Harvard Classics

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

The novel is a domestic fiction set in England that follows the intertwined lives of the Bennet sisters as…

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This volume is a psychological detective story set in nineteenth‑century Saint Petersburg, where the…

History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Henry Fielding

The work is a comic, eighteenth‑century novel that treats the growth of a young man from foundling to adult…

The Confessions of St. Augustine

Augustine, of Hippo, Saint

The work is a first‑person spiritual autobiography by Augustine of Hippo, the fourth‑century bishop and…

Meditations

Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

The work is a sprawling autobiographical meditation by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor whose lineage…

The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli

The work is a historical‑political treatise that traces the life of Niccolò Machiavelli against the turbulent…

Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes’s *Leviathan* is a foundational treatise of political science that opens with a personal…

Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

The work is an autobiographical account attributed to Benjamin Franklin, the eighteenth‑century American…

The Odyssey Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original

Homer

The work presented here is a prose rendering of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, produced by the…

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina is a Russian novel that begins with a stark observation about families, then plunges into the…

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The work is an epistolary novel that opens with a series of letters from the sensitive young protagonist,…

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving

Washington Irving’s tale is a short work of early‑American fiction that blends ghostly legend with a vivid…

Don Quijote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The work is a sprawling piece of 16th‑century Spanish fiction that blends social satire, chivalric parody,…

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

The novel is an autobiographical‑style bildungsroman that begins with a self‑conscious narrator announcing…

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus From the Quarto of 1604

Christopher Marlowe

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, printed in the 1604 quarto, is Christopher Marlowe’s early‑modern…

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith

Adam Smith’s *An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations* is a systematic treatise on how…

On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

Charles Darwin

The work is a scientific treatise that sets out Charles Darwin’s case for evolution by natural selection.

Pascal's Pensées

Blaise Pascal

Pascal’s Pensées is a theological‑apologetic treatise that opens with a preface to its second part, in which…

The Aeneid

Virgil

Virgil’s *Aeneid* opens with the battered remnants of the Trojan fleet drifting toward a hostile coast after…

Faust [part 1]. Translated Into English in the Original Metres

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The work is an English rendering of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s first part of Faust, presented in the…

Phaedo

Plato

Plato’s Phaedo is a philosophical dialogue that opens with a lively exchange among Socrates and his friends…

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This volume gathers Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most celebrated essays, presented in the scholarly format of…

Notre-Dame de Paris

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo’s *Notre‑Dame de Paris* is a sprawling historical novel that intertwines the fate of a medieval…