Are you an unusually persevering and persistent person? Or, like most of us, do you sometimes find it difficult to stick to the job until it is done?

DO you desire above all things to live a serene, useful, successful life? Do you want to get out of the petty limitations of conventionality?

Some years ago this book was born into thought by the perception of its fundamental principle, and it has been growing ever since.

H.G. Wells' 1897 science fiction novella The Invisible Man tells the story of a scientist named Griffin who theory is this.

H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, from 1895, popularized the idea of a vehicle that allows its user to travel intentionally and selectively across time, and indeed Wells is credited with coining the very term time machine.

H. G. Wells' 1901 science fiction novel The First Men in the Moon tells the story of a voyage to the moon by Mr. Bedford, a businessman plagued by financial problems, and Dr. Cavor, a brilliant and somewhat eccentric scientist.

The Emerson System treats the voice as a natural reporter of the individual, constantly emphasizing the tendency of the voice to express appropriately any mental concept or state of feeling.

It is a curious fact that of that class of literature to which Munchausen belongs, that namely of Voyages Imaginaires, the three great types should have all been created in England.

In America, in 1770, a well-defined aristocracy held control.

Soils and national characters differ; but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

The Importance of Being Earnest is the last play Oscar Wilde ever wrote, and remains his most enduringly popular.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Arms and the Man was George Bernard Shaw's first commercially successful play.

The following book consists of brief biographical commentaries about Beethoven, each followed by sections of quotations attributed to the muse.

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, from 1871, is a children's novel that is often put in the genre literary nonsense.

Major Barbara is a 1905 play by George Bernard Shaw.

The Best American Humorous Short Stories features tales from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and many other well known writers.

When Robert Browning first met the ailing Elizabeth Barrett in 1845 it must have seemed to him like something from a gothic novel.

Rousseau wrote about the difficulty of being a good individual within an inherently corrupting collectivity: society.

The Woman in White is credited with being the first of the sensation novels, and one of the finest examples of the genre.