18th Century

Sterne's Tristram Shandy: the wildly digressive novel that broke every rule of storytelling. The 18th-century masterpiece that invented postmodernism.

Swift's Gulliver's Travels: a surgeon voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and beyond. The fiercest satire in the English language, disguised as adventure.

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe: shipwrecked and alone for 28 years. The novel that launched the castaway genre and the English novel itself.

Voltaire's Candide: a devastating satire of optimism as Candide endures every disaster the world can inflict. Wickedly funny and razor-sharp.

Henry Fielding's Tom Jones: a foundling's wild journey through 18th-century England. The comic masterpiece that helped invent the English novel.

Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons: aristocratic seduction, betrayal, and ruin in pre-Revolutionary France. A masterpiece of epistolary fiction.

Rousseau's Confessions: The revolutionary autobiography that invented modern self-examination. Discover the origins of confessional writing.

Read about The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, the Romantic classic of unrequited love and passionate self-destruction that transformed European literature.

Boswell's landmark biography brings Samuel Johnson vividly to life, capturing the wit and wisdom of eighteenth-century London's greatest mind.

The first Gothic novel ever written, featuring a haunted castle, supernatural terrors, and a tyrannical prince's doomed dynasty.

Daniel Defoe's picaresque classic follows Moll Flanders through marriages, crime, and survival in 18th-century England.

Samuel Richardson's monumental epistolary novel explores virtue, power, and tragedy in 18th-century England's longest novel.

Discover The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, a beloved 18th-century tale of faith, family, and fortune's reversals.

The foundational American political masterwork arguing for the Constitution and the architecture of republican self-government.

Diderot's brilliantly subversive novel about fate, free will, and storytelling itself—a postmodern masterpiece from the Enlightenment.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason revolutionized philosophy by exploring the limits and structures of human knowledge.

Prevost's classic tale of destructive passion between a young nobleman and the irresistible, inconstant Manon Lescaut.

Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a foundational English novel about a servant girl defending her virtue against her master's pursuit.