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GET STARTED WITH A GREAT STORY

The books listed below have delighted generations of readers and critics. This is just one quality of great literature.

This admittedly incomplete list can be used as a starting point for helping you identify good literature. Eventually, you will want to add some modern authors to the mix. Authors like Ernest Gaines and Madeleine L'Engle are likely to be the "classics" of tomorrow. Here is a list of recommended classics:

Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
Austen, Jane: Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Buck, Pearl S.: Good Earth, Imperial Woman
Bunyan, John: Pilgrim's Progress
Burns, Olive Ann: Cold Sassy Tree
Caldwell, Taylor: Pillar of Iron, Great Lion of God
Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Antonia
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Christie, Agatha: Murder on the Orient Express and others
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim
Cooper, James Fenimore: Last of the Mohicans
Costain, Thomas: The Silver Chalice
Crane, Stephen: Red Badge of Courage
Dante: Divine Comedy
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House, A Christmas Carol and others
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Dumas, Alexandre: Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo
DuMaurier, Daphne: Rebecca
Eliot, T.S.: Murder in the Cathedral
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones and others
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India, A Room With a View
Green, Graham: The Power and the Glory and others
Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The House of Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter
Hemingway, Ernest: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Old Man and the Sea and others
Hilton, James: Lost Horizon
Homer: Iliad and Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: Les Miserables*, Hunchback of Notre Dame
Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World
James, Henry: Portrait of a Lady
Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Kipling, Rudyard: Kim
Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, C.S.: The Narnia Series
Lewis, Sinclair: Babbit
London, Jack: Call of the Wild
Melville, Herman: Moby Dick, Billy Budd
Michener, James: Covenant, Hawaii, and other historical fiction
Milton, John: Paradise Lost
Mitchell, Margaret: Gone with the Wind
Orwell, George: 1984, Animal Farm
Pasternack, Boris: Dr. Zhivago
Paton, Alan: Cry, the Beloved Country
Poe, Edgar Allen: Fall of the House of Usher and others
Potok, Chaim: The Chosen, My Name is Asher Lev and others
Rand, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged and others
Remarque, Erich: All Quiet on the Western Front
Shakespeare, William: Macbeth, Hamlet, and others
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Sienkiewicz, Henryk: Quo Vadis
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago and others
Steinbeck, John: Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island
Stoker, Bram: Dracula
Stone, Irving: The Agony and the Ecstasy
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels
Thackery, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, Death of Ivan Ilyitch, War and Peace
Twain, Mark: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Uris, Leon: QB VII, Exodus, The Haj and others
Verne, Jules: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and others
Wallace, Lewis: Ben-Hur
Washington, Booker T.: Up from Slavery
Wells, H.G.: Time Machine, War of the Worlds
Wilde, Oscar: Picture of Dorian Gray

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» Getting Started with a Great Story

* Jim Reimann has retold Victor Hugo's Les Miserables with updated language and in just 300 pages in a new version of Les Mis published by Word. Jim has kept the original beauty of the story, but has cut out all the extra that is not part of the Jean Valjean plot line. It's a beautiful book, and is great for folks who don't have the time or energy to plow through 1200 pages. Reimann has also updated My Utmost for His Highest and Streams in the Desert.

(Footnotes provided by Ann Byle, Freelance Writer.)