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Modern Library 100 Best Novels
Modern Library's 100 Best Novels is a 1998 list of the best English-language novels published during the 20th century, as selected by Modern Library from among 400 novels published by Random House, which owns Modern Library.Jessica Woodbury"Back Away From that 100 Best Novels List" '' Book Riot'', August 23, 2017. The purpose of the list was to "bring the Modern Library to public attention" and stimulate sales of its books.Paul Lewis"'Ulysses' at Top As Panel Picks 100 Best Novels" ''The New York Times'', July 20, 1998. A separate Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century was created the same year. Editors' list During early 1998, the Modern Library polled its editorial board to find their opinions of the best 100 novels. The board of review consisted of Daniel J. Boorstin, A. S. Byatt, Christopher Cerf, Shelby Foote, Vartan Gregorian, Edmund Morris, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Styron and Gore Vidal. Al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler, (, ; ; hu, Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism. Having moved to Britain in 1940, he published his novel ''Darkness at Noon'', an anti-totalitarian work that gained him international fame. Over the next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1949, Koestler began secretly working with a British Cold War anti-communist propaganda department known as the Information Research Department (IRD), which would republish and distribute many of his works, and also fund his activities. In 1968, he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for isoutstanding contribution to European culture". In 1972 he was made a Commander of the Orde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ulysses (novel)
''Ulysses'' is a Literary modernism, modernist novel by Irish literature, Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal ''The Little Review'' from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's 40th birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement." According to Declan Kiberd, "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking". ''Ulysses'' chronicles the appointments and encounters of the itinerant Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinisation of names, Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem the ''Odyssey'', and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Bloom an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lolita
''Lolita'' is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores, is what he calls her privately. The novel was originally written in English and first published in Paris in 1955 by Olympia Press. The novel has been twice adapted into film: first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has also been adapted several times for the stage and has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful, Broadway musical. It has been included in many lists of best books, such as '' Time'' List of the 100 Best Novels, '' Le Monde'' 100 Books of the Century, Bokklubben World L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires '' Decline and Fall'' (1928) and '' A Handful of Dust'' (1934), the novel '' Brideshead Revisited'' (1945), and the Second World War trilogy '' Sword of Honour'' (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. Waugh was the son of a publisher, educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford. He worked briefly as a schoolmaster before he became a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends and developed a taste for country house society. He travelled extensively in the 1930s, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he reported from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. He served in the British armed force ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry James
Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between ''émigré ''Americans, English people, and continental Europeans. Examples of such novels include '' The Portrait of a Lady'', '' The Ambassadors'', and '' The Wings of the Dove''. His later works were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. A Nobel Prize laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner's family moved to Oxford, Mississippi when he was a young child. With the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel '' Soldiers' Pay'' (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote ''Sartoris'' (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published '' The Sound and the Fury''. The following year ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heart Of Darkness
''Heart of Darkness'' (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river on which most of the narrative takes place, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and economically important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition. Central to Conrad's work is the idea that there is little difference between "civilised people" and "savages." ''Heart of Darkness'' implicitly comments on imperialism and racism. The novella's setting pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world. Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in ''Lord Jim'', for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel ''Erewhon'' (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel ''Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh'', published posthumously in 1903 in an altered version titled ''The Way of All Flesh'', and published in 1964 as he wrote it. Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'' that are still consulted. Early life Butler was born on 4 December 1835 at the rectory in the village of Langar, Nottinghamshire. His father was Rev. Thomas Butler, son of Dr. Samuel Butler, then headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later Bishop of Lichfield. Dr. Butler was the son of a tradesman and descended from a line of yeomen, but his scholarly aptitude being recognised at a young age, he had been sent to Ru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Way Of All Flesh
''The Way of All Flesh'' (sometimes called ''Ernest Pontifex, or the Way of All Flesh'') is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler that attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy. Written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published (in 1903) it was accepted as part of the general reaction against Victorianism. In its posthumous publication in 1903, Butler's first literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild, made substantial changes to Butler's manuscript. The original manuscript was first published in 1964 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, edited by Daniel F. Howard. The title is a quotation from the '' Douay–Rheims Bible'''s translation of the Biblical Hebrew expression, to "go the way of all the earth", meaning "to die", in the ''Books of Kings'': "I am going the way of all flesh: take thou courage and shew thyself a man." (). In 1998, the Modern Library ranked ''The Way o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ironweed (novel)
''Ironweed'' is a 1983 novel by William Kennedy. It received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is the third book in Kennedy's Albany Cycle. It is included in the Western Canon of the critic Harold Bloom. Plot summary ''Ironweed'' is set during the Great Depression and tells the story of Francis Phelan, a bum originally from Albany, New York, who left his family after accidentally killing his infant son. The novel focuses on Francis's return (after being gone twenty-two years) to Albany over the triduum of All Hallows Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day; moreover, a surreal element is added to the narrative as Phelan sees and tries to interact with dead people from his troubled past. The novel features characters that are present in some of Kennedy's other Albany Cycle books. Adaptations Kennedy wrote the screenplay for the 1987 film version directed by Héctor Babenco and starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Major portions of the film were shot on location ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Kennedy (author)
William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his novel '' Ironweed''. Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family in Albany, New York. The novels make use of incidents from the city's history as well as the supernatural. Kennedy's works include ''The Ink Truck'' (1969), ''Legs'' (1975), ''Billy Phelan's Greatest Game'' (1978), '' Ironweed'' (1983), '' Roscoe'' (2002) and ''Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes'' (2011). One reviewer said of ''Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes'' that it was "written with such brio and encompassing humanity that it may well deserve to be called the best of the bunch". Kennedy also published a nonfiction book entitled ''O Albany!: Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels'' (1983). Early life Kennedy was born and raised in Albany, New ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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