The OF Blog: Easton Press's The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Easton Press's The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written

As some of you already know from previous posts, I've begun collecting the Easton Press series of leatherbound, gilt-edged books, The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written.  For later review/collection purposes, I'm going to list the 100 books, then bold the books I've bought in that edition which I've read (italics for those now owned but not yet read and plain text for books left to be acquired).  This is not the same as the number of books from this list that I've read in other editions over the years.  If it were, over 90% of the books would be marked as read.

  1. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
  2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  3. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  5. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
  6. Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
  7. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  8. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
  9. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
  10. The Odyssey by Homer
  11. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
  12. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce
  13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
  14. Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton
  15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  16. Candide by Voltaire
  17. Oedipus The King by Sophocles
  18. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame [Notre-Dame De Paris] by Victor Hugo
  19. The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
  20. The Sea Wolf by Jack London
  21. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
  22. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  23. The Poems of Robert Browning by Robert Browning
  24. The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  25. The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James
  26. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  27. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
  28. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  29. The Poems of John Keats by John Keats
  30. On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin (own Franklin Library edition)
  31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  32. Collected Poems by Robert Frost
  33. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
  34. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  35. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (own Franklin Library edition)
  36. She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
  37. Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
  38. Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
  39. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  40. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  41. The Iliad by Homer
  42. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
  43. The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  45. Aesop's Fables by Aesop
  46. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
  47. The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
  48. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  49. Politics And The Poetics by Aristotle
  50. The Aeneid by Virgil
  51. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  52. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
  53. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  54. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  55. Pygmalion And Candida by George Bernard Shaw
  56. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
  57. Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare
  58. The Cherry Orchard And The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
  59. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  60. The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
  61. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
  62. Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
  63. The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  64. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  65. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
  66. Beowulf
  67. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  68. The Necklace And Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
  69. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
  70. Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
  71. Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  72. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  73. The History of Early Rome by Livy
  74. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  75. The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
  76. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
  77. Alice's Adventure In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  78. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  79. The Rubáiyát Of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám
  80. The Red And The Black by Stendhal
  81. A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  82. The Republic by Plato
  83. Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
  84. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  85. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
  86. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
  87. Silas Marner by George Eliot
  88. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
  89. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
  90. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
  91. The Confessions by St. Augustine
  92. Tales of Mystery And Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
  93. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
  94. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
  95. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
  96. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  97. Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
  98. Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  99. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  100. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

 Any of these that you own in the Easton Press edition?

5 comments:

Paul said...

Track down those Dostoevsky's ASAP.

Larry Nolen said...

I shall. Probably will cost me $35-50 to acquire them, but they'll be worth it.

Chad Hull said...

I own Huck Finn, Moby Dick and just bought the complete works of Guy de Maupassant from Easton press though not the edition on this list.

Is this top 100 weird to anyone else? Last of the Mochicans? Really? Public domain running rampant...

Larry, as you probably read Cyrillic this point is probably moot, but most academics and literary high brow people exalt Dostoevsky's (and other Russian writers) translations from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They are newer and thought to be the most definitive in terms of quality of translation and best versions to read.

If you going to collection all 100 on the list then who cares, but if those works are new to you, considering their length and acclaimed quality, you might as well read the best possible rendering into English you can.

Just an FYI.

drxray said...

I own the whole series. Also own their masterpieces of Science Fiction Series, Greatest books of the 20th Century series and the complete Hemingway as well as a few random other books such as some signed Vonnegut editions. I subscribed to these series over 10 years ago. It doesn't seem so expensive when you only have to pay for 2 books a month. It did take several years to aquire them though

Steve Weston said...

There is also a list with the publication years of each title at http://www.leatherboundtreasure.com/greatest_books_ever_written.html

 
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