Literary classics

This classic novel is the story of what happens when an idealistic, fiercely honest young man tries to reconcile Roman Catholic dogma with the realities of America of the 1940s. In this brilliantly comic and pungent tale, Lardner dissects the thought control of the McCarthy era, business ethics, racial intolerance, repressive sexual attitudes, the Manhattan nightclub set, "enlightened" penology, vigilantism, and other social phenomena. The ecstasy which Owen Muir seeks is of both the earthly and the spiritual kind, and his wonderfully funny fate lies in the fact that he cannot have his flesh and eat it, too.

Naturalist, philosopher, champion of self-reliance and moral independence, Henry David Thoreau remains not only one of our most influential writers but also one of our most contemporary. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau gathers his most significant works, including his masterpiece, Walden; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; selections from Cape Cod and The Maine Woods; as well as “Walking,” “Civil Disobedience,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” and “Life Without Principle.”

Called the "Tenth Muse" by the ancients, Greece's greatest female lyric poet Sappho (ca. 610-580 B.C.E.) spent the majority of her life on the famed island of Lesbos. Passionate and breathtaking, her poems survive only in fragments, following religious conspiracies to silence her. This excellent translation includes Roche's brilliant essay, "Portrait of Sappho."

The women of Athens concoct a daring scheme: to infiltrate the male-dominated Assembly disguised as men and to vote themselves into power, after which they will overturn the old laws and inaugurate a new society where all are equal and where property - sex, too! - is shared. This new translation by Robert Mayhew of one of playwright Aristophanes' last surviving plays recaptures the spirit, the bawdiness, and the brilliance of this rollicking farce which is at the same time a profound critique of contemporary Greek customs and manners. A full introduction and explanatory notes provide important background material on communistic ideas current in fifth- and fourth-century B.C.E. Greek thought as well as on historical and other details relevant to the text.

A wonderful autobiography of a man who preceded his time by appreciating in the 1920 that personal desires and impulses, including sexual, had crucial influence on his professional and personal development. For being frank - he changed his first name from James when eighteen to reflect his priority, his autobiography was banned in Britain and America until 1963. His extraordinary life summary, having risen from a poor Irish boy to literary king maker in the height of Victorian London through the building of Brooklyn bridge, the Chicago fire, smuggling cattle in Texas and law studies in Kansas, made him friends of such literary stars and Oscar Wilde and D.H. Lawrence among others. With sharp perception and immense memory we receive a broad image of the forty years from the 1880s to the 1920, mostly in London, but also in France and Germany.

This eBook version of Modern Painters, Volume 5 presents the full text of this literary classic.