Classic literature book series in reading order

by Victor Appleton

by Laura Lee Hope

by H. Rider Haggard

by J.M. Barrie

by Hugh Lofting

Henry James

131 books• 1 series

Henry James was an American-British author, placed between literary realism and literary modernism. Americans abroad, social life and manners, and the friction between Europe and the United States are the standing subjects of the fiction, and James's correspondence and travel writing are catalogued alongside it. The catalogue lists 131 titles with publication dates from 1866 to 2016, opening with Selected Tales and The Novels of George Eliot, both 1866. The 1870s were the heaviest decade, holding A Passionate Pilgrim, At Isella and Watch and Ward, all published in 1871.

P.G. Wodehouse

145 books• 13 series

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (15 October 1881 to 14 February 1975) was an English humorist, one of the most widely read of the 20th century. Wodehouse created Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, the talkative Psmith, Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle circle, the Oldest Member with golf stories, and Mr. Mulliner with tall tales. Born in Guildford, Wodehouse attended Dulwich College. The catalogue records 145 books from The Pothunters (1902) through 2019, including school stories, the Jeeves, Psmith, Ukridge and Uncle Fred series, short stories and non-fiction.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

81 books• 12 series

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1 September 1875 to 19 March 1950) was an American writer of adventure, science fiction and fantasy, and the creator of Tarzan and John Carter. Burroughs wrote twenty-four Tarzan books and eleven books with John Carter as a recurring character, along with the Pellucidar and Amtor series and the Caspak trilogy. Tarzan also became a syndicated comic strip, films and merchandise. Catalogued titles begin in 1912 with A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, followed by The Gods of Mars (1913), The Return of Tarzan (1913) and At the Earth's Core (1914). Subjects include extraterrestrial beings, Africa and Dejah Thoris.

H.G. Wells

152 books• 8 series

H.G. Wells, born Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946), was an English writer of more than forty novels and dozens of short stories. Science fiction novels are the work Wells is most known for today, and Wells shares the title of father of science fiction with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. The non-fiction covers social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography. The catalogue opens with The Chronic Argonauts (1888) and includes The Time Machine (1895), The Wonderful Visit (1895) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Utopias, civilization and philosophy appear among the subjects.

Charles Dickens

69 books• 3 series

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 to 9 June 1870) was an English novelist and journalist born in Portsmouth. At 12, Dickens left school to work in a boot-blacking factory while John Dickens, the writer's father, was held in a debtors' prison; three years later came a return to school, and then a start in journalism. The catalogue lists 69 Dickens titles, opening with Sketches by Boz (1836) and including The Pickwick Papers (1837), The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1838) and Barnaby Rudge (1841), with collected editions reaching The Complete Works of Charles Dickens (2026). Subjects include social conditions, classic literature and English Christmas stories.

Jack London

156 books• 2 series

Jack London (January 12, 1876 to November 22, 1916), born John Griffith Chaney, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. London helped pioneer commercial fiction and the American magazine, and became one of the first American writers to win international celebrity and a large fortune from writing. A member of the radical San Francisco literary group "The Crowd", London campaigned for animal welfare, workers' rights and socialism. Those causes shaped The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel, and The People of the Abyss, a non-fiction exposé, as well as War of the Classes and Before Adam. The catalogue lists 156 titles from The Wisdom Of The Trail (1899), including The Son of the Wolf (1900) and Children of the Frost (1902).

Mary Roberts Rinehart

65 books• 3 series

Mary Roberts Rinehart, who lived from 1876 to 1958, wrote American detective and mystery fiction and has often been called the American Agatha Christie. Her first mystery novel, The Circular Staircase (1908), introduced the “had I but known” style of narration. Rinehart is also the earliest known source of the phrase “the butler did it”, traced to her 1930 novel The Door, though those exact words never occur in her writing. She reported the experiences of front line soldiers in the First World War, one of the first women to reach the Belgian front. Sixty-five titles are catalogued, including the Tish, Hilda Adams and Miss Cornelia Van Gorder series.

L. Frank Baum

84 books• 12 series

L. Frank Baum, born Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919) in Chittenango, New York, was an American author of children's fantasy best known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Beyond 14 Oz books, Baum produced 41 other novels, 83 short stories, more than 200 poems and at least 42 scripts, and four further novels were lost unpublished. The 1939 film of the first Oz book became a landmark of 20th-century cinema. The catalogue opens with Our Landlady (1891), Mother Goose in Prose (1897) and Father Goose, His Book (1899), and series include Aunt Jane's Nieces, Boy Fortune Hunters, Mary Louise, Flying Girl and Trot & Cap'n Bill. Baum moved west after an unsuccessful spell as a theater producer and playwright.

Wilkie Collins

88 books

Wilkie Collins, born William Wilkie Collins on 8 January 1824 and died on 23 September 1889, was an English novelist and playwright. The Woman in White (1860) is an early sensation novel; The Moonstone (1868) set out much of what the modern detective novel came to do, and stands as an early example of the police procedural. Collins was the son of the London painter William Collins and Harriet Geddes, spent two years in Italy and France from the age of twelve, learned Italian and French there, and worked at first as a tea merchant. The catalogue holds 88 titles, from Iolani; Or, Tahiti as It Was (1840) onward, with the 1850s the heaviest decade.

H. Rider Haggard

78 books• 6 series

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was an English writer of adventure romances set in exotic locations, Africa above all, and a pioneer of the lost world genre. The eighteen Allan Quatermain stories begin with King Solomon's Mines (1885), and Ayesha is the other named series. Haggard also worked on land reform across the British Empire. The catalogue holds 78 titles dated 1882 to 2013, from Cetywayo and His White Neighbours to a complete anthology, and covers novels, non-fiction and short fiction.

Victor Appleton is the name on the Tom Swift books, and the catalogue lists 161 titles under the Victor Appleton name from 1910 to 2023. Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle, Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat, Tom Swift and His Airship and Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat all date from 1910, the start of the peak decade. The series credited to Appleton are Tom Swift I, Tom Swift Jr., Tom Swift III, Tom Swift IV, Tom Swift Invention, Tom Swift: Inventors' Academy and Tom Swift, Young Inventor, plus Don Sturdy and Moving Picture Boys. Subjects include inventors, robots, space flight, science fiction and children's adventure. Tom Swift and His Flying RaceYacht (2023) is the newest listed title.

John Steinbeck

44 books• 1 series

John Steinbeck's catalogue holds 44 titles, from Cup of Gold (1929) through to Steinbeck in Vietnam in 2012. Social conditions and American life supply the subject matter, with travel writing and the Cannery Row grouping among the named sets. Early entries include The Pastures of Heaven (1932), The Red Pony (1933), Tortilla Flat (1935) and In Dubious Battle (1936). The catalogue is listed as complete.

Edith Wharton

122 books• 6 series

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 to August 11, 1937), born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist and designer. Wharton used first-hand knowledge of upper-class New York society to depict the lives and morals of the Gilded Age with realism. The Age of Innocence made Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1921. The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome and a number of ghost stories are other well-known works, and Wharton entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. The catalogue lists 122 titles, from Souls Belated (1899) through The Touchstone (1900), The Valley of Decision (1902) and Sanctuary (1903). Old New York is the series on the author page.

Arthur Conan Doyle

164 books• 18 series

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 to 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson. A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890) and A Scandal in Bohemia (1891) are among the catalogued titles. The Lost World (1912) introduced Professor Challenger and gave its name to a subgenre of speculative fiction. Doyle also produced over 200 stories and articles, four volumes of poetry and stage works, and was knighted in the 1902 Coronation Honours. The Captain of the Polestar (1883) is the earliest catalogued title.

Louisa May Alcott

103 books• 4 series

Alcott wrote novels, short stories and children's fiction, and the catalogue runs to 103 titles, with Little Women, Eight Cousins and Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag among the named sequences. The list starts with The Inheritance (1849) and Flower Fables (1854) and takes in Hospital Sketches (1863), Moods (1864) and Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866). Young women, social custom and gender roles are the recurring subjects, and the Alcott catalogue is listed as likely complete.

James Fenimore Cooper

34 books• 2 series

James Fenimore Cooper wrote frontier and sea fiction in the early American republic. The Leatherstocking Tales follow Natty Bumppo, with The Pioneers (1823), The Prairie (1824) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826) among them; The Pilot (1824) and The Red Rover (1827) belong to the sea stories. Thirty-four titles are catalogued, Indians of North America and pioneer life recur as subjects, and the 1840s were the busiest decade.

Anthony Trollope

81 books• 6 series

Anthony Trollope was an English novelist of the Victorian era who also served as a civil servant. The catalogue holds 81 Trollope titles, opening with The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and closing at Malachi's Cove and Other Stories and Essays (1985). Trollope grouped much of the fiction into the Chronicles of Barsetshire and the Palliser novels, and wrote travel books, essays and short stories alongside them. English social life and customs, inheritance and succession, and manners recur across the subjects.

Oscar Wilde

57 books

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish author, poet and playwright. Wilde worked through several literary styles in the 1880s before becoming one of London's most popular and influential dramatists of the early 1890s, and stood as a central figure in the Aestheticism movement of the late nineteenth century. The Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the epigrams, the plays and the bedtime stories for children form the best-known work, alongside a criminal conviction in 1895 for gross indecency. The catalogue holds 57 titles from Ravenna (1878) onward, spanning poetry, drama, fairy tales, short stories and correspondence.

Baroness Orczy

51 books• 2 series

Baroness Emma Orczy, born in Hungary in 1865 and died in 1947, was a British novelist and playwright. The Scarlet Pimpernel is her lasting creation: Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop whose second identity smuggles French aristocrats away from the guillotine during the Revolution, and the figure that established the hero with a secret identity in popular culture. The stage version opened in London's West End on 5 January 1905 and drew British audiences. Orczy also wrote the Teahouse Detective stories, including The Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly Of Scotland Yard. Fifty-two catalogued titles date from 1899 to 2021.

Joseph Conrad

41 books

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was a Polish-British novelist and story writer, regarded as one of the greatest writers in English. Conrad spoke English fluently only from his twenties, and always with a strong accent, yet became a prose stylist who carried a non-English sensibility into English literature. Many of the novels and stories use nautical settings and turn on crises of human individuality in a world Conrad saw as indifferent, inscrutable and amoral. Almayer's Folly (1895), Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902) and Typhoon (1902) sit among 41 catalogued titles.

Philosophy and fiction sit side by side in Iris Murdoch's catalogue of 43 titles. The run opens with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), a study rather than a novel, and Under the Net follows. Good and evil, morality and the unconscious recur across the novels. Murdoch lived from 1919 to 1999, and collections such as Poems from an Attic continue to appear.

Laura Lee Hope is the name on 185 children's books published between 1904 and 2020, beginning with The Bobbsey Twins (1904). The Bobbsey Twins was created by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, whose other series included Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The Hope name also carries Outdoor Girls, Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue, Six Little Bunkers, Blythe Girls and Moving Picture Girls. The stories mix family adventure with mystery, and the 1910s were the peak decade.

Zane Grey

144 books• 13 series

Zane Grey, born Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939), was an American author of adventure novels and stories in the Western genre who presented an idealised American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was Grey's best-selling book. Adaptations of Grey's novels and stories number 112 films, two television episodes and the television series Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre. The catalogue opens with Betty Zane (1903), followed by The Spirit of the Border (1906), The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), The Last Trail (1909) and The Heritage of the Desert (1910). Outlaws, cattle stealing, Mormons and fishing appear among the subjects, and series include the Ohio River Trilogy, Ken Ward and Jim Traft.

Thomas Hardy

20 books• 1 series

Wessex (England) appears in the subject headings for Thomas Hardy, alongside adultery, love triangles and rural social customs. Hardy was an English novelist, poet and architect, born 2 June 1840 and died 11 January 1928. Hardy wrote as a Victorian realist in the line of George Eliot, drew on Romanticism including Wordsworth, and was sharply critical of Victorian society, above all the falling status of rural people in South West England. Poetry mattered most to Hardy, though the first collection came only in 1898. The catalogue lists 20 books, beginning with Desperate Remedies (1871), Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), with The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) among the later titles.