Joy of Reading : A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works

by Van Doren, Charles

• ISBN13: 9781402211607
• ISBN10: 1402211600
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-01
• Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc

Summary

This is an enormously readable, critical description of the classic works and their authors, from Homer and Dante to Solzhenitsyn and Salinger, written by the former editor of The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Annals of America (20 Volumes), and The History of Knowledge. The book consists of 15 chapters organized chronologically, from the Golden Age that includes Aristotle and Heroditus to only yesterday, with descriptions of great works by Orwell and Heinlen. Van Doren will begin each chapter with a short introduction about the period, placing the works within that period’s history, and the influence that history had on later books and times. The Joy of Reading contains insightful descriptions, analysis, and comments about a wide range of genres - fiction, poetry, drama, children’s books, philosophy, history, science, and reference books. The author’s personal commentary will awaken and renew a love of literature in every reader. The Joy of Reading will include a complete bibliography. Originally published in 1985, that version of The Joy of Reading was organized alphabetically, based on the authors’ names. In this complete revision, the entries are organized chronologically, and each chapter contains a historical essay on the period it covers, as well as descriptions of each author’s major works. Also included are new entries on more recent works and their authors.

Author Biography

Van Doren is the coauthor of the classic How to Read a Book with philosopher Mortimer J. Adler; the author of A History of Knowledge (which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover and 150,000 in paperback); and the author or editor of The Idea of Progress, Great Treasury of Western Thought, The Annals of America, Second Chance: An American Story, as well as several novels for young people and Webster's American biographies. He is an adjunct professor of the University of Connecticut, Torrington Campus. His father was Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and professor at Columbia.

Table of Contents

The Golden Age Homer

Hesiod

Aeschylus

Sophocles

Euripides

Aristophanes

Aesop

Herodotus

Thucydides

After the Fall

Hippocrates

Plato

Aristotle

Euclid

Archimedes

The Silver Age of Tyranny

Lucretius

Virgil

Ovid

Tacitus

Plutarch

Epictetus

Marcus Aurelius-

The Middle Age

Ptolemy

Boethius

Augustine

Anonymous (The Song of Roland)

Anonymous (The Tumbler of Our Lady)

Joseph BTdier

Thomas Aquinas

Dante Alighieri- Geoffrey Chaucer

The Renaissance, Part One

Frantois Rabelais

Niccol= Machiavelli Nicolaus Copernicus

William Gilbert

Johannes Kepler

Galileo Galilei- Francis Bacon

Michel de Montaigne

William Shakespeare

Miguel de Cervantes

The Renaissance, Part Two

RenT Descartes

Jean de La Fontaine

MoliFre

Blaise Pascal

John Donne

George Herbert

Robert Herrick

Thomas Hobbes

John Milton

Andrew Marvell

Benedict de Spinoza

The Age of Reason

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens

John Dryden

Alexander Pope

Daniel Defoe

William Congreve

Voltaire

. . . and Revolution

John Locke

John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Henry Fielding

James Boswell

Robert Burns

William Blake

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thomas Jefferson

Abraham Lincoln

Romantic Spirits

Goethe

Lord Byron

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Jane Austen

HonorT de Balzac

Stendhal

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Critics and Seers

Claude Bernard

Charles Darwin

John Stuart Mill

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Dickens

George Eliot

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Matthew Arnold

Mark Twain

Henry Adams

Some Victorians and Others

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Herman Melville

Ivan Turgenev

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Leo Tolstoy

Robert Browning Lewis Carroll

Thomas Hardy

William James

Henry James

Arthur Conan Doyle

Rudyard Kipling

Turn of the Century

Sigmund Freud

C.P. Cavafy

Alfred North Whitehead

William Butler Yeats

J.M. Synge

Beatrix Potter

Robert Frost

Wallace Stevens

Thomas Mann

Edith Wharton

Willa Cather

+tienne Gilson

James Joyce

Henrik Ibsen

Bernard Shaw

Entre Deux Guerres Eugen Herrigel

Isak Dinesen

Virginia Woolf

Franz Kafka

Austin Tappan Wright

Ringgold "Ring" Lardner

Erwin Schr÷dinger

William Carlos Williams

Marianne Moore

T.S. Eliot

Ezra Pound

Eugene O'Neill

Nancy Mitford

C.S. Lewis

J.R.R. Tolkien

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway

E.B. White

James Thurber

Archibald MacLeish

Mark Van Doren

Antoine de Saint-ExupTry

Hiroshima and After

John Hersey

Walter M. Miller, JrCharles Galton Darwin Fernand Braudel

Mortimer J. Adler

John Steinbeck

George Orwell

T.H. White

Samuel Beckett

Robert A. Heinlein

W.H. Auden

Margaret Wise Brown

Elizabeth Bishop

Tennessee Williams

Richard Wilbur

Albert Camus

Arthur Miller

Arthur C. Clarke

J.D. Salinger

Julian Jaynes

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only Yesterday

Fred Bodsworth

Primo Levi

Leo Rosten

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

JosT Saramago

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.