from 1624 to 1636, in twelve scenes, each introduced by a written caption that tells the audience in advance what will happen.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
Much Ado About Nothing is set in Messina, Sicily, where the governor Leonato welcomes Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, and his officers home from a victorious war. With the Prince come the young Florentine lord Claudio and the witty Paduan soldier Benedick, and also the Prince's sullen half-brother Don John, lately reconciled after a rebellion.
No Exit and Three Other Plays is an American collection of four of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays from the years of the German occupation and just after it, in which his philosophy of freedom and responsibility is worked out on the stage. Stuart Gilbert translated No Exit and The Flies, and Lionel Abel translated Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute.
Notes from Underground is a short novel in two parts, presented as the private notes of an unnamed retired civil servant of forty who lives in a shabby room on the edge of St. Petersburg. A footnote signed by the author explains that the writer of the notes is imaginary but represents a type produced by Russian society of the time.
O Captain! My Captain!
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
This small volume presents Montaigne's celebrated essay on friendship together with other essays from the Essais in M. A. Screech's translation. The title essay, 'Of Friendship' (Book I, Chapter 28 in modern numbering), was written as a memorial to Étienne de La Boétie, the young magistrate and humanist whom Montaigne met in Bordeaux around 1558 and who died in 1563.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows a single winter day, from reveille at five in the morning to lights-out, in a Soviet special labour camp on the steppe of Kazakhstan in the early 1950s. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant from the village of Temgenyovo, was captured by the Germans in 1942, escaped back to his own lines, and was charged with treason as a supposed German spy; he signed a confession because refusing meant being shot.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Paradise Lost is John Milton's epic in twelve books of blank verse on the fall of man, written, as the opening invocation says, to assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men. It begins in the middle of things.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Pericles' Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered in the winter of 431/430 BC at the public burial of the citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. It survives only in the History of Thucydides, who heard Pericles speak and who says of the speeches in his work that he kept as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
Prince Caspian begins a year after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are waiting on a railway platform on their way back to school when they are pulled out of England and set down on a wooded island beside a ruined castle.
Psalm 23 is a six-verse song of trust, headed in the Hebrew Psalter as a psalm of David and placed in the first book of Psalms, between the anguished cry of Psalm 22 and the processional hymn of Psalm 24. Its speaker never asks for anything.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
Saint Joan is Shaw's chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy who led the French against the English in the Hundred Years' War. In Scene I, set in 1429 at the castle of Vaucouleurs, the blustering squire Robert de Baudricourt is talked by Joan, and by his own officer Poulengey, into giving her a horse and an escort to the Dauphin; when she leaves, the hens that had stopped laying begin again.
Sam the Minuteman is an easy-to-read story of the first battle of the American Revolution, told through a boy who lives through it. Sam Brown lives with his mother and father on a farm in Lexington, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1775.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Shane is a short Western novel in sixteen chapters, told years afterward by Bob Starrett, who was about eleven in the summer of 1889 when a stranger rode into his family's Wyoming valley. The rider, dressed in dark, fine clothes and calling himself only Shane, stops at the homestead of Joe Starrett, Bob's father, and Joe's wife, Marian.
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.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are!
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces. The stories are short, often only a few pages, and are among the defining works of American postmodern fiction.
These three Senate speeches were the central statements in the long debate of 1850 over the lands won from Mexico, and the last great addresses of the three statesmen of their generation. The Mexican War had added California and the Southwest.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive. Becket's political story is familiar: the brilliant royal chancellor becomes archbishop of Canterbury, clashes with Henry II over ecclesiastical liberty and royal jurisdiction, goes into exile, returns under tense compromise, and is killed in the cathedral on 29 December 1170 by knights acting in the atmosphere of the king's fury.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles. The historical core is modest.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
Surprised by Joy is C. S. Lewis's account of his life from early childhood to his acceptance of Christianity in 1931. Lewis says in his preface that the book is not a full autobiography but the story of his conversion, and that it follows one thread: his experience of what he calls Joy, a sudden, piercing longing for something unnamed that is itself more desirable than any ordinary satisfaction.
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.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
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 Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
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 Alexiad is the life and reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118), written by his daughter Anna in fifteen books. In her preface Anna introduces herself as born in the purple and trained in Aristotle and Plato, explains that her husband, the Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios, had begun a history of her father but died of an illness brought home from campaign, and promises to praise or blame as the facts require.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea.
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 Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
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 Black Arrow is set in England during the Wars of the Roses, when York and Lancaster fought for the crown and lesser lords changed sides as fortune moved. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is the young ward of Sir Daniel Brackley, a grasping knight who holds the Moat House at Tunstall and has grown rich by seizing other men's lands.
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
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 of Constantinople, 1453 is Steven Runciman's narrative of the siege and capture of the Byzantine capital by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, published by Cambridge University Press in 1965 to mark more than five centuries since the event. In about 250 pages it sets the background, narrates the siege of spring 1453 day by day, and follows the consequences for the Greeks, the Turks and Europe.
This record surveys the eyewitness and near-contemporary narratives of the Ottoman siege and capture of Constantinople, from 6 April to 29 May 1453, and the perspectives each brings. The library does not include a full text: the accounts were written in Italian, Greek, Latin and Ottoman Turkish, and the standard English translations (Barbaro by J. R. Melville Jones, 1969; Sphrantzes by Marios Philippides, 1980; Doukas by Harry J. Magoulias, 1975) are under copyright, so no quotations are given.
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 Fate of Rome is a history of the Roman Empire from its height in the second century AD to the crises of the seventh, written by the classicist Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press in 2017 in its series on the history of the ancient world. Its argument is that the empire's long story cannot be told only through emperors, armies and barbarian peoples: changes in climate and the arrival of new infectious diseases were active forces that repeatedly struck a society whose own success had made it vulnerable.
Jonas is eleven and lives with his father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, his mother, who holds an important post in the Department of Justice, and his younger sister Lily in a tidy, enclosed Community where nearly everything is decided for its citizens. Families are assigned, each with one son and one daughter; babies are born to Birthmothers and given out at the yearly December Ceremony; children receive bicycles at Nine and jobs at Twelve; precise language is enforced with public apologies; everyone takes a daily pill once the Stirrings of adolescent desire begin; and those who break the rules three times, the old, and newborns who fail to thrive are "released" to a vague Elsewhere.
The Golden Bough sets out to explain one strange rule. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban Hills near Rome, the priest, called the King of the Wood, held office until a runaway slave broke a bough from a certain tree and killed him in single combat, becoming priest in turn.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
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 Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet system of prisons, labour camps and exile, which he likened to an archipelago of islands scattered across the country, visible only to those taken there. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the testimony of some two hundred and twenty-seven other former prisoners, together with published Soviet sources.
The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie.
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.
The Histories is Tacitus's narrative of the Roman Empire from 1 January AD 69 onward. It originally ran to Domitian's death in 96, but only Books I-IV and the first part of Book V survive, covering about eighteen months.
Book VI of Polybius's Histories interrupts his narrative of the Second Punic War at its darkest moment for Rome, the defeat at Cannae in 216 BC, to explain how a city that had just lost an army could recover and, within fifty-three years, bring nearly the whole known world under its power. His answer is the Roman constitution.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
The History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire runs in seventy-one chapters from the age of the Antonines in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the condition of the city of Rome in the fifteenth century. The library holds a selection from the Milman edition, with Gibbon's footnotes and the added notes of the editors: Chapters I to III, the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West that close the third volume, and Chapter LXVIII on Mahomet the Second and the capture of Constantinople.
The History of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
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 Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel.
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 Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
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 Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Battle tells of the end of Narnia, some two hundred years after the reign of Caspian X. Beside Caldron Pool, under the great waterfall in the far west, lives Shift, a clever, ugly old Ape, with his simple friend Puzzle the Donkey, whom he bullies. When a lion's skin washes down the falls, Shift sews it into a coat for Puzzle and, showing him by firelight in a stable on a hill, announces to the Narnians that Aslan has returned.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer.
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.
Izaak Walton's Lives are short, affectionate biographies of English churchmen, written by a London tradesman and angler who loved the Church of England and the men who served it. The library text is the second volume of the Cassell's National Library edition of 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition with Austin Dobson's notes, and contains three of the five lives: Richard Hooker (first published 1665), George Herbert (1670) and Robert Sanderson (1678); the lives of Donne and Wotton belong to the first volume and are not included.
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 Mayflower Compact is a single paragraph of about two hundred words, signed on 11 November 1620 (Old Style; 21 November by the modern calendar) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor in the hook of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. The ship had left Plymouth, England, in September with about a hundred passengers.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's attempt to understand how the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which she treats as a new form of government without precedent, could arise out of European history. It was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951 (in Britain as The Burden of Our Time).
The Pearl is a short novella in six chapters, framed as a folk tale retold in the Gulf town of La Paz, on the coast of Baja California. Kino, a poor pearl diver, lives in a brush house by the shore with his wife, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The narrator, presenting himself as a researcher, announces that the Opera ghost really existed and that he has proved it from archives, the memories of old employees and the papers of a mysterious Persian. In the 1880s the ballet girls of the Paris Opera whisper about a ghost in evening dress with a death's head; the scene-shifter Joseph Buquet, who claims to have seen him, is found hanged in the third cellar.
The Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
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 Popol Vuh, the Book of the Mat or Council Book, is the sacred and historical book of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala, written in K'iche' by anonymous nobles in the 1550s and preserved in Francisco Ximénez's copy of about 1701. The library's text is not a full translation but Lewis Spence's 1908 English study, which retells and partly translates the first books from Brasseur de Bourbourg's French and Ximénez's Spanish and then comments on them.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
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 Practice of the Presence of God gathers four conversations with, and fifteen letters by, Brother Lawrence, a lay brother of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris who spent his days in the friary kitchen. The conversations were written down by a visitor, traditionally identified as Joseph de Beaufort, who first met him on 3 August 1666.
The Prince and the Pauper opens in London in October 1537, when two boys are born on the same day: Edward Tudor, longed-for son of Henry VIII, and Tom Canty, unwanted son of a thief in Offal Court, off Pudding Lane. Tom is beaten by his father John and his grandmother, but his gentle mother and sisters Nan and Bet love him, and the old priest Father Andrew teaches him reading, a little Latin, and tales of kings.
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 Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
The Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Screwtape Letters is a book of thirty-one letters written by Screwtape, a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter on his first assignment. Wormwood's charge is a young Englishman, never named and called only the patient, who lives with his mother at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
The Silver Chair begins behind the gym at Experiment House, a muddled modern boarding school where bullies rule. Jill Pole is crying there when Eustace Scrubb, much changed since his voyage on the Dawn Treader, tells her about Narnia.
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.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
The Song of Roland transforms a historical rearguard action in Charlemagne's Spanish campaign into a sacred and feudal epic of loyalty, betrayal, martyrdom, and judgment. The plot turns on Ganelon's resentment.
The Souls of Black Folk is a book of fourteen chapters framed by a short Forethought and Afterthought, in which W. E. B. Du Bois sets out to show readers what it meant to be Black in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. He announces his subject at once: the great problem of the new century is the color line.
The Story of a Soul is the autobiography of Thérèse Martin, a young Carmelite nun of Lisieux in Normandy, written at the request of her superiors in the last years of her short life and published a year after her death. In the library text, Thomas N. Taylor's 1912 translation, it is arranged in eleven chapters addressed to her sister Pauline, by then Mother Agnes of Jesus, and framed by a prologue on her parents and birth and an epilogue on her final illness.
The Stranger is a short novel in two parts narrated by Meursault, a young shipping clerk in Algiers in French Algeria, who reports what he sees and feels in plain, flat sentences and seldom explains himself. Part One, in six chapters, covers about eighteen days.
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 Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
The Travels of Ibn Battuta is the account of a Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier in June 1325, aged twenty-one, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not settle at home again until 1349. Its Arabic title, given by its editor Ibn Juzayy, means A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling; it is usually called simply the Rihla, the Journey.
The Trial follows Josef K., a respected chief clerk at a large bank in an unnamed city, from the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when two warders appear in his lodgings and tell him he is under arrest, to the eve of his thirty-first, when two men in frock coats lead him to a quarry and kill him. Neither K. nor the reader ever learns what he is accused of or what law he has broken.
This volume gathers three Euripides plays about what the Trojan War left behind: The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert Murray's rhyming verse, and Hecuba in Michael Wodhull's blank verse of 1782. The Trojan Women opens on the smoking ruins of Troy.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
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 Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Waning of the Middle Ages is a study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Burgundian Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Huizinga, a Dutch professor of history, published it in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, literally the autumn-tide of the Middle Ages.
The Waste Land is a poem of 433 lines in five parts, dedicated to Ezra Pound and prefaced by a Latin and Greek epigraph from Petronius in which the Sibyl of Cumae, shrivelled in a jar, says she wants to die. Part I, The Burial of the Dead, opens with April as the cruellest month, stirring memory and desire in a dead land.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a historical novel in twenty-one chapters set in Connecticut Colony in 1687 and 1688. Katherine Tyler, called Kit, is sixteen and has grown up in freedom and comfort on her grandfather's plantation in Barbados.
Walter Hartright, a young London drawing-master, is engaged through his Italian friend Professor Pesca to teach watercolour at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. Walking home across Hampstead Heath late on the night before he leaves, he is touched on the shoulder by a woman dressed entirely in white who asks the way to London and speaks fondly of Limmeridge; soon after, two men in a chaise ask a policeman whether he has seen a woman escaped from an asylum.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
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.
Through Gates of Splendor is Elisabeth Elliot's account of five young American missionaries who were killed in January 1956 while trying to make friendly contact with the Waorani, an isolated people of the Ecuadorian rainforest then known to outsiders as the Aucas. Elliot, the widow of one of the men, tells the story largely through the men's own letters, diaries and the recollections of their wives.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
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.
To the Lighthouse, published by the Hogarth Press in May 1927, follows the Ramsay family and their guests at a holiday house on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, across one evening before the First World War and one morning ten years later. Virginia Woolf tells it almost entirely through the passing thoughts of her characters, so that small events, a remark about the weather, a dinner, a brushstroke, carry the weight of a lifetime.
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.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
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.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
Washington had made it a crime to aid a suicide since its first territorial legislature acted in 1854. In January 1994 four physicians who treat terminally ill patients, led by Dr. Harold Glucksberg, joined three gravely ill patients (who died while the case was pending) and the nonprofit group Compassion in Dying in a suit in federal court.
Washington: A Life is Ron Chernow's single-volume biography of George Washington, published in October 2010 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011. Chernow's central aim is to replace the remote, marble figure of patriotic legend with a man of strong passions, ambition and a fierce temper, held in check by a lifelong discipline of self-command.
Where the Red Fern Grows is narrated by Billy Colman, now a grown man in a town far from the Ozarks. Walking home from work one evening, he rescues an old redbone hound from a pack of town dogs, feeds it and lets it go home, and the encounter brings back the story of his boyhood.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
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
- 12 Years a Slave, Tibeats episode
Northup is nearly hanged and left in prolonged bodily torment after resisting Tibeats.
- A Christmas Carol, Stave IV
An unattended corpse stripped of its bed-curtains and shirt; the Cratchits mourn Tiny Tim.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 2
Dr Rank speaks of the inherited disease destroying his spine and of the final examination he is making on himself.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 3
Rank leaves his visiting card marked with a black cross to announce his approaching death.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 3
Osvald's mental collapse at sunrise; his mother stands with the morphine he made her promise to give him.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book I, Chapters IX-X
The trench-mortar shell in the dugout, Passini's mortal wound, the dressing station and the haemorrhaging soldier on the stretcher above Frederic.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book V, Chapter XLI
Catherine's long labour with gas, the doctor's advice to perform a Caesarean, the stillborn son, the repeated haemorrhages and her death.
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Grace without softness
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes disability, chronic illness, trauma, violence, family care, and the charged symbolism of bodily affliction
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter I
Stephen's fever after the ditch, the infirmary with Brother Michael, and his imagined death and the news of Parnell's death.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter III
The retreat sermons on death and hell and Stephen's physical terror and remorse afterwards.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter XIV
Prognostic signs: color, size and spacing of pustules, timing of eruption, fever after eruption, delirium and swooning as fatal signs; scarification of a threatened limb.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XVII
Huck describes the dead Emmeline Grangerford's mourning pictures and obituary poems.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapters I-II
Kemmerich in the field hospital after the amputation of his leg; the orderly refuses morphia; Kemmerich's death and the passing on of his boots.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter IX
Paul tends the French soldier he has wounded, bandaging him and giving him water through hours of dying.
- Amos Fortune, Free Man, Woburn, 1740-1779
Amos buys the sick Lily's freedom, marries her and nurses her until her death.
- Amos Fortune, Free Man, Auctioned for Freedom
Polly Burdoo is taken into the Fortune home after the vendue and dies there.
- Amos Fortune, Free Man, Evergreen Years, 1794-1801
Amos's old age and death at about ninety-one.
- Animal Farm, Chapter 1
Major tells the animals that Man will send the old horses to the knacker and that he himself has lived long only by luck.
- Animal Farm, Chapter 9
Boxer's split hoof and failing lungs, his collapse at the windmill, and his removal in the horse slaughterer's van while Squealer describes a hospital.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XXXVII
Matthew, who has had heart trouble, collapses and dies after reading of the Abbey Bank's failure.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Part VII
Mention of the Irish fever that cut off emigrants between Liverpool and Leeds, in a passage on Catholic clergy.
- Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Chapter XV
His typhoid fever of 1886 and the deaths of his mother and brother within a few days while he was ill.
- Because I could not stop for Death, Stanza 2 (Lines 5-8)
The speaker lays aside labor and leisure as Death drives slowly, an image of letting go of ordinary life at the end.
- Because I could not stop for Death, Stanza 4 (Lines 13-16)
The grave pictured as a low house half sunk in the ground, the body's resting place seen from the dead speaker's side.
- Beowulf, The dragon and the barrow
Beowulf gives this tag concrete force through the medical interest lies in battle wounds, grief, aging kingship, and the social care owed to bodies that have been broken in public violence
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Bartleby, middle and end
Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after the execution
The purser and the surgeon debate why Billy's body showed no spasm at hanging.
- Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad, Chapters 11-12
Achilles's grief for Patroclus, the mourning in the camp and the funeral pyre.
- Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad, Chapter 17, Poisoned Arrow
Philoctetes, left on Lemnos with a wound that would not heal, is brought to Troy with the bow of Heracles; Paris dies of a poisoned arrow.
- Bleak House, Chapter XXXII, The Appointed Time; Preface
Guppy and Weevle discover the greasy soot and remains of Krook; Dickens's prefatory defence of spontaneous combustion.
- Bleak House, Chapter XLVII, Jo's Will
Woodcourt attends the dying Jo in George's shooting gallery.
- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Final chapters
Buchenwald, Flossenbürg and the execution of April 1945.
- Botchan, Chapter XI
Kiyo's death from pneumonia in February and her deathbed request about her grave.
- BUtterfield 8, Final chapters
Gloria's fall from the steamboat and the public reaction to her death.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 5–6
The Lisbon earthquake, the injured Candide, and the auto-da-fé held to prevent further quakes.
- Cannery Row, La Jolla chapter
Doc finds the body of a drowned girl in the rocks while collecting specimens.
- Captains Courageous, Chapter X
Gloucester's memorial service reads the names of the fishermen lost that year.
- Carmilla, Chapter XIV, The Meeting
The General's first physician ridicules the doctor from Gratz, who declares that no natural disease exhibits Bertha's symptoms and sends a sealed letter to be read before a clergyman.
- Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, Early chapters
Deaths in the Bowditch household during Nat's boyhood and indenture.
- Charlotte's Web, Chapter XXI
Charlotte tells Wilbur she will not return to the barn and dies alone at the fairground after the crowds leave.
- Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, Boniface Is Killed in a Battle Against the Bulgarians
Boniface's arrow wound beneath the shoulder and his death from loss of blood.
- Chronographia, Reign of Michael IV
The emperor's seizures, the efforts to conceal them, and his final illness with dropsy.
- City of God, Books 13–14
Death, flesh, will and disordered desire are traced to the fall.
- City of God, Book 22
Resurrection raises questions of bodily restoration, wounds, disabilities and identity.
- Confessions, Book IV.4–9
Grief at the death of a friend: weeping, hatred of familiar places, weariness of life and fear of death.
- Confessions, Book IX.10–13
Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.
- Cranford, Ch. II
Mr Hoggins says Miss Brown cannot live many days; her sister nurses her through her last illness after their father's death.
- Cranford, Ch. XI
Mrs Brown tells how her children died in India and how she carried her last baby to safety.
- Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, Opinion of the Court, paragraph beginning The logical corollary of the doctrine of informed consent
Traces how the right to refuse treatment grew out of informed consent and how Quinlan in 1976 began the line of state end-of-life decisions.
- Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, Dissent of Justice Brennan, section A, paragraph opening with a quotation on the timing of death
Cites a federal technology-assessment report on how often deaths in hospitals and long-term care follow a decision to forgo treatment.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Death of Cuchulain (Emer's lament)
Emer asks Conall to make the grave wide, lies down beside Cuchulain and dies of grief; the two are buried under one stone.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 4, final scenes
Christian is brought back mortally wounded and dies in Roxane's arms as the Spanish attack.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 5, Scene 6
The bandaged Cyrano grows faint, wanders in speech, stands against a tree and dies sword in hand.
- Daisy Miller, Part II (closing pages)
Daisy's illness, the doctor's attendance, her death and burial in the Protestant cemetery.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 9
David learns of his mother's death and that of her newborn baby.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 48–53
Dora's illness and death, and David's grief.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop, Memory and death
Death Comes for the Archbishop gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes travel hardship, hunger, fever, aging, deathbed care, and the bodily cost of missionary life in an arid landscape
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
The English clerk's account of cholera's spread, its symptoms, mortality, the pesthouse, and the city's concealment of the epidemic.
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
Thirsty and feverish, Aschenbach eats overripe strawberries in the city; his collapse on the beach follows days later.
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, final scenes and Requiem
Willy plans his death for the insurance; the funeral and Linda's inability to cry.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Philo on why the miserable remain alive: terrified, not bribed, to continue existing; the man of delicate temper as more sensitive and therefore more unhappy.
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Encheiridion, chs. IX and XI
Disease and lameness as impediments to the body but not the will; the discipline of saying of the dead that they have been restored.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 74
Don Quixote falls into a fever, sleeps, wakes sane, renounces chivalry and dies.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Ignatius, Letter to the Romans
Ignatius frames his coming death in bodily and sacrificial language.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Martyrdom of Polycarp
Polycarp’s death is narrated as witness, endurance and communal memory.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Canticle of the Sun
Praise of bodily death gives end-of-life suffering a devotional vocabulary.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Death narratives
Francis's final weakness, song, and ritual gestures make dying a communal and liturgical event.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, Mountain Interval, "Out, Out--"
A boy's hand is cut by the buzz-saw; he begs that the doctor not amputate, is put under ether, and his pulse fades while watchers listen at his heart.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, North of Boston, The Death of the Hired Man
Mary notices how changed and worn the old hired man Silas is; Warren later finds him dead.
- East of Eden, Part Four (final chapters)
News of Aron's death in France; Adam's stroke and deathbed blessing.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book III, Chapters XXIII, XXVII and XXX
Cedd and his companions die at Lastingham; the pestilence of 664 spreads through southern England, Northumbria and Ireland; the East Saxons lapse into idolatry during the plague.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book IV, Chapter XIX
The physician Cynifrid recounts opening Ethelthryth's tumour beneath the jaw, her death, and the healed wound seen at her translation.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book V, Chapter XII
Drythelm, who seemed to have died, revives and describes a vision of the places of the dead, then lives as a penitent monk.
- Effi Briest, Final chapters (c. Ch. 33–36)
Effi's decline after Annie's visit, Rummschüttel's letter to her parents, and her death at Hohen-Cremmen.
- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Stanzas 22-23
Reflection on the dying: no one leaves life without a lingering look behind, and the parting soul relies on a loving breast and the tears of those at the bedside.
- Emma, Vol. III, Ch. IX
Mrs. Churchill dies suddenly at Richmond; the narrator observes that her death justified her long complaints, and Jane Fairfax's illness worsens.
- Essays, Book I, Ch. XIX (Cotton), 'That to study philosophy is to learn to die'
Stoic and Epicurean arguments for habitual meditation on death as a cure for fear of it.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XII, 'Of Physiognomy'
Montaigne and his household flee plague and civil war; he admires how ordinary people meet death without philosophy.
- Essays, Essay II, Of Death
Fear of death compared to children's fear of the dark; the deathbed's groans and convulsions; passions that overcome the fear of dying; death as natural as birth.
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection), Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic
Absolute monarchy called the easiest death, the euthanasia, of the British constitution.
- Ethics, Part IV, Prop. XXXIX, Note
Death defined as a change in the body's proportion of motion and rest; the Spanish poet who after illness forgot his own works.
- Evangelium Vitae, Gospel and dignity
Evangelium Vitae gives this tag concrete force through this is one of the batch's most explicit medical-ethics texts, addressing abortion, euthanasia, suffering, conscience, and care for the vulnerable
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, the old woman's house
The woman refuses to leave her books and dies in the fire she lights herself.
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, The Solitary Fairies, The Banshee note and tales
The banshee's wail before a death in the old families, the funeral keen said to imitate her cry, and the death-coach.
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Nightingale
When the mechanical bird breaks, the body physician is called in vain; later the sick emperor sees Death on his chest and is revived by the real nightingale's song.
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Little Match Girl
A barefoot, hungry child dies of cold in a corner on New Year's Eve, seeing visions of a warm stove, a roast goose, a Christmas tree and her dead grandmother.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Chs. IX–XI
Fanny's struggle along the Casterbridge highway to the Union-house, and the report of her death there.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Ch. XIII
Bathsheba opens the coffin and finds Fanny with her dead child beside her.
- Farewell to Baseball ("The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth"), Opening
Gehrig refers to the bad news the fans have been reading about and answers it with his claim of good fortune.
- Farewell to Baseball ("The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth"), Closing
He concludes that despite a bad break he has much to live for.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Goriot's last illness
Mustard poultices, moxas from the Hospice Cochin, a medical consultation, and laudanum rubbed on the diaphragm.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Goriot's death
Delirium, calls for the absent daughters, Anastasie's arrival when he can no longer hear, and the death announced by Bianchon.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 27
Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. I–II (1818) / Ch. 2–3 (1831)
Victor's youthful reading of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus; his mother dies of scarlet fever caught while nursing Elizabeth.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, closing
Ward health before and after antiseptic treatment: nine months without pyaemia, hospital gangrene or erysipelas.
- Great Expectations, Chapter XLIX
Miss Havisham's dress catches fire; the surgeon dresses her burns and Pip's.
- Great Expectations, Chapter LVI
Magwitch's decline and death in the prison infirmary.
- Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5
The Ghost describes the juice of hebenon poured in his ear, curdling his blood and covering his body with a leprous crust.
- Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7 and Act 5, Scene 1
Gertrude reports Ophelia's drowning; the gravediggers and the priest dispute whether she died by her own act and deserves Christian burial.
- Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
The poisoned rapier and cup kill Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and Hamlet.
- Hard Times, Book the Second, Chapter IX
The death of Mrs. Gradgrind, too vague to say whether she is in pain.
- Hard Times, Book the Third, Chapter VI
Stephen is drawn up from the Old Hell Shaft, badly injured, and dies after speaking of the many lives the old pits have taken.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (Outer Station)
The grove of death where sick, starving African labourers lie dying in the shade.
- Heart of Darkness, Part II (the attack)
The helmsman is speared and dies on the deck, his blood filling Marlow's shoes.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III
Kurtz's emaciation and illness, his midnight crawl toward the forest, and his death.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 4, Scene 2
Falstaff's ragged pressed men, whom he calls food for powder fit to fill a pit.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, Scenes 1, 3 and 4
The catechism on honour and surgery, Blunt's death, Falstaff's ragged men peppered, and Hal wounded but refusing to leave the field.
- Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1 and Scene 3
Falstaff falls sick; Nym says the king has run bad humours on him, and the Hostess describes his death.
- Henry V, Act 4, Scenes 6 and 7
The deaths of York and Suffolk, the slaughter of the boys with the baggage, and the order to kill the prisoners.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 23
Four months of epidemic in Constantinople, daily deaths in thousands, burial organised by Theodorus, bodies placed in the towers of Sycae, cessation of trade, and Justinian's own swelling of the groin.
- Holy Sonnet X: "Death, be not proud", Lines 5-6
Rest and sleep are called death's pictures, the classical analogy of sleep and death on which the argument turns.
- Holy Sonnet X: "Death, be not proud", Lines 9-12
Death keeps company with poison, war and sickness, and poppy or charms are said to bring sleep as well as death's blow.
- Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on Lazarus
Death and resurrection supply Augustine with a pastoral language for grief, sin, and renewed life.
- Household Stories (Grimm's Fairy Tales), Aschenputtel, opening
The dying mother blesses her daughter, who weeps daily at the grave where the hazel tree grows.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's death alone in a Times Square hotel, and Charlie's memory of avoiding him shortly before.
- Humboldt's Gift, Final section
Reburial of Humboldt and his mother.
- I Will Fight No More Forever, Harper's Weekly text, sentences 8-10
Joseph describes cold, lack of blankets and food, and children freezing in the camp and in the hills.
- In Flanders Fields, Lines 6-9
The dead recall their lives and their sudden end, a few days after living and loving.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, ch. 17, secs. 10-11
The many diseases and dangers that threaten life, and providence offered as the remedy for anxious fear.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, chs. 8-9
Bearing the cross and meditating on the future life as a discipline for sickness, loss and mortality.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, ch. 19, secs. 18-21
Calvin's argument that the apostolic anointing with oil and the gift of healing were temporary, set against the Roman rite of extreme unction.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins, Chapter 7-8
Ramo is killed by the wild dogs and Karana is left alone with her grief.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXX
The wounded Front-de-Bœuf lies dying in remorse while Ulrica taunts him and sets his castle ablaze.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XLIII
Bois-Guilbert falls in the lists and dies with no wound, flushed and then pallid, victim of his own passions.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters V and IX
Lowood's scant, spoiled food and damp situation; the spring typhus epidemic; Helen Burns's death from consumption; the public inquiry and reform that follow.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 7, famine traditions
Famine in biblical history is treated as social crisis and divine judgment, linking hunger, public order and survival.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 15, Herodian family violence
Herod's household murders and suspicions are narrated as political pathology, a non-clinical portrait of fear, rage and moral disorder.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 17, Herod's final illness
Herod's last disease includes severe pain, feverish decline, abdominal and genital symptoms, physicians and desperate therapies before death.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 19, Agrippa I's death
The sudden illness and death of Agrippa I are framed as divine judgment, showing how acute disease becomes political theology.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 20, late provincial unrest
Crowding, executions, famine relief and social disorder in the later books reveal the bodily cost of unstable governance.
- John Adams, Part III
Nabby's mastectomy in 1811, her death in 1813, and Abigail's death in 1818.
- John Adams, Part III
Adams's infirmities in old age and his death at Quincy on 4 July 1826.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 12
Rab dies of his Lexington wound; Dr. Warren examines Johnny's hand and offers to cut the scar.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapters XXXVII–XXXIX
The body of a murdered king, preserved in a well, is carried to the Master and restored to life.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. X–XI
Jude's final illness after the rainy journey to Marygreen, Vilbert's return at his bedside, and his death alone during the college festivities.
- Kalevala, Rune XV
Lemminkäinen's mother rakes his body from the river of Tuonela, joins it together and revives him with salves, the last fetched by a bee from heaven.
- 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.
- Kokoro, Part Two
The father's slow decline from kidney disease, the doctor's visits and the family's vigil.
- Kokoro, Part Two
News of the Meiji emperor's death and General Nogi's suicide reaches the household.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book XXI, Ch. V
The mortally wounded Arthur is borne away by barge, saying he goes to Avilion to heal him of his grievous wound.
- Legends of Charlemagne, The Battle of Roncesvalles
Orlando, spent with toil and fever, rides to a fountain where his dying horse kneels and falls; he strikes the rock with Durindana, receives Turpin's absolution and dies, and Charlemagne grieves over the field of slain.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters of 30 April, 8 June and 16 July 1944
Critique of religion as a deus ex machina at the limits of human knowledge and strength, with implications for faith at the sickbed.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, 'Stations on the Way to Freedom' (after 20 July 1944) and 'By Gracious Powers' (December 1944)
Death imagined as the last station of freedom; a poem of trust written for his family at Christmas in the Gestapo prison.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letters 24 and 26
Death should be contemplated in advance so it loses its power to terrify.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 54
Seneca describes severe breathing attacks and his mental response to bodily crisis.
- Letters of Napoleon, Russian campaign letters and bulletins (1812)
Reports from Moscow and the retreat that understate losses to cold, hunger and disease.
- Letters of Napoleon, St Helena correspondence and will (1815–1821)
Complaints about climate and confinement, failing health, and the will's request that his body be examined after death.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 7: fever and apparent death
The catechumen's fever and death become the first major healing miracle, blending sickroom detail with resurrection narrative.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
The Pennsylvania's boilers explode; scalded passengers and crew wait on a wood-flat in the sun without food or help until carried to Memphis.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
The Memphis hall used as a hospital: wounded wrapped in raw cotton and linseed oil, physicians and medical students on watch, women of the city as nurses, and the death-room for the dying.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
Henry Clemens's last six days under Dr. Peyton's care, ending with his wandering mind and fingers picking at the coverlet.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapters 42-43
New Orleans cemeteries, a report on burial and epidemic mortality, and an undertaker's frank view that epidemics are good for trade.
- Little Britches, Final chapter
Father is thrown from Babe, his cough returns, a doctor diagnoses pneumonia and orders bed rest, and he dies; the family mourns.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 16–18
Beth nurses the poor Hummel family's sick baby, who dies of scarlet fever; Beth catches it; Amy is sent away; Dr Bangs attends.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 36 and 40
Beth's slow decline at the seaside and at home; her death nursed by Jo.
- Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Volume 1), Lives of Taddeo Gaddi and Agnolo Gaddi
Brief notices of painters carried off by violent or malignant fevers.
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Life of Alexander, last chapters
The account of Alexander’s final illness from the royal diaries, day by day, with Plutarch’s doubts about the rumors of poison.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 9
The ritual dance in the thunderstorm becomes a group frenzy in which Simon is killed.
- Love and Freindship and Other Early Works, Love and Freindship, Letter the 14th
Sophia's fatal illness from fainting in the night air and her deathbed warning against swoons.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, first phase
Admission to Auschwitz: the selection, shaving and disinfection, the delusion of reprieve, and the first emotional reactions, including grim humour and curiosity.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
A fellow prisoner's dream foretells liberation on 30 March; when the date approaches without rescue he falls ill and dies, which Frankl links to the loss of hope.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 17 (Ch. 48)
Dr Grant dies of apoplexy after three great institutionary dinners in one week.
- Mark Antony's Funeral Oration ("Friends, Romans, countrymen"), Act 3, Scene 2 (at Caesar's body)
Antony points to the rents in Caesar's mantle made by Cassius, Casca and Brutus, then uncovers the wounded body before the crowd.
- Meditations, Book 3.3; 4.48
Catalogues of the dead, including Hippocrates and physicians who frowned over the sick.
- Meditations, Book 9.3; 12.36
Death as a natural process like birth and growing old; departing serenely.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 110
Queequeg wastes with fever, orders his coffin and recovers.
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Scene 3
Courage must not show recognition when Swiss Cheese's body is brought before her.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, Homecoming, Act Four
During a heart attack Christine gives Ezra a pellet in place of his medicine; he accuses her before dying, and Lavinia finds the box.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Late afternoon, the Bloomsbury lodging
A calm hour over Mrs. Peters's hat, then Holmes on the stairs and Septimus's leap from the window; the ambulance that Peter hears in the street.
- Much Ado About Nothing, Act 4, Scene 1
Hero swoons after the accusation; the Friar proposes reporting her dead.
- No Exit and Three Other Plays, No Exit
Inez's account of how her cousin's wife turned on the gas in their room at night.
- No Exit and Three Other Plays, No Exit
Estelle mentions dying of pneumonia; each character describes the manner of death.
- Notes from Underground, Part II, Chapters VI–VII
The narrator describes to Liza the abandonment and death of a sick woman in a damp cellar and the careless burial in the wet snow.
- O Captain! My Captain!, Stanza 3, lines 17-18
Death is confirmed by pale, still lips and the absence of a pulse.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Carlson shoots Candy's old dog; Candy later wishes he had done it himself.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 6
George kills Lennie to spare him the lynch mob.
- Old Yeller, The wolf at the fire
A rabid wolf attacks Mama and Lisbeth at night; Old Yeller kills it and is bitten, and Mama and Travis decide he must be shot.
- Oliver Twist, Chapter I
Oliver's birth in the workhouse, attended by a contract parish surgeon and a pauper nurse; his unnamed mother dies soon after holding him.
- On the Making of Man, Sex, death, and resurrection
On the Making of Man gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens includes anatomy, generation, bodily organs, sex difference, mortality, resurrection, and the porous border between medicine and theology
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 3
Arguments for the mortality of the soul aim to cure fear of death and afterlife punishment.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 6, plague of Athens
The poem ends with fever, thirst, sores, despair, contagion-like care and burial breakdown.
- On War, Book V, Ch. 12, Marches (continued)
Sickness in crowded quarters versus on the road; soldiers drinking cold water after heat exhaustion; Napoleon's losses of 95,000 to sickness and straggling on the march to Smolensk in 1812.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Evening, the return search
Buynovsky is sent to the punishment cells, where the narration notes that ten days of strict regime can ruin a man's health for life.
- Our Town, Death and Attention
Our Town gives this tag concrete force through the medical material is quiet but important: doc gibbs, childbirth, mortality statistics, grief, and the care rituals surrounding death
- Paradise Lost, Book X
Sin and Death come to the world to prey on all created things after the Fall.
- Paradise Lost, Book XI
Michael's vision of the lazar-house lists the diseases, madness and melancholy that will afflict Adam's descendants.
- Passing, Part Three (ending)
Clare's fall from the window and Irene's collapse, followed by her blurred, possibly repressed recollection of the moment.
- Pensees, Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II
Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.
- Pericles' Funeral Oration, Book II.34
Thucydides describes the Athenian rites for the war dead: the laying out of the bones, tribal coffins, the empty bier for the missing, and the public burial.
- Personal Memoirs, Preface
Grant notes he was 'reduced almost to the point of death' while writing and that his son F. D. Grant helped with the work.
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, First Series, Life IX
The heart asks first for pleasure, then for excuse from pain, then for anodynes that deaden suffering, then sleep, and last the liberty to die.
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, Third Series, Time and Eternity XLVI (Dying)
A dying speaker describes the hushed room, the watchers' dry eyes and the signing away of keepsakes, interrupted by a buzzing fly as sight fails.
- Prince Caspian, Chapter 14
Aslan finds Caspian's old nurse on her deathbed and restores her with a cup of water turned to wine.
- Psalm 23, Psalm 23:4
The valley of the shadow of death verse, the part of the psalm most often spoken at deathbeds and in bereavement.
- Richard III, Act 1, Scene 4
Clarence's dream of drowning and of judgment by the souls of Warwick and Prince Edward, followed by his murder and drowning in a malmsey butt.
- Richard III, Act 5, Scenes 4-5
Richard fights on foot after his horse is killed and dies in single combat with Richmond.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3
Romeo poisons himself and Juliet stabs herself; Montague reports that his wife has died of grief.
- Ruth, Ch. 34–35
Ruth nurses Donne through the fever, falls ill herself and dies in delirium.
- Saint Joan, Scene VI (close)
De Stogumber returns from the burning in a state of breakdown and the executioner reports that her heart would not burn.
- Sam the Minuteman, The battle on Lexington green
Eight minutemen are killed and Sam's friend John is wounded in the leg.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 9
Brandon's account of the first Eliza, whom he found dying of consumption in a sponging-house.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Devotions, bells and physicians
The sickroom is linked to doctors, neighbors, death bells, and the social meaning of mortality.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Death's Duel
The sermon stages dying as theological confrontation and preparation.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Books VII–VIII (winter 1917–18)
Daud's death from cold; Farraj wounded and killed by Lawrence to spare him capture and torture; Lawrence's growing exhaustion and despair before asking to be relieved.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Tafas, September 1918)
A village massacred by retreating Turkish troops, followed by the order to take no prisoners; a key passage on reprisal and moral injury.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Damascus, October 1918)
Lawrence finds a Turkish military hospital full of dead and dying men and organises its cleaning and burials amid the chaos of the city's first days.
- Shane, Chapters 9-11
Stark Wilson goads Ernie Wright into drawing and kills him.
- Shane, Chapters 15-16
The gunfight at Grafton's; Shane, wounded, rides away.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Om'
Kamala dies of a snakebite; later, Siddhartha's grief over his son is healed by listening to the river.
- Silas Marner, Chapter XII
Molly's opium habit and her collapse and death in the snow.
- Silas Marner, Chapter XIII
Doctor Kimble is called from the dance to the dead woman at Silas's cottage.
- Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Act III
The Child's drowning in the garden fountain and the Boy's death by a revolver shot.
- Sixty Stories, 'The School'
A teacher recounts the cascade of deaths affecting his class and the children's questions about death.
- Speeches on the Compromise of 1850, Calhoun's speech of March 4, 1850, opening
The address was read by James Mason because Calhoun was too ill to speak; it is the last formal speech of a dying man.
- Speeches on the Compromise of 1850, Clay's speech, February 5-6, 1850, final sentence
Clay prays not to survive the dissolution of the Union, a reference to his age and health two years before his death.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Edward Grim murder account
The violent wounds of martyrdom generate relic matter and connect political violence to later healing devotion.
- Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Chapter I
His mother's cancer, the operation at home, her death, and the change in the family.
- Tales (Selection), The Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline's illness and entombment
Madeline's settled apathy, gradual wasting and cataleptic affections baffle her physicians; her body, with a faint blush and lingering smile, is placed in a vault for a fortnight.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Étaples)
Nursing German prisoners and, in spring 1918, gassed and badly wounded British soldiers in overwhelmed wards.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Victor Richardson)
Victor, blinded by a wound to the head, is visited in a London hospital before dying of his injuries.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 17
Feverish Pinocchio refuses his bitter medicine until four black rabbits bring a coffin for him; he swallows it and recovers at once.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 36
Pinocchio draws water each dawn to earn milk for his weak father, builds him a wheeled chair, and finds his friend Lamp-Wick dying as an overworked donkey.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a physician who once practised in Calcutta, uses a trained swamp adder through a ventilator; Holmes reflects on doctors who become murderers and on poisons that escape chemical detection.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Boscombe Valley Mystery
John Turner, dying of long-standing diabetes, confesses to the killing and is spared the trial he would not live to finish.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 33
Injun Joe is found dead of starvation behind the sealed cave door.
- The Aeneid, Book 2
Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, Priam’s death and the loss of Creusa as survivor testimony.
- The Aeneid, Book 6
The Sibyl’s possession and Aeneas’ descent to the dead frame prophecy as an altered state.
- The Aeneid, Book 12
Aeneas kills Turnus after a flash of rage at Pallas’ belt.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 75–77
Alexander's final fever at Babylon, day by day from the royal journals, with Plutarch's discussion of poisoning rumours.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 43
Agricola's last illness, the emperor's physicians and freedmen visiting, and rumours of poison.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Germania 27
Germanic funeral customs and mourning.
- The Alexiad, Preface, 3–4
Nikephoros Bryennios returns from campaign with a fatal internal tumour; the family forbids him to talk for fear it may burst; Anna's grief.
- The Alexiad, Book XV, last illness
The physicians' dispute over purging, Alexios's breathlessness and swelling, the family's vigil, and his death in August 1118.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 12, death of Claudius traditions
Tacitus reports the famous poisoning tradition surrounding Claudius and succession.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 14, murder of Agrippina
Nero’s attempts on his mother’s life turn family violence into imperial policy.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 15, fire and Christians
The great fire and punishments of Christians show public trauma redirected into scapegoating.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Little Hunchback
The hunchback chokes on a fishbone; a Jewish doctor, a purveyor and a broker each believe they have killed him until the barber revives him.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, Fourth Voyage
Sindbad's companions are given a herb that drives them mad before they are fattened to be eaten; later he is buried alive with his dead wife by local custom.
- The Argonautica, Book IV, Libya, death of Mopsus
A serpent sprung from the Gorgon's blood bites Mopsus; numbness, failing sight and rapid corruption of the body follow.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (examination of sudden death)
Procedures for inspecting a corpse to determine whether death resulted from hanging, drowning, poison or violence.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, sparagmos
Agave and the bacchants dismember Pentheus while misrecognizing him as an animal.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 2.11–2.30
Krishna's argument that the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead, because the self is eternal.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §3
The wisdom of Silenus, that it is best not to be born and next best to die soon, as the pessimistic ground of Greek art.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §§13–15
Socrates' daemon as a warning instinct, the dying Socrates, and the faith that knowledge can heal the eternal wound of existence.
- The Black Arrow, Book II, Chapter I
The wounded archer Carter lies dying in the Moat House and refuses Dick the truth about his father's death.
- The Black Arrow, Book V, Chapter VII
Sir Daniel, struck by the last black arrow, dies in spasms of pain in Dick's arms.
- The Call of the Wild, Chapter IV
Dave's inward injury: the drivers examine him at the fire, cannot locate the trouble, and let him return to harness before he is shot.
- The Call of the Wild, Chapter V
Hal and Charles halve the dogs' rations, then feed them frozen horse-hide; the dogs die one by one of exhaustion and hunger.
- The Canterbury Tales, The Knight's Tale, Arcite's death
Arcite's crushed chest festers and neither vomit upward nor laxative downward can help him.
- The Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner's Tale
The youngest rioter buys rat poison from an apothecary to kill his companions.
- The Civil War, Book II.41–42
Curio's exhausted and wounded men cannot break out; Curio refuses flight and fights until killed.
- The Complete Poems, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's Lincoln elegy turns national mourning into ritualized grief and meditation on death.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VI.13–16
Druid teaching on memory and the soul's survival; those suffering severe diseases vow human sacrifices to win back the gods' favour.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VII.77–78
Critognatus's speech proposing cannibalism, and the Mandubii, including old and sick people unfit for war, expelled from Alesia and refused food at the Roman lines.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VIII.44
Defenders of Uxellodunum have their hands cut off; the captive Drappes starves himself to death.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 5
Providence and freedom are reconciled to preserve responsibility in the face of death.
- The Cost of Discipleship, Part One, Discipleship and the Cross
Suffering and rejection are presented as the mark of the follower; the call is described as a summons to die to the old self.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters ('The Abbé's Chamber' to 'The Cemetery of the Château d'If')
Faria's cataleptic attacks, treated with drops of a red liquid; the third attack kills him.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Late Paris section ('Locusta' and following)
Monte Cristo substitutes a narcotic that simulates death to save Valentine from poisoning.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 1
The widow tells Peter Ivanovich of her husband's three days of incessant screaming before death.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 6
The Caius syllogism: he cannot accept that the logic of mortality applies to himself.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 12
Three days of screaming, the sensation of being pushed into a black sack, then light and the end of fear.
- The Divine Comedy, Paradiso
The Divine Comedy gives this tag concrete force through dante is rich for the history of mind: despair, fear, grief, bodily torment, purgative healing, visionary states, and spiritual therapy structure the journey
- The Early Christian Creeds, Apostles' Creed, articles on birth, death and resurrection
The creed moves through conception, birth, suffering, death, burial and bodily resurrection, offering a compact theology of embodied life.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), life of the world to come
The final hope of resurrection and future life functions as consolation in the face of death and communal suffering.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Chalcedonian Definition (451), two natures
Chalcedon's insistence that Christ is fully human protects the reality of embodied suffering from being treated as merely apparent.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets VII-VIII
Enkidu dreams of the gods' council and of the house of dust, falls sick, lies ill for twelve days and dies; Gilgamesh laments him and will not yield the body until decay begins.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets IX-X
Gilgamesh wanders in skins with hollow cheeks and a face like one who has travelled far; each figure he meets asks why he looks so ravaged, and he tells of his grief and fear of death.
- The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, Narrative of 29 May 1453
Giustiniani is badly wounded on the walls and is carried to a ship; his departure disheartens the defenders.
- The Fall of Constantinople, 1453: Eyewitness Accounts, Sphrantzes, Chronicon Minus, on the fall
The death of Constantine XI and the capture and later deaths of Sphrantzes's children.
- 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 Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Sulla 36
Sulla's final illness, described as an infestation of lice and an internal ulcer, ending in a haemorrhage.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 4, The Old Age of the World
The Plague of Cyprian and the hypothesis of a hemorrhagic viral fever; drought and the third-century crisis.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 6, The Wine-Press of Wrath
The first bubonic plague pandemic from 541, its biology, routes and mortality, alongside the volcanic cooling of the 530s.
- The Giver, Chapters 4 and 7
Jonas bathes Larissa at the House of the Old and hears of Roberto's celebrated release.
- The Giver, Chapter 15
Jonas receives the memory of a battlefield where a wounded boy dies asking for water.
- The Giver, Chapter 19
The recorded release of a newborn twin by injection, performed by Jonas's father.
- The Golden Bough (abridged edition), Chapter XXIV
Kings put to death when sickness or age threatened their strength, lest nature decline with them.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Lives of plague and danger saints in the Golden Legend tradition
Roch, Sebastian, Barbara, and Christopher show how sudden communal or occupational risks were organized through saints before modern public health.
- The Great Gatsby, Chapter VII
Myrtle runs into the road and is killed by Gatsby's car; the scene at the garage and the body are described.
- The Great Gatsby, Chapter VIII
Wilson's night of grief with Michaelis, his fixation on the billboard eyes as the eyes of God, and the murder of Gatsby and Wilson's suicide.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part III, chapters on camp life
Rations, work norms and the progressive wasting of prisoners; the camp medical unit and the role of doctors in certifying fitness for work.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part IV
Reflections on how prisoners endured or were broken psychologically, and on Solzhenitsyn's own inner change.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 3-4
Deaths of the aunts from tuberculosis and diabetes and the mother's stroke, nursed at home by the ten Boom daughters.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 9-10
Corrie, sick with influenza, is arrested in the raid; her elderly father dies some ten days after the arrest while she is in solitary confinement.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 13-14
Ravensbrück: hunger, cold roll calls, fleas and lice, the shared vitamin drops, and Betsie's decline and death in the camp hospital.
- The Histories, Book 2.84–88
Egyptian medical specialization and the three grades of embalming, with removal of brain and viscera.
- The Histories, Book 4.73–75
Scythians purify themselves after funerals by inhaling hemp-seed vapour in felt tents.
- The Histories, Book II, ch. 46-49
Otho refuses to prolong the war, consoles his nephew, sleeps, and kills himself at dawn; some soldiers die by their own hand at his pyre.
- The Histories, Book III, ch. 25 and 33
After the second battle at Cremona a son is found to have killed his father; Cremona is then sacked and burned.
- The Histories, Book VI, Book VI, chs. 53–54
The Roman aristocratic funeral: the body at the Rostra, the eulogy, and the procession of ancestral masks.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book III, chs. 6-8 and 32
Pestilence kills consuls, augurs and much of the people while the Aequi and Volsci press on the city; later plague and famine come together.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book V, ch. 48
Disease among the Gauls camped in the ruined city amid ashes and unburied dead during the siege of the Capitol.
- The History of the Church, Books 5–6, martyr narratives
Accounts of imprisoned and tortured Christians make bodily suffering central to communal memory.
- The History of the Church, Books 8–9, Great Persecution
Executions, mutilations, mines and prisons under Diocletian dominate the late narrative.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections), Chapter II, Part IV
Long peace described as a slow and secret poison in the vitals of the empire, an organic metaphor for decline.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections), Chapter LXVIII, Part IV, and notes 58–59
Justiniani's wound, his withdrawal to seek a surgeon, the varying accounts of the injury, and the death of Constantine Palaeologus.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.51–53
Caregivers die, laws lose force, burial customs collapse and despair spreads through the crowded city.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 7.75–87
The Sicilian retreat culminates in thirst, slaughter, imprisonment in quarries and catastrophic defeat.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book II, Chapters viii-ix
Captain Blifil dies suddenly; two physicians called in after death dispute apoplexy versus epilepsy.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book V, Chapter vii
Allworthy, seriously ill, gathers his household to settle his affairs, believing himself near death.
- The Hobbit, Chapter 18: The Return Journey
Thorin lies wounded in a tent after the battle and makes peace with Bilbo before dying.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2
The newspaper account of the inquest: Sir Charles's heart disease, changes of colour, breathlessness and nervous depression, facial distortion explained as usual in death from cardiac exhaustion, and a post-mortem confirming organic disease.
- The Idiot, Part I, Chapters II and V
Myshkin's accounts of an execution by guillotine and of a man reprieved before a firing squad, focusing on the mind in its last minutes.
- The Idiot, Part IV, Chapters IV-V
General Ivolgin's drinking, collapse in the street and death after a stroke.
- The Iliad, Book 1.43–52
Apollo shoots his arrows into the Greek camp, killing first mules and dogs and then men, for nine days.
- The Jewish War, Book 1, late Herod narrative
Herod the Great's final illness is described through bodily pain, feverish symptoms, ulceration and futile attempts at relief before his death.
- The Jewish War, Book 5, Jerusalem under siege
Crowding, corpses, factional violence and the shrinking food supply turn Jerusalem into a public health crisis before the final assault.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, famine in Jerusalem
The famine reaches its most extreme form, including the story of a mother driven to cannibalism, which Josephus uses as a sign of social and bodily collapse.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, burning of the Temple
The final fighting around the Temple brings fire, crush injuries, slaughter and mass death in a sacred precinct.
- The Jewish War, Book 7, Masada
The Masada episode presents collective suicide as a response to enslavement and defeat, requiring careful historical and ethical reading.
- The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter III
Woolman watches by night with his father, dying of a fever in 1750, who speaks of his concern for the enslaved.
- The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter XI (closing minutes)
Friends at York record the progress of his smallpox, his prayers, the attempts at medicine, his talk with the apothecary and his death.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Les Deus Amanz'
A strengthening potion from a relative at Salerno; the lover refuses it and dies of exhaustion at the summit.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Yonec'
The hawk-knight is impaled on the spikes at the window and bleeds to death.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 14: Night Falls on Narnia
Tirian and the children watch the death of the Narnian world and grieve for it before Peter shuts the door.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 16: Farewell to Shadowlands
Aslan reveals that the children and their parents were killed in a railway accident and that they will stay in his country.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Apology 40c–41c
Death as either a dreamless sleep or a journey to converse with the dead: neither is to be feared.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 116a–118a
The bath, the farewell, the friends' weeping, the drinking of the hemlock and the ascending numbness until death.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. VI, Chs. 6–10
Toby and Trim's care of the dying Lieutenant Le Fever at the inn.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1769 (Aetat. 60)
Conversations on the fear of death, Hume's calm, and whether the mind can be fortified against the last hour.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1784 (Aetat. 75)
Dropsy, breathlessness that forces him to sit up all night, and the last days and prayers before his death on 13 December.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter V
The crisis in her father's house: about four days insensible, the last anointing, and her family's belief that she was dead.
- The Little Prince, Chapters XXVI-XXVII
The snake's bite, the prince's quiet fall, and the narrator's grief in the years afterward.
- The Lives of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, Life of Hooker, last illness
Hooker's long sickness after a cold, his restless nights, his loss of appetite and his final conversation with Saravia.
- The Lives of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, Life of Herbert, last weeks
His decline at Bemerton, the visits of clergy, and his deathbed reflections and songs.
- The Magician's Nephew, Chapter 1: The Wrong Door
Digory tells Polly that his father is in India and his mother is ill and going to die.
- The Master and Margarita, Part Two, Ch. 23
Satan's ball: Margarita receives a procession of poisoners and murderers from history.
- The Mayflower Compact, Signers' list
Samuel Fuller, the company's physician and a deacon of the church, appears among the signers.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 3–4
Her jump from the window holding an icon, Lukerya's account, and the narrator's anguish over the body.
- The Metamorphosis, Part III
Gregor stops eating, wastes away, and dies alone at dawn; the charwoman finds the dried body and the family feels relief.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness'
Donne, on what he believes is his deathbed, imagines his physicians as cosmographers reading his body as a flat map.
- The Metaphysical Poets, Henry King, 'An Exequy to his Matchless Never to be Forgotten Friend'
King's elegy for his young wife, longing to join her in the grave.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 3
Monsieur Purgon curses Argan with a cascade of diseases; Toinette, disguised as a doctor, prescribes absurd remedies; Argan feigns death to test his family.
- The Murder on the Links, Chapter 3, At the Villa Geneviève
Dr. Durand reports that death occurred seven to ten hours before his examination and that the stab could not have been self-inflicted; he has sedated Mrs. Renauld.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapter III
Mrs. Inglethorp's convulsions behind the bolted doors, Dr. Bauerstein's artificial respiration and her death.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 2-3
The Ariel voyage exposes Pym and Augustus to intoxication, storm, near drowning and rescue after impaired judgment at sea.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 10-12
After mutiny and storm, the survivors face wounds, thirst and starvation on the wreck before drawing lots for cannibalism.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, The Third Remove
Nine days caring for her wounded daughter until Sarah dies at Wenimesset, and the remedy of oaken leaves for her own wound, learned from a fellow captive.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 16
Hagen kills Siegfried by striking the hidden vulnerable place while the hero drinks at a spring.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 33-39
The fighting in Etzel's hall emphasizes wounds, exhaustion, burning, thirst and the mass death of warriors trapped by honor.
- The Odyssey, Book 5
Odysseus is shipwrecked, battered and washed ashore exhausted, showing exposure, pain and recovery at the edge of death.
- The Odyssey, Book 11
The underworld journey stages grief, memory, sacrificial blood and conversation with the dead.
- The Oresteia, Agamemnon, Cassandra scene
Cassandra foresees murder, ancestral crimes and her own death while the chorus struggles to understand her.
- The Oresteia, Libation Bearers, tomb scene
Electra and Orestes perform mourning at Agamemnon’s grave and convert lament into revenge.
- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Three, ch. 12, Total Domination
The camps as laboratories of total domination; the killing of the juridical person, the moral person and individuality.
- The Pearl, Chapter 6
The rifleman's shot at the cry in the cave kills Coyotito; Juana and Kino carry him back to La Paz.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter V
The Armenian snows: deep drifts, a north wind, men dying overnight without fire or food, hunger-faintness, snow-blindness and frostbitten toes, with practical remedies.
- The Persian Expedition, Book V, Chapter VIII
Xenophon's defence at the army's audit: he struck men who left the disabled behind or tried to bury a living comrade, and forced stragglers to keep moving to prevent freezing.
- The Phantom of the Opera, Chapter I
Buquet's description of the ghost's skeletal face and the discovery of Buquet hanged in the cellar.
- The Plague, Part III
The summer peak: the closing of cemeteries, burial in lime pits, the crematorium and the trams carrying the dead at night.
- The Plague, Part IV
The death of Othon's young son after an injection of Castel's serum, watched at the bedside by Rieux, Castel, Tarrou and Paneloux.
- The Poetic Edda, Baldrs Draumar
Baldr's evil dreams send Othin riding to Hel to wake a dead seeress and learn his son's fate.
- The Popol Vuh (Lewis Spence's account), The Second Book, the twins' wonders in Xibalba
Spence's account of the twins' self-chosen death, return, and display of killing and restoring men and animals before the lords of Xibalba.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Early Gardencourt chapters
Ralph's chronic illness shapes his observational life, his limited mobility and his imaginative investment in Isabel's freedom.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Touchett's final illness
Inheritance is decided at a sickbed, linking money, care, mortality and Ralph's experiment in enabling Isabel.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Ralph's deathbed
Isabel's return to the dying Ralph concentrates grief, confession, forgiveness and the bodily end of one of the novel's moral witnesses.
- The Power and the Glory, Final return to the dying American
The call to attend a dying man forces the priest back into danger and frames sacramental care as a duty to the body at death.
- The Practice of the Presence of God, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Letters, final note
Lawrence, near eighty and often near death, anticipates seeing God; he takes to his bed two days after the last letter.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter XVII
Yokel tells how his mother, who nursed the sick, was burned as a witch when a patient died, and how his children starved.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Prussian Officer, III-IV
The orderly wanders feverish and hallucinating in the heat, collapses, and dies in hospital; the doctors notice the bruises and say nothing.
- 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 Quiet American, Phat Diem / war reporting chapters
Fowler's reporting confronts corpses, danger and the gap between military language and bodily suffering.
- The Quiet American, Place Garnier bombing
Civilian casualties after the bombing make Pyle's theory visible as wounds, blood and preventable death.
- The Ramayana, Book II, Cantos LXIII-LXIV
Dasaratha tells Kausalya of the hermit's son he once shot by mistake and the parents' curse, then dies of grief for the exiled Rama.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter IX
Jim Conklin's death from a torn side, his fear of being crushed by artillery, and his final rigid convulsion in a field.
- The River War, Chapter III: The Dervish Empire
The Mahdi falls ill in June 1885; public prayers are offered; he dies of what his attendants recognise as typhus within days.
- The River War, Chapter XVI: The Fall of the City
Bombarded Omdurman: mangled civilians, houses crammed with wounded, decomposing bodies and animal carcasses.
- The Roman History, Book XXI, ch. 15
Constantius II falls ill with fever on the march and dies at Mopsucrenae in Cilicia.
- The Roman History, Book XXV, ch. 3
Julian is speared through the side, cuts his fingers trying to pull out the weapon, is treated by a physician, and dies after losing blood while discussing the soul.
- The Roman History, Book XXV, ch. 10
Jovian dies suddenly at Dadastana; Ammianus gives the explanations current at the time, among them noxious fumes and overeating.
- The Roman History, Book XXX, ch. 6
Valentinian, enraged at the Quadic envoys, loses his voice, is seized by convulsions and dies at Brigetio.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 23
The final scaffold confession and death present public truth as both spiritual release and bodily endpoint.
- The Screwtape Letters, Letter XXXI
The patient's sudden death in an air raid, described from the devils' side as a soul passing beyond their reach.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Preface and Introduction
The physician's bedside manner as a model for Christian exposition; the Lazarus story and the claim that despair, not death, is the mortal sickness.
- The Silver Chair, Chapter 16: The Healing of Harms
Old King Caspian returns from his voyage, blesses Rilian and dies; on Aslan's mountain the dead king lies in the stream before he is made young.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Rip Van Winkle
Judith reports that her mother died after breaking a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New England peddler.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Broken Heart
Crayon argues that women can die of disappointed love and tells of a betrothed girl who wastes away in melancholy after her lover's execution.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Widow and Her Son; Rural Funerals
A poor widow mourns her only son, a sailor who comes home to die; Crayon describes English burial flowers and reflects on the sorrow for the dead.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Pride of the Village
A village girl deserted by an officer declines through the spring and dies, the parish mourning at her funeral.
- The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter XI
The body politic compared to a human body that begins to die at birth; the constitution of man is nature's work, that of the state the work of art and can be prolonged.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XIX, The Ghosts
Two ghosts sit in silence in the wigwam and then ask the living not to burden the dead with lamentation and grave-goods.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XX, The Famine
Famine and Fever enter the wigwam; Minnehaha's delirium and death; Hiawatha sits seven days speechless.
- The Song of Roland, Judgment after battle
The Song of Roland gives this tag concrete force through its battlefield scenes emphasize wounds, exhaustion, hearing, breath, and the ritual handling of the dead more than inward psychology
- The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter XI, Of the Passing of the First-Born
The birth of Burghardt, his illness in Atlanta, the watch beside him as the physician comes and goes, his death and burial, and the father's mixed grief and consolation.
- The Story of a Soul, Chapter II
Her mother's death in August 1877, the Extreme Unction she witnessed, and the change in her temperament afterward.
- The Story of a Soul, Epilogue
The final months in the infirmary, the doctor's visits and remedies, her suffering and her death on 30 September 1897.
- The Stranger, Part One, Chapter 1
The vigil among the elderly residents of the home at Marengo and the funeral procession, in which Pérez collapses in the heat.
- The Stranger, Part Two, Chapter 5
Meursault's thoughts on the guillotine, the chances of a successful appeal and the dawn on which the condemned are taken.
- 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 Theban Plays, Antigone, burial conflict
Antigone insists on rites for the dead despite state prohibition, making grief a public act.
- The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Chapter II (Upper Egypt, Humaithira)
Story of the Sufi master al-Shadhili, who dies at a desert station with a poisonous well after foretelling his own burial.
- The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Chapter V (Damascus)
The people of Damascus gather at the Mosque of the Footprint to pray against plague amid thousands of deaths a day.
- The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Chapter XIV (India)
Ibn Battuta describes the burning of widows and drowning in the Ganges as religious practices of some Hindus.
- The Trial, Chapter 10
K.'s execution in the quarry, described with physical exactness.
- The Trojan Women and Other Plays, The Trojan Women, burial of Astyanax
Hecuba washes and dresses her grandson's broken body on Hector's shield, in one of the longest laments in Greek tragedy.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
His father's delirium about Napoleon, the visit to a wise woman instead of a physician, and the father's death.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, final scene
The confrontation with Miles joins possible exorcism, panic, coercion and child death.
- The Twelve Caesars, Nero
Nero's violence, artistic grandiosity and suicide are presented through bodily fear, performance and death.
- The Twelve Caesars, Several lives
Poisoning rumors, assassination wounds and deathbed omens recur as instruments of political interpretation.
- The Underdogs, Final battle
The circular return to combat emphasizes death, repetition and the exhaustion of revolutionary purpose.
- The Vampyre, Greek episode
Ianthe's death after vampire warnings links folklore, bodily violation and the drained victim.
- The Vampyre, Final marriage plot
Aubrey's failed warning and death frame secrecy and social disbelief as fatal for his sister.
- The Waning of the Middle Ages, Chapter XI, The Vision of Death
The dance of death, the macabre image of decomposition and the call to remember mortality.
- The Waste Land, Epigraph
The Sibyl of Cumae, given long life without youth and shrunk to hang in a jar, says she wants to die.
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Chapters 18-19
Fever spreads through the town, children die, Mercy lies near death, and a mob blames Hannah Tupper's witchcraft.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, The Narrative of the Doctor
A brief death certificate recording the death of Lady Glyde from aneurism at St. John's Wood.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Theogony, ll. 211-225 and 758-766
Night bears Death, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams; later Sleep and Death dwell together beneath the earth.
- This Side of Paradise, Book One, Ch. 2
The car crash on the road from New York in which Dick Humbird is killed.
- Through Gates of Splendor, Closing chapters
Burial of the men near the sandbar and the widows' reflections on loss and faith.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §5
The last man: health-conscious, conflict-averse, managing his days with small doses of poison for pleasant dreams and a larger dose for a pleasant death; dissenters go voluntarily into the madhouse.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse XXI: Voluntary Death
Praise of dying 'at the right time' and scorn for lingering decline; important for the history of arguments about suicide and end-of-life choice.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11
Jem reads to Mrs. Dubose through her fits; after her death Atticus reveals her fight to break her morphine addiction.
- To the Lighthouse, Part II, Time Passes
Bracketed reports of Mrs Ramsay's death, Prue's death after childbirth, and Andrew's death by a shell.
- Treasure Island, Admiral Benbow chapters
Billy Bones's heavy drinking, stroke-like collapse and death bring alcohol, vascular crisis and fear into the opening.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book V
Troilus's grief after Criseyde's betrayal turns toward battlefield death and the poem's philosophical release.
- Twelve Angry Men, Opening deliberation
Heat, impatience and life-or-death stakes create a pressure environment for group decision-making.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Part I, Chapter XXIII, The Coral Kingdom
Aronnax, acknowledging his medical training, examines a crewman with a shattered skull and exposed brain and judges the wound fatal.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Part II, Chapter XVI, Want of Air
As the oxygen runs out beneath the ice, Aronnax records headache, dizziness, laboured breathing and the near-collapse of the crew.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, health and death
Charlemagne's fevers, aging and final illness make the emperor's body a political and moral subject.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapters XXII-XXVI
Eva's cough, flushed cheek and slow fever; Marie dismisses it while Ophelia and the doctor recognize consumption; Eva's death.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XLII
Legree drinks recklessly and dies raving and screaming of visions.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (the removable evils)
Poverty and disease presented as largely conquerable by education, social institutions, 'proper control of noxious influences' and science; those who care for others keep their interest in life on the eve of death.
- Villette, Ch. IV
Lucy nurses the rheumatic invalid Miss Marchmont, hears her story on her last night, and finds her dead in the morning.
- War and Peace, Book Four, Chs. VIII–IX
Lise's labor and death in childbirth at Bald Hills as Andrew returns home.
- War and Peace, Book Twelve, Chs. XV–XVI
Andrew's last days at Yaroslavl, nursed by Natásha and Princess Mary.
- War and Peace, Book Fourteen, Chs. XII–XIV
Pierre's march with the prisoners in the French retreat: hunger, sore feet, cold, and the shooting of Karatáev.
- Washington v. Glucksberg, Opinion of Justice Breyer, paragraph on pain-relieving drugs and hospice briefs
Considers the testimony of hospice and medical organizations that pain can nearly always be controlled, and treats lawful palliative care as decisive for the case.
- Washington: A Life, The planter years (1773)
Patsy Custis's epilepsy and death in a seizure at Mount Vernon.
- Washington: A Life, Final chapter (December 1799)
The throat infection, the physicians' repeated bleeding and other remedies, and Washington's composed death.
- Where the Red Fern Grows, The ghost coon and the Pritchards
Rubin Pritchard trips while running with Billy's axe and is fatally wounded; Billy is left shaken by the death.
- Where the Red Fern Grows, The mountain lion
Old Dan is mortally wounded fighting the lion and dies; Little Ann refuses food and dies on his grave.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter IV
Cholera at Cruces: her treatments, the deaths, the examination of an infant's body to learn about the disease, and her own attack of cholera.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter VII
Nursing army officers and their families through the yellow fever epidemic in Kingston in 1853, with many death-bed scenes.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter XVI
Dressing wounds at the field hospital on 18 June 1855 and on the field of the Tchernaya.
- Wuthering Heights, Catherine's illness and childbirth
Catherine's emotional crisis becomes feverish illness, delirium, childbirth and death.
- Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's final days
Heathcliff's visions of Catherine, refusal of food and death show grief as obsessive bodily unraveling.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“Mother, give me the sun”
Frequently cited
“It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
Frequently cited
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”
“Till now, I had been a great sleeper, but a total privation of repose, with other alarming symptoms which have accompanied it, even to this time, persuaded me I had but a short time to live”
Frequently cited
“he tied himself to it with his breast-belt, the way he would not meet his death lying down, but would meet it standing up.”
“O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed”
Frequently cited
“And on the same day a respectfully shocked world received the news of his death.”
“Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from which no man escapeth”
“MEN fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children, is increased with tales, so is the other”
“Groans, and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible”
“It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other”
“The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve”
“I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases”
Frequently cited
“PROP. LXVII. A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life”
“is an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death.”
“We can live to be three hundred years old, but when we cease to exist here, we are turned into foam on the surface of the water”
“when a star fell down a soul mounted up to God.”
Frequently cited
“I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for.”
“Not until you are dying do you know your children”
“You give them life; they give you your deathblow. You bring them into the world, and they send you out of it.”
“To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death”
“O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!”
“I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room”
Frequently cited
“The horror! The horror”
Frequently cited
“his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbled of green fields”
“those of the population who had formerly been members of the factions laid aside their mutual enmity and in common they attended to the burial rites of the dead”
Frequently cited
“Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe”
“From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow”
“Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell”
Frequently cited
“One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”
“Dear child, be pious and good, and God will always take care of you, and I will look down upon you from heaven, and will be with you.”
“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking-Glass is dead, Ta-hool-hool-shute is dead. The old men are all dead.”
“It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death.”
Frequently cited
“We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.”
Frequently cited
“Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.”
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man-child conceived.”
“Lemminkainen’s faithful mother Takes the rake of magic metals, Rakes the Tuoni river bottoms, Rakes the cataract and whirlpool,”
“Now, blessed Lord, would I not longer live, if it might please thee, Lord.”
Frequently cited
“Orlando fixed his eyes on the hilt of his sword as on a crucifix, and embraced it, and he raised his eyes and appeared like a creature seraphical and transfigured, and bowing his head, he breathed out his pure soul.”
Frequently cited
“and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”
“But, after the lapse only of a few days, the catechumen, seized with a languor, began to suffer from a violent fever”
“O Lord, if I am still necessary to your people, I do not shrink from toil: your will be done”
“His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.”
“Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull”
“Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died.”
“Think continually how many physicians are dead after often contracting their eyebrows over the sick”
“I could not help reproaching myself for having consented to his visit in that sickly region in the summer-time”
“The child that bore my name, and in whose future I reposed with more confidence than I did in my own plan of life, now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land, with a weeping mother, brother, and sisters, clustered about him”
“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.”
“Come, lady, die to live: this wedding day Perhaps is but prolong’d: have patience and endure.”
“But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.”
“My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,”
“How many trifling illnesses by that means become serious, how many serious ones become mortal”
“Nobody; I myself. Farewell. Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!”
Frequently cited
“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed”
“Physicians will not heal thee, for thou wilt die at last. But it is I who heal thee, and make the body immortal”
Frequently cited
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb”
“Later I was reduced almost to the point of death, and it became impossible for me to attend to anything for weeks”
“The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to "Let us have peace”
Frequently cited
“Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality.”
Frequently cited
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
“O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown”
Frequently cited
“A plague o’ both your houses.”
Frequently cited
“Light your fire: do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? My voices were right.”
“And anon the knights smote him, and one of them smote off the crown of his head, and another brake the point of his sword upon the pavement”
Frequently cited
“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
“since here we have passed our lives in love and concord, we wish that one and the same hour may take us both from life, that I may not live to see her grave, nor be laid in my own by her.”
“Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams”
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”
Frequently cited
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”
“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts”
“The dying Socrates_ became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths,--an ideal they had never yet beheld”
“Ye took the better part and pardoned; I took the worse, and there lies the clay of mine enemy.”
“he embarked in a small boat with a few attendants, and was there murdered by Achillas and Septimius”
“They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valour, the fear of death being disregarded”
“they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices”
“Thus, being excited by the massacre at Genabum and the fatigue of the siege, they spared neither those worn out with years, women, or children”
Frequently cited
“There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.”
“"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more!"”
Frequently cited
“All hope abandon, ye who enter in”
“Thus, after many labors, Heracles passed away, a mortal passing into an immortal being in a great burning high above the sea.”
“there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still”
“There could not easily be a more inspiring spectacle than this for a young man of noble ambitions and virtuous aspirations.”
“Dr Y. holding that he died of an apoplexy, and Dr Z. of an epilepsy.”
Frequently cited
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
“I believe my being here is in the Wisdom of Christ; I know not as to Life or Death.”
Frequently cited
“The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows”
Frequently cited
“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt”
Frequently cited
“The ACCUSING SPIRIT, which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL, as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.”
“So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.”
“I have lived to see this world is made up of perturbations”
“As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go”
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so”
“Alfred—Alfred——”
“by the same token we shall all one day be dead, but that is no reason why meantime we should all be buried alive”
Frequently cited
“Cattle die, | and kinsmen die, And so one dies one’s self; But a noble name | will never die, If good renown one gets.”
“The greatest of all is this: that he made man, and gave him the spirit, which shall live and never perish, though the flesh-frame rot to mould, or burn to ashes”
Frequently cited
“the shaft flew through Baldr, and he fell dead to the earth; and that was the greatest mischance that has ever befallen among gods and men.”
“The bodies of the two men lay together, side by side, in the mortuary, the one white and slender, but laid rigidly at rest, the other looking as if every moment it must rouse into life again, so young and unused, from a slumber.”
Frequently cited
“She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.”
Frequently cited
“The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.”
Frequently cited
“He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.”
“Presently those who attended him could doubt no longer that he was attacked by typhus fever”
“Women and children lay frightfully mangled in the roadway. At one place a whole family had been crushed by a projectile”
“a cavalry spear, grazing the skin of his arm, pierced his side, and fixed itself in the bottom of his liver.”
“The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction”
“Farewell, O my Laughing Water! All my heart is buried with you, All my thoughts go onward with you!”
“Many a man lives after hope has grown little; but my good-hap has departed from me, nor will I suffer myself to be healed”
Frequently cited
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
“I do pray for you, every hour and every minute, Arthur; but you must pray for yourself.”
“I myself was present at this mosque in the year 746 (A.D. 1345), when the people were assembled for the purpose of prayer against the plague : which ceased on that very day.”
“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death”
“Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra”
“Was THAT—life?’ will I say unto death. ‘Well! Once more”
“Yes, forgotten by all else, but not by us. We dug the grave, and the polypi undertake to seal our dead for eternity.”
“there ain’t no more ye can do! I forgive ye, with all my soul!”
Frequently cited
“Who,—who,—who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”
“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”