Folio
The classics, in the public domain. One link each — the edition worth reading.
58 works
Epic
Long poems, from Homer to Milton.
c. 8th century BCE
The Iliad
Homer
William Cullen Bryant’s blank verse
c. 8th century BCE
The Odyssey
Homer
William Cullen Bryant’s blank verse
19 BCE
The Aeneid
Virgil
John Dryden’s translation
8 CE
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Dryden and others
c. 8th–11th century
Beowulf
Anonymous
John Lesslie Hall’s verse
1320
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation
1667
Paradise Lost
John Milton
Unabridged
Poetry
Lyric and narrative verse.
c. 1400
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
Middle English
1609
The Sonnets
William Shakespeare
With the narrative poems
1845
The Raven and Other Poems
Edgar Allan Poe
The collected poems
1855
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Unabridged
1859
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Omar Khayyám
Edward FitzGerald’s translation
1922
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot
In the collected poems
Drama
Plays meant to be heard.
c. 429 BCE
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles
Francis Storr’s translation
c. 1595
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
Unabridged
c. 1600
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
Unabridged
1606
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Unabridged
1606
King Lear
William Shakespeare
Unabridged
1808
Faust
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Bayard Taylor’s verse, Part I
1895
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
Unabridged
Fiction
Novels and stories, in the order they appeared.
1605
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
John Ormsby’s translation
1759
Candide
Voltaire
The Modern Library translation
1813
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Unabridged
1815
Emma
Jane Austen
Unabridged
1818
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Unabridged
1844
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Chapman and Hall translation
1847
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Unabridged
1847
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Unabridged
1850
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Unabridged
1851
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Unabridged
1857
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Eleanor Marx Aveling’s translation
1861
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Unabridged
1862
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Isabel F. Hapgood’s translation
1865
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
With Tenniel’s illustrations
1866
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Constance Garnett’s translation
1869
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation
1871
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Unabridged
1878
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Constance Garnett’s translation
1880
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Constance Garnett’s translation
1884
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Unabridged
1886
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Unabridged
1890
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Unabridged
1892
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The 1892 story
1892
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
The twelve stories
1897
Dracula
Bram Stoker
Unabridged
1899
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Unabridged
1899
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Unabridged
1914
Dubliners
James Joyce
The fifteen stories
1922
Ulysses
James Joyce
The 1922 text
1925
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Unabridged
1925
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Unabridged
Prose
Philosophy, science, and witness.
c. 375 BCE
The Republic
Plato
In Benjamin Jowett’s Dialogues
c. 170
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
George Long’s translation
1532
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
W. K. Marriott’s translation
1845
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Unabridged
1854
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Unabridged
1859
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
Unabridged
1903
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
Unabridged