Harvard Classics Books

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

The second novel by Dickens, and considered one of his best, Oliver Twist is the story of an orphan boy who is essentially born into an English workhouse. There he must suffer the abject miseries of p..

Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) is one of the best known and widely read English novelists out there, and her 1811 book Sense and Sensibility, which she signed anonymously "A Lady," was the book that kicked o..

Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is the sequel to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which takes place 6 months after Alice's trip down the rabbit hole. This time it's a ..

The Bible

Anonymous

This is undoubtedly the greatest composition of fiction man has ever created. It has lust, it has jealousy, capriciousness, murder, rape, genocide and war in general. And it also has hope, it has grac..

Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham

Of Human Bondage is W. Somerset Maugham's 1915 masterpiece featuring the young Philip Carey. The work is considered autobiographical, though Maugham claims that most was "pure invention." The novel is..

Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy

Sophocles

Oedipus Rex ie the first in the trilogy is one of the most powerful dramas I've had the chance to read. It defines the term 'epic' both in scale and emotion; its narrative is grand and gripping, and t..

Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts (1912) is one of greatest comic masterpieces of the 20th century. It's hard now to imagine how a play about a phonetics expert who decides to co..

Heidi

Johanna Spyri

Heidi is a work of children's fiction published in 1881 by Swiss author Johanna Spyri, originally published in two parts as Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning and Heidi: How She Used What She ..