With their call for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!", for self-honesty, and for harmony with nature, the writings of Henry David Thoreau are perhaps the most influential philosophical works in all American literature. The selections in this volume represent Thoreau at his best. Included in their entirety are Walden, his indisputable masterpiece, and his two great arguments for nonconformity, Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle. A lifetime...

Upon its first appearance in 1895, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure shocked Victorian critics and readers with a frank depiction of sexuality and an unbridled indictment of the institutions of marriage, education, and religion, reportedly causing one Angli-can bishop to order the book publicly burned. The experience so exhausted Hardy that he never wrote a work of fiction again. Rich in symbolism, Jude the Obscure is the story of Jude Fawley and his...

Contains thirteen narrative poems and lyrical dramas, the shorter lyrical and reflective poems, and a selection of prefaces and essays. Edited with an introduction analyzing Shelley's work and thought, by C. Baker.

The Brothers Karamazov. The final novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published as Bratya Karamazovy in 1879-80, and generally considered to be his masterpiece. It is the story of Fyodor Karamazov and his sons Alyosha, Dmitry, and Ivan. It is also a story of patricide, into the sordid unfolding of which Dostoyevsky introduces a love-hate struggle with profound psychological and spiritual implications. Throughout the whole novel there persists a search...

"The Greco-Persian Wars (also often called the Persian Wars) were a series of conflicts between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and city-states of the Hellenic world that started in 499 BC and lasted until 449 BC. The collision between the fractious political world of the Greeks and the enormous empire of the Persians began when Cyrus the Great conquered Ionia in 547 BC. Struggling to rule the independent-minded cities of Ionia, the Persians appointed...