The Canon of Works

Sophocles · c. 441 BCE · Play

A sister buries her brother against the edict of the state.

Sophocles · c. 429 BCE · Play

A king investigates a murder and finds himself.

Homer · 8th century BCE · Epic

Ten years of sea and disguise between Troy and Ithaca.

Homer · 8th century BCE · Epic

Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles.

Li Bai · 8th century · Poetry

'Drinking Alone by Moonlight', 'Quiet Night Thought'.

Du Fu · 8th century · Poetry

'Spring View', 'Song of the War Carts'.

Rumi · 13th century · Poetry

The reed torn from the reed bed, crying of separation.

Murasaki Shikibu · c. 1010 · Novel

The world's first novel: the shining prince and the women whose lives he alters.

Dante Alighieri · 1320 · Epic

Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in one hundred cantos of terza rima.

Petrarch · 1374 · Poetry

366 poems for Laura, alive and dead.

Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1387–1400 · Poetry

Thirty pilgrims ride to Canterbury and tell tales that give them away.

Michel de Montaigne · 1580 · Essay

The invention of the essay: 'What do I know?'

William Shakespeare · c. 1595 · Play

Two adolescents invent a private language in a city that has no room for it.

William Shakespeare · c. 1595 · Play

Four lovers, a fairy quarrel and a troupe of amateur actors lose a night in the wood.

William Shakespeare · c. 1600 · Play

A prince is asked by a ghost to avenge a murder and spends five acts interrogating the request, the ghost, and himself.

William Shakespeare · c. 1604 · Play

Iago talks a great general into murdering the person who loves him.

Miguel de Cervantes · 1605/1615 · Novel

A gentleman reads too many romances and rides out to restore chivalry.

William Shakespeare · c. 1606 · Play

A soldier hears a prophecy, murders a king, and discovers that the crown is the least interesting thing he has taken.

William Shakespeare · c. 1606 · Play

A king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to price their love.

William Shakespeare · 1609 · Poetry

154 sonnets to a fair youth and a dark lady.

William Shakespeare · c. 1611 · Play

A deposed duke rules an island by magic and then gives it up.

John Milton · 1667 · Epic

Twelve books on the fall of angels and of man, in blank verse of terrifying grandeur.

Matsuo Bashō · 1702 · Travel writing

Prose and haiku from a walking pilgrimage through northern Japan.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774 · Novel

Letters from a young man in love with an engaged woman.

William Blake · 1789/1794 · Poetry

Paired songs — 'The Lamb' against 'The Tyger', two chimney sweepers, two nurses.

William Blake · 1790 · Poetry

Proverbs of Hell and a diabolical reading of Milton.

Cao Xueqin · 1791 · Novel

The Jia family's grandeur and dissolution, seen through Baoyu's enchanted adolescence.

William Wordsworth · 1798 · Poetry

With Coleridge: the volume that reset English poetry toward ordinary language.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1808/1832 · Play

A scholar wagers his soul on the promise that he will never say 'stay, thou art so fair'.

Jane Austen · 1811 · Novel

Two sisters, two temperaments, one inheritance withheld.

Jane Austen · 1813 · Novel

Elizabeth Bennet mistakes pride for contempt and wit for insight, and is corrected by a letter.

Jane Austen · 1815 · Novel

A heroine 'whom no one but myself will much like', busily ruining her neighbours' lives with kindness.

Jane Austen · 1817 · Novel

A woman of twenty-seven meets the man she was persuaded to refuse.

John Keats · 1819 · Poem

A bird's song offers oblivion; the word 'forlorn' tolls the poet back.

John Keats · 1819 · Poem

Figures frozen a moment before consummation.

Alexander Pushkin · 1833 · Verse novel

A dandy refuses a country girl's letter and meets her again, unavailable, years later.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1838 · Novel

Poe's only novel: mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism and a white figure at the pole.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1839 · Short story

A narrator visits a childhood friend in a cracked house that will not outlive its family.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1840 · Short stories

Twenty-five tales, including 'Ligeia', 'William Wilson' and 'Usher'.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1841 · Short story

C. Auguste Dupin solves an impossible locked-room killing in Paris.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1842 · Poem

An old king refuses retirement.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1842 · Short story

Prince Prospero seals a thousand nobles inside an abbey while plague takes the country.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1842 · Short story

A prisoner of the Inquisition maps his cell in total darkness.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1843 · Short story

A murderer insists on his sanity while a dead man's heart keeps beating under the floorboards.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1844 · Short story

The stolen letter everyone searches for is lying in plain sight.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1845 · Poem

A bereaved scholar questions a bird that answers only 'Nevermore'.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1846 · Short story

Montresor walls Fortunato into the catacombs over an unnamed insult.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1846 · Essay

Poe reverse-engineers 'The Raven' as if it were clockwork.

Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · Novel

A governess insists on being addressed as an equal soul.

Emily Brontë · 1847 · Novel

Two houses, two generations, and a love that behaves like weather.

Edgar Allan Poe · 1849 · Poem

A love the angels envied, and a tomb by the sounding sea.

William Wordsworth · 1850 · Epic

The growth of a poet's mind, in fourteen books.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1850 · Poetry

133 lyrics written over seventeen years of mourning for Arthur Hallam.

Charles Dickens · 1853 · Novel

A lawsuit that eats generations, told in two alternating voices.

Gustave Flaubert · 1857 · Novel

A country doctor's wife tries to live the novels she has read.

Charles Baudelaire · 1857 · Poetry

Spleen and ideal, prosecuted for obscenity.

Charles Dickens · 1859 · Novel

London and Paris, and a man who dies in another's place.

Charles Dickens · 1861 · Novel

A blacksmith's boy is given a fortune and loses his manners along with his gratitude.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1864 · Novella

'I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man.'

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 · Novel

A student murders a pawnbroker to prove a theory and is undone by his own nerves.

Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · Novel

Five families through Napoleon's invasion, plus a theory of history.

Arthur Rimbaud · 1873 · Poetry

Written at nineteen; then he stopped writing.

Leo Tolstoy · 1878 · Novel

Two marriages, one destroyed by passion, one built by patience.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · Novel

Three brothers, a murdered father, and God on trial.

Leo Tolstoy · 1886 · Novella

A judge falls, bruises his side, and dies over eighty pages.

Anton Chekhov · 1886–1903 · Short stories

'The Lady with the Dog', 'Gooseberries', 'Ward No. 6'.

Emily Dickinson · 1890 · Poetry

1,775 poems, most unpublished in her lifetime, in hymn metre gone strange.

Oscar Wilde · 1890 · Novel

A portrait ages so its subject need not.

Oscar Wilde · 1895 · Play

Two men invent alibis named Ernest.

Anton Chekhov · 1904 · Play

An estate is sold while its owners discuss something else.

Rabindranath Tagore · 1912 · Poetry

Song offerings, self-translated into English prose-poems.

Marcel Proust · 1913–1927 · Novel

Seven volumes on how the past is recovered, and by what accidents.

Franz Kafka · 1915 · Novella

Gregor Samsa wakes as an enormous insect and worries about his train.

Lu Xun · 1918 · Short story

A man reads 'eat people' between the lines of the classics.

W. B. Yeats · 1919 · Poem

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Lu Xun · 1921 · Novella

A day-labourer who converts every defeat into a 'spiritual victory'.

T. S. Eliot · 1922 · Poem

A collage of voices over the ruins of post-war Europe.

Rainer Maria Rilke · 1923 · Poetry

'Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?'

Virginia Woolf · 1925 · Novel

One June day in London; a party; a shell-shocked veteran at the far edge of the same city.

Franz Kafka · 1925 · Novel

Josef K. is arrested one morning without being told the charge.

Virginia Woolf · 1927 · Novel

A postponed voyage, a decade of empty rooms, and a painting finished at last.

Federico García Lorca · 1928 · Poetry

Green, how I want you green.

Virginia Woolf · 1929 · Essay

Five hundred a year and a lock on the door.

George Orwell · 1933 · Memoir

Plongeur kitchens and casual wards, reported from inside destitution.

George Orwell · 1934 · Novel

A timber merchant's slow suffocation inside the club-room racism of British Burma.

John Steinbeck · 1935 · Novel

Danny's paisano friends in Monterey, mock-Arthurian and permanently thirsty.

John Steinbeck · 1936 · Novel

Organisers lead an apple-pickers' strike in a California valley.

John Steinbeck · 1937 · Novella

George and Lennie carry a small dream of land across a hostile season of work.

John Steinbeck · 1937 · Short stories

Four linked stories of Jody Tiflin's education by animals and old men.

George Orwell · 1938 · Memoir

Orwell's account of fighting with the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War — and of being hunted by his own side.

John Steinbeck · 1939 · Novel

The Joads leave the Dust Bowl for California and find the promise already sold.

Albert Camus · 1942 · Novel

Meursault does not cry at his mother's funeral, and is convicted for it.

Albert Camus · 1942 · Essay

Is life worth living? The only serious philosophical question.

T. S. Eliot · 1943 · Poetry

Four meditations on time and redemption.

Jorge Luis Borges · 1944 · Short stories

'The Library of Babel', 'Funes the Memorious', 'Pierre Menard'.

George Orwell · 1945 · Novella

A beast fable in which the animals of Manor Farm expel their drunken master and build a republic — which curdles, commandment by commandment, into the tyranny it overthrew.

John Steinbeck · 1945 · Novel

Mack and the boys throw Doc a party that destroys his laboratory — twice.

George Orwell · 1946 · Essay

Six rules against the dying metaphor, the pretentious diction and the ready-made phrase.

John Steinbeck · 1947 · Novella

A pearl diver finds a fortune and loses everything it was meant to buy.

George Orwell · 1949 · Novel

Winston Smith edits the past for a living and commits the crime of keeping a private diary in a state that has abolished privacy.

John Steinbeck · 1952 · Novel

Two families in the Salinas Valley replay Cain and Abel across three generations.

Chinua Achebe · 1958 · Novel

Okonkwo's rise in Umuofia and the arrival of the missionaries.

John Steinbeck · 1961 · Novel

A grocery clerk from an old family decides, once, to be dishonest.

John Steinbeck · 1962 · Travel writing

A late road trip across thirty-eight states with a poodle.

Sylvia Plath · 1963 · Novel

Esther Greenwood's New York summer and its collapse.

Anna Akhmatova · 1963 · Poetry

Written in the prison queues of the Terror, memorised by friends because it could not be written down.

Sylvia Plath · 1965 · Poetry

'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' — poems written at a rate of one a morning.

Seamus Heaney · 1966 · Poetry

'Digging' — the pen laid beside the spade.

Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · Novel

Seven generations of Buendías in Macondo, from founding to hurricane.

Italo Calvino · 1972 · Novel

Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities to Kublai Khan; each is Venice.

Mahmoud Darwish · 1986 · Prose poetry

Beirut, August 1982, and the making of a cup of coffee under bombardment.

Elena Ferrante · 2011 · Novel

Two girls in a poor Naples neighbourhood; one leaves, one stays.