The English novel begins behind bars, in extremis. Its first author, John Bunyan, was a Puritan dissenter whose writing starts with sermons and ends with fiction. His famous allegory, the story of Christian, opens with a sentence of luminous simplicity that has the haunting compulsion of the hook in a great melody. "As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream."
An ancient river. The journey upstream of some impressionable young men into a mysterious, challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest. "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first," said its author.
But this is not Heart of Darkness, and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it's the Thames, and the narrator is not Marlow but J, or Jerome, K Jerome. Published in 1889, 10 years before Conrad's novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), is one of the comic gems in the English language. An accidental one, too. "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first," said its author.
Humour in literature is often not taken as seriously as it deserves. Nevertheless, there are a few seriously funny books that remain great for all time. Three Men in a Boat is one of these. Ostensibly the tale of three city clerks on a boating trip, an account that sometimes masquerades, against its will, as a travel guide, Three Men in a Boat hovers somewhere between a shaggy-dog story and episodes of late-Victorian farce.
Humour in literature is often not taken as seriously as it deserves. Nevertheless, there are a few seriously funny books that remain great for all time. Three Men in a Boat is one of these. Ostensibly the tale of three city clerks on a boating trip, an account that sometimes masquerades, against its will, as a travel guide, Three Men in a Boat hovers somewhere between a shaggy-dog story and episodes of late-Victorian farce.
STephen Crane, born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871, completed the short novel that would become the godfather of all American war novels, and an inspiration for writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and JD Salinger, while still in his early 20s. His subject, the war between the States, had actually ended before he was born, and he never experienced the horrors of battle. But the laconic realism of his prose, the fierce investigation of the soldier's psyche, and his impressionistic use of colour and detail convinced many readers that Crane was a veteran turned novelist.Some critics see The Red Badge of Courage as a founding text in the modernist movement, a seminal novel whose influence haunts the composition of The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, The Thin Red Line and Matterhorn, among others. Crane, a struggling freelance writer, researched his subject partly through magazine accounts of the civil war, a popular subject, and partly through conversations with veterans. He later said that he "had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood" and had imagined "war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers".
The Call of the Wild, a short adventure novel about a sled dog named Buck (a cross between a St Bernard and a Scotch collie) will be one of the strangest, and most strangely potent, narratives in this series.
Its author was a one-off, too. Jack London was a maverick, macho young man, the son of an itinerant astrologer and a spiritualist mother. As a boy, he led a criminal life, specialising in the piracy of oysters in San Francisco Bay. As a writer, he blazed briefly, lived hard and dangerously, and died from drink and drugs aged just 40, having written more than 50 books in 20 years.London is the archetype of the American writer as primeval hero, the forerunner of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Kerouac and possibly Hunter S Thompson. To George Orwell, he was "an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been". A devotee of Kipling's Jungle Book, London found his literary voice writing about a dog that learns to live at the limit of civilisation.
He was inspired to embark on his dog story as a means to explore what he saw as the essence of human nature in response to a wave of calls to American youth urging a new start for the turn-of-the-century generation. London's mythical creature became his answer to the complex challenges of modernity.
through conversations with veterans. He later said that he "had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood" and had imagined "war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers". The idea of a writer immersing himself in the literary expression of his subject to make a book for publication, so familiar today, was new in the 1890s, as was his chosen genre, the war story. At this point he had published, unsuccessfully, at his own expense, just one novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), and was creatively out of sorts.