Germinal
1885 · 546 pages
Etienne Lantier takes work in a French coal pit and talks the starving miners into striking. Zola went down a real mine to write this, and you feel the rock overhead.
★ 7.3
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1885
Showing 19 works across all media from 1885
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
1885 · 816 pages
Dying of throat cancer and ruined by a swindler, Grant set down the Mexican War and the Civil War in short exact sentences that never boast. He finished days before his death.
★ 7.3
The Potato Eaters
1885 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Van Gogh made the faces deliberately coarse and the browns deliberately muddy, wanting it clear that these people had dug the meal themselves.
★ 7.2
Symphony No. 4
1885
The finale is thirty variations over an eight-bar bass line lifted from Bach. At the private play-through one friend begged him to scrap the finale.
★ 7.0
The Bather
1885 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
He stands in bathing trunks with his hands on his hips, built out of planes and given the same weight as a mountain.
★ 6.3
Selected Poems of Victor Hugo
1885 · 664 pages
Hugo was the largest voice in French poetry, and the range astonishes: political fury from exile against Napoleon III, and “Demain, dès l'aube,” a walk that ends at his drowned daughter's grave.
★ 5.8
King Solomon's Mines
1885 · 320 pages
Allan Quatermain, an aging elephant hunter, follows an old map into unmapped Africa and finds a lost kingdom ruled by a tyrant. Hidden-city adventure from Tarzan to Indiana Jones runs on Haggard's machinery.
★ 5.3
King Solomon's Mines · 1885
★ 1.9
First Inaugural Address of Grover Cleveland · 1885