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Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution is a landmark of literary history. Conceived not as a dry recounting of facts, but as a personal, vivid, direct, and dramatic encounter with the turbulent times of revolutionary France, it is in fact an extended dramatic monologue in which we meet not only the striking personalities and events of the time, but the equally striking personality and mind of Thomas Carlyle himself.

This was Carl Sandburg's breakthrough book. It is easy to see how it draws directly on Sandburg's life in Chicago, because it speaks powerfully of the specific character of that city, and indeed, begins with his famous poem that names Chicago as the "City of the Broad Shoulders." His poetry is deeply aware of the inner life of the city, from a homeless woman freezing in a doorway to the lifestyles of the rich and powerful.

Childe Harold narrates the experiences of a young nobleman, sated with the wine, women, and song of his native England, who goes forth in search of the wine, women, song, and adventure of Spain, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. The book is literally an armchair travelogue in rhyming couplets. He expresses himself in vivid, forceful and emotional language on all that he enounters and shapes his experience into a deep study of that subject so favored by all the Romantic poets - himself.

Children of the Night, from 1897, is Edwin Arlington Robinson's second book of poetry. He self-published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before, in 1896; most of the poems in it also appear in this volume. This book already contains one poem destined to become known as one of his masterpieces, namely the famous portrait of a suicide, "Richard Cory" - the man who "glittered as he walked," the character who may have been inspired in part by Ediwn Arlington Robinson's own brother.

In this set of "Uncanny Tales," Mary Louisa Molesworth deftly makes us feel the shiver of ghostly mystery without actually giving us a ghost! Or, to put it another way, she's interested in a different kind of ghostly presence. In "The Man with the Cough", it is the ghostly presence of a secret agent, and the ghostly experience of events that seem like a dream, but have real-world consequences. In "Halfway Between the Stiles", it is the ghostly presence of old memories of love that will not die away, and again, the real world responds. In "Will Not Take Place", it is a man who almost becomes a ghost.

Thomas Gray is worldfamous as the author of "Gray's Elegy", more properly known as "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". He did not write very much, but he did write more than just his most famous poem. This collection is a recording of the 1768 Dodsley edition, the primary publication of his poetry that he published during his lifetime.

This volume of The Poetry of Lord Byron is focused on work in which Byron dealt with certain themes that recurred throughout his career, especially personal integrity in the search for freedom and for love, and the suffering that can go with that search. "The Prisoner of Chillon", the keynote piece of this volume, is one of Byron’s most riveting pieces. Based on the true story of Francois Bonivard, it tells a story of political repression and human endurance.

John Maynard Keynes died in 1946, but his name is still prominent in economics and politics worldwide. Although his contributions to economic theory established and maintain his fame, he also - particularly at the time in his life when he wrote the present book, Economic Consequences of the Peace - showed a flair for practical political work. At the end of World War I he was appointed as the British Treasury's representative to the Versailles Peace Conference. His experiences at the Conference formed the basis of this book.

Frost weaves together themes of innocence and experience, love and joy and pain, in a sequence of poems that relate to each other while also standing alone as vivid, fresh expressions of intense feeling that speak as freshly today as they did when they were written.

When Lytton Strachey published Emininent Victorians, he took the general perception of the Victorian age among English-speaking readers and turned it upside-down. Four of the most eminent and idealized heroic figures of the Victorian age came under his witty and unsparing gaze and emerged, astonishingly enough, as human beings.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the first of the series, Dumas tells the luridly sexy, amazingly violent, and strikingly amoral story of the three most famous members of the Borgia family - Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia, and above all Cesare.

The Wood Beyond the World transports its hero, Walter the Golden, from the English village of Langton-on-Holm across the seas to a magical kingdom in a forest beyond the known world, ruled by the Mistress, an extraordinarly beautiful, complex, and sinister woman. There he meets the Maid, a woman captured, enslaved, and tortured by the Mistress, who has magical powers of her own.

This is Carl Sandburg's third book of poetry and his largest. It is also the most wide-ranging. The title, Smoke and Steel, suggests the steel industry he knew in Chicago, Gary and Pittsburg, but he writes about many other things as well. His over-arching theme seems to be human life as a struggle in adversity, a struggle for the mere necessities of life - food, clothing, shelter, work - and a struggle for the human soul, a struggle for love, charity, justice, equality.

In this, the 13th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, finds ample scope for his favorite approach. His subject is a well-documented historical figure: Ali Tepelini, most often known as Ali Pasha and known even in his own day as The Lion of Tepelen. Dumas presents us with an extraordinary character, a man of tremendous courage, unstoppable tenacity, matchless duplicity, extreme debauchery, disgusting cruelty, and amazing ingenuity.

In 1642, a pregnant Hester Prynne is found guilty of adultery, shunned by her neighbors, and forced to wear a scarlet letter 'A' on her dress. Meanwhile, Hester's husband - long thought to be lost at sea - has returned to Boston under the assumed name 'Roger Chillingworth' and plots to uncover her lover's identity. After her daughter Pearl is born, Hester is frequently visited by both Reverend Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, but always refuses to name her lover.

An experiment. A declaration. A spiritual awakening. Noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days chronicling his near-isolation in a small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond, on land owned by his mentor and the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Immersing himself in nature and solitude, Thoreau sought to develop a greater understanding of society amidst a life of self-reliance and simplicity. Originally published in 1854, Walden remains one of the most celebrated works in American literature.

English society in the 1860s was on the brink of enormous change, and some of the biggest changes coming to birth in that time were tremendous changes in the status of women - changes affecting politics, economics, law, government, business, education, psychology, religion, and sexuality, and the list goes on. The changes John Stuart Mill foresaw in 1861 as he wrote The Subjection of Women were just beginning to surface in his own time and have not yet run their full course in ours.

Unlike most ghost story writers, Mary Louisa Molesworth does not want to make you wake up screaming in the middle of the night. You may wake up with a shiver, but you'll also wake wake up feeling thoughtful, musing on how the mysteries of love, compassion, and memory can extend themselves into the realm of the supernatural.

Frost's third book of poetry, North of Boston, is an extraordinary set of poems that are nearly dramas, conversations drawn from the heat of life, love, and death. From "Home Burial" and "Death of the Hired Man" to "A Hundred Collars" and "The Generations of Man", Frost's work in this volume spans the whole range of human experience, expressed always in his characteristic dry, matter-of-fact, yet wonderfully musical verse.

Robert Frost's second book of poetry. Sometimes puckishly humorous, sometimes elegiac, sometimes terrifying, these poems show the young artist using his new-found voice to explore a world - a village in New Hampshire - that meant everything to him. This volume includes some of his best-known and best-loved works, such as "The Road Not Taken", "Out! Out!", "Birches", and "The Hill-wife". It also includes one of his poem-dramas, "Snow".