The Importance of Being Earnest is the last play Oscar Wilde ever wrote, and remains his most enduringly popular.

Jane Eyre is raised in her aunt's house after the death of her parents.

Causing mass hysteria as listeners of its 1938 radio broadcast believed a Martian invasion of Earth really was taking place, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is perhaps the most famous novel of its genre.

Arms and the Man was George Bernard Shaw's first commercially successful play.

Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband is a comedy about politics, blackmail and corruption.

Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems by Walt Whitman originally published in 1855 at the poet's own expense.

Notes from the Underground is Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1864 masterpiece following the ranting, slightly unhinged memoir of an isolated, anonymous civil servant.

There never was anybody, wrote the Spectator, who had adventures as well as Miss Bird.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes collects together eleven stories detailing the famous exploits and adventures of Baker Street's greatest detective.

The Best American Humorous Short Stories features tales from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and many other well known writers.

When Robert Browning first met the ailing Elizabeth Barrett in 1845 it must have seemed to him like something from a gothic novel.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's second novel starring the great detective Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four weaves together a complex plot involving stolen treasure, a secret pact between guards and prisoners, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

The Valley of Fear is the last Sherlock Holmes novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in book form in 1915.

Doctor Pascal concludes Zola's epic Rougon-Macquart series.

While Bram Stoker didn't invent the vampire, his 1897 novel Dracula has been the defining force in the popularity and evolution of vampire mythology today.

Considered by many to contain pioneering works of English writing, Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights collects together his short stories that were originally published in periodicals between 1877 and 1880.

Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life places before the reader in a handy form an account of the principal ideas and beliefs held by the ancient Egyptians concerning the resurrection and the future life, which is derived wholly from native religious works.

Edward FitzGerald gave the title The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to his translation of poetry attributed to the Persian poet, astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam (1048-1123).

G.K. Chesterton lends his witty, astute and sardonic prose to the much loved figure of Saint Francis of Assis.

One world's richest and best-known people in his day, Henry Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Company and a pioneering innovator of mass production.