Moby Dick
1851 · 672 pages
American fiction has attempted nothing bigger. Ahab drags a whaling crew across the world after the whale that took his leg, and Melville keeps stopping the hunt to explain whales.
★ 9.6
Browse by time · decade
1850s
1850 – 1859
Showing 21 books from the 1850s
Madame Bovary
1857 · 329 pages
Emma Bovary reads romances, takes lovers, and runs up debts trying to feel something in a provincial town. Flaubert weighed every sentence, and modern fiction's idea of style begins with him.
★ 9.4
Leaves of Grass
1855 · 703 pages
Whitman threw out rhyme and meter to write the body, the country, and himself at full voice. In "Song of Myself" he speaks straight at you, delighted that you finally showed up.
★ 9.3
On The Origin of Species
1859 · 972 pages
More creatures are born than can survive, they differ, and the useful differences carry forward. Darwin builds that one plain idea into an explanation of every living thing on earth.
★ 9.2
Bleak House
1853 · 1036 pages
Dickens's supreme achievement, and his angriest. A lawsuit over a will has dragged through the courts so long that nobody alive understands it, and its fog settles over every life in England.
★ 8.8
The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics)
1857 · 399 pages
Modern poetry starts here, in gorgeous verse about boredom, rot, and the crowds of Paris. Baudelaire opens by calling the reader his hypocrite brother, then makes ugliness beautiful.
★ 8.5
On Liberty
1859 · 592 pages
Mill sets the limit that still governs the argument: society may interfere with you only to prevent harm to others. Silence an opinion and you rob everyone, including the people who are right.
★ 8.2
Walden
1854 · 802 pages
Two years in a cabin by a Massachusetts pond, and the permanent argument against a life spent earning. Thoreau writes about beans, loons, and why most people lead lives of quiet desperation.
★ 8.2
The Scarlet Letter
1850 · 273 pages
Puritan Boston fastens a red letter to Hester Prynne's dress for adultery, and she refuses to name the child's father. Hawthorne turns public shame into something you feel in your body.
★ 8.1
David Copperfield
1850 · 1024 pages
Put to work in a warehouse as a boy, David escapes to an aunt he has never met. Dickens gave him his own childhood, and loved this novel above all the others.
★ 8.1
Selected Poems
1850 · 352 pages
Daffodils, a solitary reaper singing in a field, and a valley revisited after five years: Wordsworth wrote these in ordinary speech and found that remembering keeps remaking the person who remembers.
★ 7.2
Bartleby the Scrivener (and other short stories)
1853 · 176 pages
Hired to copy documents in a Wall Street office, a clerk answers every request with "I would prefer not to." He explains nothing, and quiet refusal turns out to be unanswerable.
★ 7.1
The World as Will and Representation
1859 · 694 pages
Underneath everything we perceive, Schopenhauer argues, runs a blind will that wants without knowing why. Because wanting never finishes, living is suffering, and only art and music briefly suspend it.
★ 7.1
A Tale of Two Cities
1859 · 488 pages
Eighteen years in the Bastille have left Doctor Manette making shoes in the dark. Dickens carries his daughter's household from London into the Terror, where Madame Defarge knits a death list.
★ 7.0
Collected Tales
1852 · 464 pages
A civil servant wakes to find his nose gone and walking Petersburg in a senior official's uniform. Elsewhere a clerk saves for an overcoat, and Gogol's comedy tips steadily into nightmare.
★ 7.0
Twelve Years a Slave
1853 · 432 pages
Northup was a free New Yorker with a family and a violin. Lured to Washington in 1841, he woke chained in a slave pen and spent twelve years on Louisiana cotton plantations.
★ 6.9
The Ancien Regime and the Revolution
1856 · 307 pages
Revolutions come not when oppression is worst but when it begins to lift. Tocqueville digs through the old monarchy's records and finds the Revolution completing the centralized state it believed it was destroying.
★ 6.8
Uncle Tom's Cabin
1852 · 400 pages
Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio on breaking ice with her child. Stowe sold three hundred thousand copies within twelve months and made slavery intolerable to Northerners who had lived comfortably beside it.
★ 6.7
North and South
1855 · 450 pages
Gaskell moves Margaret Hale from a soft southern parish to a smoke-blackened cotton town, where she despises the mill owner Thornton until a strike teaches her what masters and workers each risk.
★ 6.6
Sketches from a Hunter's Album
1852 · 403 pages
Turgenev sends a hunter across the provinces with a gun and a dog, and the serfs he meets emerge as individuals. The book did for serfdom what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for slavery.
★ 6.6