White Fang

A wager in a London club, 80 days, every transport invented by 1872. Verne turns a bet into the most efficient adventure novel ever written.

Jules Verne

Two boys who look identical swap lives in Tudor England. Twain uses the trick to skewer monarchy with a straight face.

Mark Twain

Ahab wants the white whale, the whale wants nothing. Long, strange, obsessive, and one of the most quoted American novels ever written.

Herman Melville

A runaway boy and an escaped slave float down the Mississippi. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from this book.

Mark Twain

Captain Nemo, the Nautilus, and a tour of the ocean floor decades before submarines existed. Pure 19th-century wonder.

Jules Verne