Great Authors of The Western Canon

What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras, including Calvino, T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Michael Dirda, and Ezra Pound. The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but they are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" refers to a list of books considered to be "essential" and is presented in a variety of ways. It can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's) or be the official reading list of an institution of higher learning. Some of the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Molière, Camões, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Eça de Queirós, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, and Samuel Beckett. This book discusses the biographies of the above authors and their works. This book is designed to be a state of the art, superb academic reference work and provide an overview of the topic and give the reader a structured knowledge to familiarize yourself with the topic at the most affordable price possible. The accuracy and knowledge is of an international viewpoint as the edited articles represent the inputs of many knowledgeable individuals and some of the most current knowledge on the topic, based on the date of publication.