by PBS
The son of a successful doctor and his Irish nationalist–poet wife, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. Educated at Trinity College and Oxford, he married in 1884, had two sons almost immediately, and socialized with a literary crowd in London, including W. B. Yeats. He gained fame through his clever, comedic plays, including A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), but he also published poetry, journalism, short stories, and essays. In addition, he was, by all accounts, a lot of fun to be around, as witty in person as on the page.
During the writing of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde began a romantic relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the nature of which Douglas’s father publicly denounced. Wilde sued for libel, and not only lost but was himself charged with sodomy and other indecent acts in 1895. He served two years of hard labor—the maximum sentence—falling into poverty and despair upon his release. Wilde died a few years later, abandoned, in exile, and alone. In 2017, when the United Kingdom decriminalized homosexuality, Wilde received an official pardon.
Wherever we live, whomever we are, we are bombarded with stunning images, often encouraging us to pursue pleasure at all costs. Even though we know on some level that every ad gets manipulated with Photoshop, or that people take thousands of photos to get that one perfect shot for Instagram, we long to be like what we see and to possess whatever it is we want. Yet when that longing starts to become overwhelming, we need only open The Picture of Dorian Gray to be reminded of the dangers of narcissism and hedonism.
The title page of the 1776 edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, printed in London.
An engraving of John Bunyan, printed in the 19th century. Buyan was known as “Bishop Bunyan,” and was a powerful Puritan preacher.
A commemorative illustrated edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress was printed in 1877.
Bunyan is buried in Bunhill Fields cemetery, in Islington, London. A sculpture of a pilgrim is detailed on his memorial.
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THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
John Bunyan · 1678
The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is a clear-cut allegory about Christianity, meant to help weary souls find the strength to soldier on and stay the course to deliverance. For centuries, readers have turned to the text for inspiration and solace.
Born in England in 1628, John Bunyan was expected to follow his father into the tinker trade but joined the English Civil War instead, fighting in the Parliamentary army for three years. After his marriage in the late 1640s, his wife encouraged him to read the Bible and go to church. Eventually he became a powerful Puritan preacher, nicknamed “Bishop Bunyan,” as a result of the crowds who would come to hear him. The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 curtailed deviations from the doctrine and practices of the Church of England, and Bunyan was imprisoned, along with like-minded individuals with whom he debated and discussed his ideas. He started The Pilgrim’s Progress during his 12 years in jail, and after his release he continued writing that work and many others before his death in 1688.
From its very first lines, The Pilgrim’s Progress reveals its intent to instruct. The text opens with “The Author’s Apology for His Book,” a poem in rhyme about the book’s origin and goals. As Bunyan explains, his “Scribble” came quickly, so much did he have to say about individuals on their “way to Glory.” The rest of the novel, told in prose, concerns a dream the narrator had about a man named Christian. Evangelist, a spiritual guide, tells Christian to leave the City of Destruction and seek salvation in the Celestial City. Christian tries to convince his family to come too, but they initially refuse.
Part I tracks Christian’s adventures, while Part II focuses on the journey his wife and four sons take to find their husband and father in the Celestial City. The pilgrims stop at places like the Slough of Despond, the Doubting Castle, and the town of Vanity, where they meet people named Hopeful, Old Honest, and Great-heart. The book shouts, rather than whispers, its message: life is full of trials and tribulations, but adhering to the tenets of Christianity offers a guarantee about what’s to come.
Readers not only heard Bunyan’s call but heeded it. During the 17th and 18th centuries the novel was extremely popular and influential. People admired its frank style, as well as its rejection of the idea of an intermediary between a believer and the divine. The novel also criticizes the stratified system of economics in which the rich get richer and the poor get nothing. Whereas material wealth rises and falls, spiritual wealth remains steadfast within those blessed enough to possess it, and, The Pilgrim’s Progress tells us, spiritual wealth can be acquired by anyone.
Outlining a strict moral code, Bunyan’s novel helped shape Christian teachings and interpretations in the years to come. The character of Christian suffers throughout his journey, but the suffering has a purpose, and he receives the reward he seeks at the novel’s end. Suffering begets progress. Indeed, the March sisters use the book as a self-help guide to life in Little Women (1868–1869), and an epigraph from Bunyan’s novel kicks off Louisa May Alcott’s. Today the book is widely used by missionaries because of its imaginative dramatization of the Bible’s edicts concerning faith and redemption. But America was, to some extent, founded and shaped by Puritans—and The Pilgrim’s Progress offers an excellent window into their worldview.
Front cover of The Pillars of the Earth, first published in 1989.
Ken Follett, photographed before the video game based on The Pillars of the Earth was presented during the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2015. Follett’s first successful novel was Eye of the Needle (1978).
Follett on the set of the television adaptation of The Pillars of the Earth in Budapest in 2009.
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THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH
Ken Follett · 1989
Everywhere you go in Europe, you’re bound to bump into a cathedral. Most people, as Ken Follett likes to point out, spend just an hour or two roaming around these religious edifices, checking out the nave and the altar, considering how flying buttresses work, maybe watching the light come in through the stained glass. Follett, in contrast, likes to spend several days engrossing himself in a cathedral’s architecture and absorbing its atmosphere. With The Pillars of the Earth (1989), he sought to offer readers the same immersive effect.
Fans of Follett were a little stunned when he turned from spy thrillers to historical fiction. “I was known as a thriller writer,” Follett said later. “Clowns should not try to play Hamlet; pop stars should not write symphonies.” But The Pillars of the Earth wound up jump-starting a new series for the popular author, and readers now gobble up his writing on medieval architecture and society as much as on counterintelligence and international espionage, subjects of two of his previous bestsellers. Follett himself was excited to transform his lifelong interest in cathedrals into an epic tale of adventure, war, romance, religion, and politics.
The Pillars of the Earth takes place during the Anarchy, as clergy and nobles vie for the throne left empty after King Henry I’s death in 12th-century England. Distraught after the loss of his wife, Tom Builder abandons his infant son and meets up with an outlaw named Ellen and her son, Jack. Eventually a prior named Philip hires Tom to construct a new cathedral in Kingsbridge. Getting the structure built will require the cooperation of local landowning families, including the spirited, determined Lady Aliena, the clergy, and the monarchy, with conflicting motivations and equally intense aspirations.
Since a cathedral typically took generations to go from conception to execution, Follett dives deep into the lives of his characters, showing how every aspect of the building affected their village, their fortunes, and their fates. He demonstrates the tremendous number of decisions that went into the design and construction, and shows how seemingly little labors served to make the building rise to prominence. When Oprah Winfrey picked The Pillars of the Earth for her book club in 2007, she provided a six-part reading guide, so detailed is the novel’s plot. Follett kept eve
rything and everyone straight with a thorough outline.
Ken Follett was born in 1949 in Cardiff, Wales. He had his first big hit with Eye of the Needle (1978), followed by several more. A decade later, he broadened his writing style with The Pillars of the Earth, and these days he continues to navigate multiple genres, having published World Without End (2008) and A Column of Fire (2017), sequels to The Pillars of the Earth, as well as stand-alone thrillers. Currently he’s working on a series of novels that will use the fates of five interconnected families to explore 20th-century history.
The Pillars of the Earth was turned into an eight-hour miniseries, starring Donald Sutherland and Eddie Redmayne, in 2011. Follett also worked with artist Petra Röhr-Rouendaal to produce images of the cathedral at Kingsbridge in various stages of completion. The result is glorious.
“Nobody who reads it ever looks at a church or a cathedral the same,” said Oprah. While Kingsbridge and its cathedral are imaginary, Follett did base the latter in part on actual edifices in England. As a work of historical fiction, The Pillars of the Earth strives to show how individuals were affected by significant events and, in some cases, even set them into motion. Kingsbridge’s rise in prosperity echoes similar trajectories of cities during the Middle Ages, as do the tussles within and between the Church and the Crown. But the novel isn’t a dry series of facts wrapped around a bunch of characters—instead, it’s a compulsively readable saga about fascinating people undertaking a fascinating project.
First trade edition printing of A Prayer for Owen Meany, published in 1989.
Author John Irving published his first novel at age 26, and has since published 14 other novels.
A bookplate signed by the author accompanied a first edition.
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A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY
John Irving · 1989
While not a religious man, John Irving is an imaginative one, so he set about pondering what, if anything, might transform him into a person of faith. He wrote an answer of sorts in the form of a novel, his seventh: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989).
The book explores doubt, religious belief, fate, late 20th-century American history, social justice, and friendship. As an adult, narrator John Wheelwright looks back on his life, reflecting on the events of his childhood, his friendship with Owen Meany in a small New Hampshire town during the 1950s and 1960s, and the awakening of his faith. After Owen accidentally kills John’s mother with a foul ball during a Little League game, Owen becomes convinced that he is an instrument of God.
Unusually small, with a bizarre voice denoted by all capitals in the text, Owen thinks he can change the world. In some ways, of course, he does: he cuts off John’s trigger finger with a diamond saw, for example, when John asks for help avoiding the Vietnam War. He swears that divine intervention will assist John in discovering the identity of his biological father—and it does, sort of. In exchange for Owen helping the dyslexic John with schoolwork, John helps Owen dunk a basketball by lifting him over his head, a move they call “The Shot”; this maneuver saves the lives of a group of Vietnamese children many years later.
Owen grew up in a quarry, and exposure to its dust from an early age offers a rational explanation for his delusions. Nevertheless, his father tells John that Owen’s was a virgin birth, just like Jesus’s. Mr. Meany also shows John a gravestone Owen made when he was 11, on which is inscribed the correct date of his death. The novel’s critiques of organized religion put Owen’s spirituality into high relief, as Irving shows readers how people find their own paths to the divine.
Irving’s extensive cast of characters and comedic sensibility earn him comparisons to Charles Dickens; both novelists write big—and bighearted—books that often explore people on the outskirts of mainstream society. Their novels demonstrate care and concern for the marginalized without crossing over into sentimentality. He published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968), at age 26, and won the National Book Award for The World According to Garp (1978). To date, he has published 15 novels, along with nonfiction, essays, and screenplays.
Born John Wallace Blunt Jr. in 1942 in New Hampshire, Irving never knew his biological father, who died in a heroic mission during World War II. He adopted the surname of his stepfather, who taught at Phillips Exeter Academy. As an Exeter student, Irving suffered from dyslexia, an untreated condition that didn’t dampen his love of reading. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years and coached the sport into his 40s. Owen Meany makes many references to the American obsession with sports, and Irving seeks to explore the ways in which our focus on seemingly unimportant events like football games may detract from our focus on important events like the Iran-Contra affair.
Rumors swirled upon the 1998 release of the movie Simon Birch, loosely based on A Prayer for Owen Meany, that Irving demanded his name be removed from the film. The truth, however, is that Irving didn’t want the book’s fans to be disappointed by differences between the two works. The movie borrows the book’s beginning and key relationships but then moves into an equally compelling story about two outcasts who find comfort and companionship in one another.
A Prayer for Owen Meany earned readers’ love because it blends Irving’s trademark quirkiness with pointed philosophical queries. Its supernatural elements feel relevant to the story, rather than contrived, and the plot neatly folds in on itself. Regardless of whether we know an oddball like Owen, each of us has wondered to what extent fate touches our lives.
A first edition printing of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813.
An illustration by Hugh Thomson, entitled “The entreaties of several,” accompanied the “Peacock” edition of the book—a cover decorated with prideful peacocks—published by George Allen in 1894.
A portrait of Jane Austen, circa 1790. Only her immediate family knew that Austen wrote her novels; she published anonymously because of her role as an upper-class woman.
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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Jane Austen · 1813
That Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) has endured over the past 200 years is something of an understatement. T-shirts that proclaim “Team Darcy.” A 12-foot fiberglass statue of Colin Firth, depicting the scene from the 1995 BBC miniseries in which he emerges as Darcy, soaking wet and very buff, to the surprise of Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth. Packaged pilgrimages to Bath, complete with visits to key homes and churches. Bride and Prejudice (2004), a Bollywood version. The novels Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), which turns Elizabeth Bennet into a bumbling yet lovable single gal in London, and Eligible (2016), which moves the plot into 21st-century Cincinnati and drops a reality show into the mix. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), an elaborate parody featuring the undead, which was later made into a movie.
Born in 1775 near the southern coast of England, Austen grew up in a literary family, the daughter of a minister. At age 20, she fell in love with a young man whose family rejected the match on account of her low income; around this time she also began writing novels, including one called First Impressions. When it failed to find a publisher, she focused on Sense and Sensibility, which came out to much fanfare in 1811. This success gave her the confidence to return to her earlier efforts, and the novel we now know as Pride and Prejudice was published two years later. Of her six novels, Pride and Prejudice inspires the most fervent adoration.
No one except her immediate family knew Austen had authored the novels. Mindful of her role as an upper-class woman in the late 1700s and early 1800s, she published her work anonymously. After her death in 1817 at age 41, her brother revealed her identity. But what really seemed to drive Austen’s popularity was bibliotherapy, or the practice of reading certain texts for their healing benefits. Soldiers carried Austen into the trenches of World War I, and her work was prescribed as an antidote to the horrors of World War II as well. At the time of its publication, the novel gave an entertaining peek into parlors, serving as a mirror for the pleasures and pressures of Regency society. The details of dresses, d
inners, and dances provide a window into life for a certain class during that specific era. Readers continue to return to the beloved characters and their domestic dramas for reassurance and diversion, swept up in Austen’s prose.
With five unmarried daughters, the Bennet family greets the arrival of an eligible bachelor to the neighborhood with great delight. Charles Bingley falls hard for Jane Bennet, but his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy feels less keen toward Jane’s sister Elizabeth. As Jane and Mr. Bingley court, Elizabeth and Darcy both come together and clash. Meanwhile, the insufferable Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth—a match she rejects, even though Collins stands to inherit the Bennet property (the law of entailment stipulates that the property must pass to a male heir). Her best friend, Charlotte, marries Collins instead, because, as she explains, she’s getting older and must consider her financial future. Lydia, the youngest and most boy-crazy Bennet girl, runs off with a soldier, forcing Darcy into some shady dealings and Elizabeth into some soul searching.
Pride and Prejudice can be viewed through many lenses: at its core, it’s a comedy of manners about a girl who rejects a man, discovers her grave error, and lives happily ever after. It skewers society in Regency England, which saw marriage as a means of cementing wealth and consolidating power; marrying for love would have been unconventional. It offers a pointed critique of a class system that overly values a woman’s reputation, and shows how swiftly one’s reputation could unravel. And then there’s the writing, with a sharpness that sparkles even as it cuts to the quick. From its famous first line—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—this novel offers sly barbs and sarcastic asides. To open its pages is to fall through time, to smile, to smirk, and, perhaps, to join Team Darcy.