John Adams wrote A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in London, where he was serving as the first American minister to Great Britain. The occasion was a letter of 1778 from the French statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot to the English minister Richard Price, published by Price in 1784, which regretted that most American states had imitated England with a governor, a council and an assembly instead of collecting all authority into one centre, the nation.
Theme
Ambition
35 works in the library take up ambition, from The Conquest of Gaul to Washington: A Life.
Works
A Mathematician's Apology is a short book of twenty-nine numbered sections in which the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, at sixty-two and conscious that his creative powers had faded, sets out to justify a life spent on pure mathematics. Cambridge University Press published it in 1940.
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.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
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.
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.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
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.
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.
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.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
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.
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.
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.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
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.
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.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet.
Ada Lovelace's Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine begin as an act of translation and become a theory of computation. Luigi Menabrea had published a French account of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine after hearing Babbage lecture in Turin.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
Ozymandias is a fourteen-line sonnet about a ruined statue of an Egyptian king in the desert, and it has become the best-known English poem on the vanity of earthly power. Shelley wrote it in late 1817, in a friendly sonnet-writing contest with his friend Horace Smith on the same subject, and Leigh Hunt printed it in The Examiner on 11 January 1818.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher is Charles Babbage's late memoir of invention, public controversy, and scientific administration. It is not a continuous autobiography so much as a set of argued recollections.
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.
That Hideous Strength, subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, completes the trilogy that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, though it moves the action from other planets to an English university town. Mark Studdock, a young sociologist and fellow of Bracton College in Edgestow, longs to belong to the inner circle of the college's Progressive Element.
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.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is the life story of a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, dictated in his late fifties and carried from his birth on All Saints' night in 1500 to 1562. It opens with Cellini's claim that anyone who has done excellent work and is honest should write his own life after forty, and with his ancestry and childhood: his father Giovanni, a musician and maker of instruments, wants him to be a flute-player, and once boxes his ears so that he will remember the salamander they have seen in the fire.
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 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 Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and war veteran who comes East in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, on Long Island, beside the vast mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a rich former Yale football player, along with Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a champion golfer.
The 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.
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.
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.