A translation of Thucydide's history of the wars between Athens and Sparta is critically introduced.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was Douglass' third autobiography. In it he was able to go into greater detail about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery, as he and his family were no longer in any danger from the reception of his work. In this engrossing narrative he recounts early years of abuse; his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom, abolitionist campaigns, and his crusade for full civil rights for former slaves....

Eschewing the "great man" theory of history, Tolstoy shows how events are determined by large numbers of people whose actions coalesce at any moment in history to determine the course of events. Arguing that the closer people are to a situation the more they believe they have exercised free will, and the farther away people are from that situation the more they realize that their actions were already determined by past events, Tolstoy demonstrates...

"First published 1897. Count Dracula, an 'undead' villain from Transylvania, uses his supernatural powers to lure and prey upon innocent victims from whom he gains the blood on which he lives. The novel is written chiefly in the form of journals kept by the principal characters -- Jonathan Harker, who contacts the vampire in his Transylvanian castle; Harker's fiancée (later his wife), Mina, adored by the Count; the well-meaning Dr. Seward; and Lucy...

The curse of the Baskervilles dates to the seventeenth century, when the wicked Hugo Baskerville chased a farmer's daughter across the pitch-dark moor of Grimpen with vile intentions. The poor girl died of fright, but Baskerville's fate was worse -- a giant black hound, eyes afire and jaws dripping with blood, tore out his throat and devoured it on the spot. Since then, the specter of that terrible beast has haunted Baskerville Hall, many of whose...

"Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend." "The heroic battle for survival of simple pioneer folk in the Nebraska country of the 1880s. John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother alng to a new zest...

"For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known. The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon,...

When Catherine Morland is taken to Bath to "come out" in society, she meets Henry Tilney, a young clergyman, and his sister. They are the children of the eccentric General Tilney, who when he meets Catherine belieces her to be wealthier than she is and arranges for her to visit his house in Gloucestershire -- Northanger Abbey -- to entice her into marriage with Henry. When Catherine learns that the General's wife has been dead for some years, she...

The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist who has come from the provinces to conquer Paris but is conquered instead by the flaws of his own genius. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It provides a unique insight into Zola's career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence....

Frankenstein is the most famous novel by Mary Shelley: a dark Faustian parable of science misused that was an immediate success on its publication in 1818. Purporting to be the record of an explorer, it tells of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but wayward student of science, who builds a human from dead flesh. Horrified by what he has done, he abandons his creation. The creature, an outcast for his horrific appearance, learns language and becomes...