Central Kansas Library System

Despite the early success of his tales of adventure in the South Seas, Herman Melville (1819–1891) suffered a reversal of fortunes with the 1851 publication of Moby-Dick. The great epic, now recognized as a masterpiece, was scorned by an uncomprehending nineteenth-century audience. Melville's preoccupation with metaphysical and philosophical issues and his use of symbols and archetypes foreshadowed elements of latter-day literature, and modern readers...

Popular and prolific, Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels as well as dozens of short stories that provide fascinating insights into Victorian life, behavior, and morals. A careful observer of people and places, Trollope created realistic, unsentimental depictions of everyday life that offer enduring entertainment as well as vivid reflections of the attitudes of his era. These six stories originally appeared in periodicals, and Trollope may have drawn...

Seneca's Letters from a Stoic are moral letters to his friend Lucilius, written over two thousand years ago. They still hold the power to fascinate. The letters were written by Seneca at the end of his life, during his retirement, after he had worked for the Emperor Nero for fifteen years. They are addressed to Lucilius, the then procurator of Sicily, although he is known only through Seneca's writings. It is not clear from the historical record whether...

"As close to an autobiography as Jack London ever wrote, John Barleycorn recounts the author's lifelong struggle with alcohol. The brutally frank memoir created a sensation upon its 1913 publication and became a powerful tool of the temperance movement. Rich in anecdotes and written in a captivating style, the book also offers compelling insights into London's life as a rugged adventurer and popular writer"--

Between the first proposals of a federal Constitution in 1787 and the document's 1789 ratification, an intense debate raged among the nation's founding fathers. The Federalist Papers - authored by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay - favored the adoption of the Constitution, but other early statesmen opposed its ratification. The latter group, writing under pseudonyms, amassed a substantial number of influential essays, speeches, and...

Derived from the journals of an empress's tutor and companion, this unique book offers rare glimpses of court life in eleventh-century Japan. Lady Murasaki recounts episodes of drama and intrigue among courtiers as well as the elaborate rituals related to the birth of a prince. Her observations, expressed with great subtlety, offer penetrating and timeless insights into human nature. Murasaki Shikibu (circa AD 973-1025) served among the gifted poets...

A woman of many gifts, Margaret Fuller (1810–50) is most aptly remembered as America's first true feminist. Her 1845 work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, is regarded as the United States' first feminist publication, a groundbreaking book that helped reshape gender roles for women as well as men. Fuller was one of the few female members of the Transcendentalist movement, and in her brief yet fruitful life, she was an author, editor, literary and...

An officer and cavalry commander during the Civil War and Indian wars, General George Armstrong Custer (1839-76) was well known in his lifetime for his personal daring and his aggressive approach to warfare. After his "last stand" in 1876, he was even more famous as the commander who led his entire unit to annihilation by a massive coalition of Native American tribes at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. A few years before the fatal clash, Custer...

Best known today as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Count Leo Tolstoy also is acknowledged as a skilled playwright. His five-act drama The Power of Darkness offers a cold and unsparing look at Russian peasant life that illustrates the costs of pursuing personal desires rather than the dictates of morality. The grimly realistic tragedy is based on a real incident, centering on a peasant's confession to a party of wedding guests of his...

A legal and readily available painkiller in the nineteenth century, laudanum was a source of both pleasure and pain for author Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859). After achieving overnight success with Confessions of an English Opium Eater, an impassioned account of his struggles with addiction, the author wrote the hypnotic prose poems of Suspiria de Profundis ("Sighs from the Depths"). Like Confessions, these short essays combined drug-induced visions...