The Library of the World’s Best Literature
The library is one of the noblest of institutions. There has never been an expense more magnificent and more useful.
Voltaire
The Library of the World’s Best Literature
In Thirty Volumes
Founded by Charles Dudley Warner
With 5,550 selections and over 1,000 essays on primary authors and literary genres, this 20,000-page anthology stands as a monument of the best critique and editorial expertise of the early twentieth century. Combined with the three reference volumes, it forms a complete universe of world literary study.
Contents
NEW YORK: WARNER LIBRARY Co., 1917
NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2015
Indexes
Use the quick author index to go to a favorite, take a more meditative stroll through a thousand images in the portrait gallery, peruse the index to verse, or browse the alphabetical list of some 8,000 entries in the general index.
Alphabetical Listing by Author
The master table of contents lists the 1,032 biographical and critical introductions from some of the best authors of the time, combined with 2,422 verse and 2,362 prose selections.
The 766 selections in this specialized anthology—with a large body of Poems of the Great War—supplement the 2,422 verse selections in the main body of The Library.
With more than 2,000 synopses of works by some 1,200 authors—sorted by title, author and date—this unique reference work is the ultimate great book finder through the early twentieth century.
The more than 6,800 short biographies of world authors, with particular attention to the 1,000 primary authors in The Library, have been meticulously updated to include accurate years of birth and death—and feature easy-to-read pronunciations, particularly of non-English names.
The reading lists, genre guides and lectures—which feature chronological tables and bibliographies—contain some 4,300 hyperlinks to the main body of The Library, making it a fully integrated guide to this massive anthology.