Can someone list famous authors/book titles/lines?

Question

I need a short list of famous authors who have accomplished great achievements (such as publishing a best seller at a young age)

I also need a few titles of some of the greatest, most famous books of all time (books everyone will read at one point or another)

I would also love a couple of famous literature quotes that people will immediately be familiar with (EX: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...")

Answer 1

I don't know many great achievements of authors. However, Wikipedia mentions this about George Gordon, Lord Byron: "Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization the Carbonari in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero[2]. He died from a fever in Messolonghi in Greece."

The poet William Butler Yeats was the first Irishman to get the Nobel Prize in Literature.

T.E. Lawrence was a rather extraordinary man who helped the Arabs revolt against the Ottoman Empire on the eve of and during World War I. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.e._lawren... has a lot of information, but also some really good external links at the bottom of the page.

Winston Churchill was an author as well as the invaluable Prime Minister of England during World War II. He wrote A History of the English-Speaking Peoples and many more biographies and stories and history tomes.

Louisa May Alcott became a nurse during the Civil War. In fact she contracted mercury poisoning from that time which years later contributed to her death. At a time when women had very few options, Louisa literally supported her entire family with her writing as well as teaching and sewing for other people. Her father, though a good man, was more of a dreamer than a provider.

Beatrix Potter almost single-handedly preserved the natural beauty of the Lake District in England by buying property after property and keeping them from developers. She left almost all of her property to The National Trust to keep up her work of preservation.

Françoise Sagan, author of Bonjour Tristesse, was only 19 when her book became number 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. At that time, she was the youngest author to have achieved this. See http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/25/books/... Of course, Christopher Paolini became a New York Times bestselling author at age 19.

Helen Keller became a lecturer against all odds, since she was both deaf and blind and had been mute until Annie Sullivan could teach her how to form words.

I take it you mean novels:

-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (and all the rest of her works)

-all of William Shakespeare's plays

-A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (and all of his)

-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

-The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

-The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

-War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

-Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

-Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

-The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

-The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

-Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

-Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

-The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

-The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

-Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

-Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgmery

-Moby d**k by Herman Melville

-The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

-The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (and other plays)

-The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

-To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

-The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

-Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

-The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

-Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

-1984 by George Orwell

-Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

-Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

-The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

-Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegtu

-The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (or others like The Turn of the s***w or Washington Square)

-Lord of the Flies by William Golding

-To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

-Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

-My Antonia by Willa Cather

-Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

-Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

...And MANY, MANY more

Famous book quotes:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

"God bless us every one." - A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Tiny Tim)

As you already mentioned, the first line from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

The last sentence of A Tale of Two Cities is also very famous: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." - Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Moby d**k by Herman Melville: "Call me Ishmael."

"My dear, I don't give a d**n." and "I'll think of it tomorrow." - the book Gone with the Wind

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." - Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov