When Little, Brown published Infinite Jest on February 1, 1996, it arrived already mythologized — a 1,079-page novel with nearly 400 endnotes, written by a thirty-three-year-old from central Illinois who had spent four years on…
Read MoreIn 1831, Victor Hugo changed the course of literature—and architecture—with a single novel: Notre-Dame de Paris, better known to English readers as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. That year, the world first encountered two of literature’s…
Read MoreThere are books that whisper gently across time—and then there are books that roar like the wind over the Yorkshire moors. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights belongs to the latter. Published in 1847, it was the…
Read MoreFew writers shaped American literature as profoundly as Ernest Hemingway. A Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, Hemingway was known for his stark, economical prose, his deeply human characters, and his focus on themes such as…
Read MoreLauded by William Faulkner as “the father of American literature,” American writer, humorist, and publisher Mark Twain is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in American literary history. Active during the latter…
Read MoreFew poets have etched themselves into the American consciousness as deeply as Robert Frost. With his deceptively simple verses and vivid portraits of rural life, Frost captured the complex emotions and quiet struggles of everyday…
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