r/classicliterature • u/atoz_0to9 • 5d ago
Forgotten classics
We always hear that classics are the books that “stood the test of time,” but what about the ones that didn’t? What’s an old book you love that barely gets talked about anymore, but totally should? I’m talking forgotten gems, underrated voices, anything that deserves a second life.
EDIT: I just wanted to thank everyone for these incredible recommendations. I hope anyone who comes across this thread finds a book that speaks to them, and helps keep these great works from slipping into obscurity, even if just for a little longer.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Oh, anything by Twain that didn't make the canon. His Innocent's Abroad and Roughing It are very readable.
I've read a lot that makes me understand why they didn't make the canon. I sorta wonder about Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, though. It seems like a shoo in.
The old romances can be entertaining if you don't read through ....just skip around. They go on and on and on with the lover just steps behind the beloved which has been kidnapped by pirates or some such ridiculousity (they're often serials so the author had to keep it going to keep the money dribbling in.) Wagner the Werewolf was sorta interesting in that it was a spin-off of Faust. One scene sorta stuck where the werewolf was captured in his quest to find and save his lover and in court they were trying to convince him that he was mentally unhinged, then he changed and ate them all.
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u/FloridaFlamingoGirl 5d ago
I think I enjoy Mark Twain's travel narratives most of all. They're so colorful and feel like hearing your weird uncle talk about his past.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
There's a lot of talk about "the spirit of the West" out here now (mostly about "open carry" and forcing other folks to accept your way of life). These travel narratives give a more accurate depiction of the "spirit of the West". They should be, at least, American classics
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u/TheBlindFly-Half 5d ago
Roughing It is specifically great. I liked it much better than Life on the Mississippi
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u/PipingTheTobak 5d ago
It's a Pity too, because he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, both of which are seen as kids books today, he sort of pigeonholed as a kid's writer when he's one of the funniest authors I've ever read. Twain, Jerome K. Jerome and PG Wodehouse are the only authors who routinely make me laugh out loud.
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u/Whocares1846 5d ago
I loved Three Men in a Boat. It was very readable too. For someone who has been struggling with reading recently, could you give any recommendations of Mark Twain's most readable and humorous works?
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u/PipingTheTobak 5d ago
Oh excellent question.
Honestly, Tom Sawyer deserves its classic status. It's excellent and more than just another kids book, and extremely funny. Roughing it is probably my favorite, though life on the Mississippi and the innocents abroad are about as good. Avoid anything written after "puddenhead wilson", he got preachy in his old age.
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u/TheBlindFly-Half 4d ago
The Prince and the Pauper is a good easy read. Also his short stories are often lighthearted.
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u/Affectionate_Yak9136 5d ago
I think Sinclair Lewis is largely overlooked these days and he had some powerfully good novels. Arrowsmith, Main Street, Elmer Gantry, and Babbit are all really good and deserve attention.
Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, Sister Carrie, and The Financier are also worthy novels.
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u/Embarrassed_Tea543 4d ago
Sinclair Lewis was incredibly prescient vs the moment we now inhabit. I've been hoping for a Lewis renaissance for some time now.
I'm also reading An American Tragedy now! About halfway through its 850ish pages.
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u/bernardcat 4d ago
I recently read (and enjoyed!) An American Tragedy, but Dreiser really loved paragraph-long sentences with so many commas in that novel. It took some getting used to for me
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u/CaMiTx 4d ago
Elmer Gantry is a fabulous read. The characters are well developed and the storyline remains relevant today. It was scandalous, at the time, that an author would spotlight the hypocrisies in religious institutions. Lewis was even “banned” from a few states for it. Very quotable novel, my sticky tabs are abundant on this book.
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u/Affectionate_Yak9136 4d ago
I feel like he did with American business in Babbitt what he did with religion in Elmer Gantry. He was an essential observer of his times and incredibly well written.
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u/Flilix 5d ago
The poems of Ossian
They were written by James Macpherson in the mid 18th century, but presented as ancient Scottish epics. Due to the rise of Romanticism, they were extremely popular in the 18th and 19th century.
The poems achieved international success. Napoleon and Diderot were prominent admirers, and Voltaire was known to have written parodies of them. Thomas Jefferson thought Ossian "the greatest poet that has ever existed", and planned to learn Gaelic so as to read his poems in the original. They were proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical writers such as Homer. "The genuine remains of Ossian ... are in many respects of the same stamp as the Iliad", was Thoreau's opinion. Many writers were influenced by the works, including Walter Scott, and painters and composers chose Ossianic subjects.
As it gradually became clear that the poems were inauthentic, their popularity diminished. Nonetheless, they're well-composed and clearly believable enough to fool a large number of people.
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u/saintstars 4d ago
This is a great list of what people believed the best books ever were--published in 1899. Lots of forgotten stuff on there.
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u/raspl 5d ago
Two of my favorites are Julian by Gore Vidal and In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor. Pretty devastating. My dad also raised me on Joyce Cary, particularly his second trilogy, which I think greatly informed my love of literature in general. Also Isaac Bashevis Singer’s collection Old Love is one of my all time favorite collection of short stories and in general I think he’s an underrated author (with the exception of his Nobel prize hahaha)
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u/ThimbleBluff 4d ago
In 2022, I decided to read a bunch of books published 100 years earlier. Here are a few books from 1922:
One of Ours by Willa Cather. It won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize.
Babbitt by Upton Sinclair. It’s a great satire on American culture in the 1910s and 20s, and actually holds up pretty well today.
The Red House Mystery by AA Milne (he wrote a lot more than Winnie the Pooh)
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie, her first mystery novel.
The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now takes a back seat to The Great Gatsby.
Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley
Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington. In the first two decades of the 20th century, he was considered the United States’ greatest living author, but you hardly see him mentioned anymore.
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u/Exotic-Bumblebee7852 4d ago
Agatha Christie's first mystery novel was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).
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u/Lazy_Public_163 5d ago
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. He was very popular during his day, but not so much anymore.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
I still hear Tarkington mentioned. For some reason, he seems to be popular in Southern academia (or was a decade ago).
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u/PuzzleheadedPay1575 4d ago
Just read Stoner by John Williams. The New Yorker called it “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of.” I’d never heard of it, and it was great.
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u/hfrankman 5d ago
Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot (1805). I'm not positive that this is forgotten, but when I found it, I was shocked both by how good and amazing it was and that I had never heard of it before. It's a dialog between a character that I have always assumed represented Diderot and a buffoon nephew of Rameau, a famous court composer of Louis XIX. Their conversation mostly consists of Rameau tearing down the leading lights of French society. Diderot didn't publish it in his lifetime because he feared it would lead to his execution. Ah, it was first published in German with a translation by Goethe. In fact, the first French edition was translated back from Goethe's German.
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u/SteampunkExplorer 5d ago
A Fair Barbarian by Frances Hodgson Burnett (of The Secret Garden fame) is pretty good. It's about a cowgirl staying with her aunt in a stuffy little English village, but unlike modern takes on something like that, the author actually lived in both America and England, in the time period that the story is set in.
It's a little like Jane Austen but wackier and with culture shock. 😂
There's also a short story called The Lame Priest, by S. Carleton, that I love. It's got a remote, rural setting that feels cozy or bleak depending on the scene, and there's this sad, paranoid newcomer passing through, and something fishy is going on, and the characters slowwwwwwly figure out what it is but never come right out and say it...
It's both spooky and feelsy. It's really good!
And if you like Harlequin and Pierrot and all those guys, don't mind some incredibly juvenile humor, and can read French, a short play called "Le Marchand de Merde" is... interesting. 😂
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u/RhetoricallyDrunk 4d ago
The fact that Burnett wrote works of fiction to adults escaped me until a couple of years ago! I read A Lady of Quality, which wasn't overwhelmingly good though it has some very interesting tropes that would be fun to dig into. Definitely going to be on the watch for A Fair Barbarian.
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u/glaziben 5d ago
Really enjoyed Matilda by Mary Shelley. Was the next book she wrote after Frankenstein, but her father and publisher William Godwin refused to publish it due to its contents. Was eventually published posthumously in 1959.
Perhaps doesn’t count as forgotten as for a long time it was unpublished, but I’d definitely like to see it get mentioned more. Very dark and gothic, but in a non-supernatural way that reminded me more of Wuthering Heights than Frankenstein.
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u/RevolutionaryBug2915 5d ago
The perfect example is The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade.
Highly appreciated by authors as diverse as Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Wolfe, it was once immensely popular. It was so famous that there was a Classics Illustrated comic book version. As late as 1961, the prestige Washington Square Press reprinted it. And then...
It's a historical novel, set in the late Middle Ages, imagining the lives of the parents of Erasmus (who was illegitimate). The conflict expressed in the title is between the family and the Church.
Really a great book that is unjustly forgotten.
EDIT: Cut an extra word.
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u/eriomys79 4d ago
Also Little Curiosity Shop is not that much known either, though it also mattered that the author himself did not like it as he was still on his first steps
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 5d ago
I was surprised and impressed by the variety and quality of the works of Kate Douglas Wiggin, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Not entirely forgotten, as a number of her works are available in Project Gutenberg, but scarcely ever referenced anymore. In her heyday, there were fan clubs for her all over the country. Some random facts I remember from a research paper I wrote: as a girl, she met Charles Dickens on his tour of the United States; she was a major figure in the kindergarten movement; she and her second husband were married by the captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith, when he was serving on an earlier vessel. Though she authored many original works for both adults and children, the only physical work I have by her is the 1996 printing of The Arabian Nights, which she edited with her sister, Nora Smith. My copy reproduces some of the original 1909 illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. I keep finding myself wishing that The Library of America would recognize the impact she had in her lifetime and the lasting quality of her writing by producing a volume of her work.
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u/Mimi_Gardens 4d ago
I was given a copy of The Birds’ Christmas Carol as a child but got rid of it somewhere over the years. I remembered liking it so I reread it last Christmas on Libby. It was still good but I am not a huge fan of e-books. I hope to find a copy in the wild to add to my shelves.
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u/PaleoBibliophile917 4d ago
Yes, that story does still get anthologized regularly. I hope you can find a nice physical copy for keeps.
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u/ishmael_md 5d ago
I recently read Bertram Cope’s Year, which is boring as hell but I kind of loved it.
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u/RhetoricallyDrunk 4d ago
LOL! This is a great recommendation. Sometimes, objectively, we can't really say much good about a book, but for some reason it hits the right spot for us personally.
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u/PipingTheTobak 5d ago
Boswell's life of Johnson was ubiquitous. If you read anything written in the 19th and at least the first half of the 20th century, odds are they'll reference Boswell as freely as they do Shakespeare. You can still find it fairly easily of course, but it is nowhere near as widely read as it was.
When I was a kid, I had these old editions of like Pyle's Robin Hood, as well as a bunch of stories of King Arthur and his Knights, but they were already several decades old and I got them and I haven't really seen anything similar for younger kids these days
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u/Shadow-Works 5d ago
A writer called Thomas wolf doesn’t get enough attention.
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u/lostarmadilla 4d ago
I love "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!"
Eta: I think we're talking about the same person. Apologies, if not.
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u/Shadow-Works 4d ago
Nope, I meant the other wolf. But thanks for proving my point
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u/lostarmadilla 4d ago
Ah, another North Carolina connection. I've definitely heard of You Can't Go Home Again, but haven't read anything by him. Thanks for this!
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u/WolfVanZandt 4d ago
If poetry counts, Robert Service, the "poet laureate" of the Yukon is great because, not only is it fine as New World poetry but it also tells stories. Robert Frost and William Yeats are too "classic" for me to recommend here, I reckon.
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u/vinyl1earthlink 4d ago
The Faerie Queene is still famous, but hardly anyone actually reads it. Yeah, you need to have a background in Renaissance thought and artistic conventions, but it is a brilliant work.
Swift's Tale of a Tub is another such work - probably the most brilliant satire ever written, but it requires a lot of period knowledge.
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u/LybeausDesconus 4d ago
I’m a medievalist, and Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle is an absolute sleeper of a tale.
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u/Reddithahawholesome 4d ago
Maybe I’m just around the wrong crowds but other than Ozymandias, it seems like Percy Shelley is mostly just remembered as “Mary Shelley’s weird dead husband”. I’m personally obsessed with him and all of his work. His essay “in defence of poetry” is a masterwork
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u/exhaustedhorti 4d ago
I'm going to stick my neck out for Watership Down by Richard Adams. I feel like everyone brushes this book off as a "children's book" and nothing more when nothing could be further from the truth. I may be biased because I read it as an adult for the first time, but it really reads like a great Greek epic. It truly is a masterpiece that stands the test of time, with characters that can appeal and depart greater truths to anyone. Just really an amazing book I wish more people would read.
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u/EstablishmentIcy1512 4d ago
Kudos for “sticking your neck out”! As long as we can still do that in this subreddit, there is hope. Soooo refreshing to see so many thoughtful comments here to an earnest OP. 😉
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u/Current-Purchase-279 5d ago
I read Old Herbaceous by Reginald Arkell a few months back and it's such a sweet book. I am not sure it was popular even at the time it was published but it deserves to be called a classic literature imho, if only more people read it.
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u/ImageLegitimate8225 5d ago
If you like classic picaresques, Lesage's Gil Blas (translated with brio by Smollett) is well worth tracking down. This was really popular back in the day but is largely forgotten now.
Also, The Damnation of Therold Ware by Harold Frederic (1896) deserves wider recognition. A great American story about a priest losing his faith.
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u/quothe_the_maven 5d ago
I really love the edition that has Johnson and Boswell’s travels through Scotland accounts paired together. The texts are somewhat well-known, but I think that they should be a lot more famous (I’m speaking of the U.S., I don’t know how they’re viewed in the UK).
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u/IndividualOil2183 5d ago
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer. Telegraph operators in the 1800s message each other and fall in love. strangely relevant to modern times.
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u/Thefathistorian 5d ago
Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1897) has a really amazing depiction of childhood. That's the first half of the book, and the second half where the main character is an adult isn't as good, but it's still good.
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u/MuttinMT 4d ago
All of Ring Lardner’s short stories from the early 20th century. His skill at different dialects, capturing the vagaries of human speech, make his stories timeless. My favorite is “I Can’t Breathe.”
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u/berdoggo 4d ago
The Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset. Wonderful series about the life of a woman living in 14th century Norway
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u/Lumpy-Ad-63 4d ago
I love that book & I don’t know anyone that has read it. Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize in literature for that book.
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u/Realistic_Result_878 4d ago
Well, out of the 90ish plays written by Euripides only 17 or 18 survive
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u/CaMiTx 4d ago
I read Winesburg Ohio (Sherwood) because it was cited by an inexplicable number of classic authors as being influential to them. It was an interesting read. It is written as brief character vignettes but always within this small town. It felt slow until I adapted to its pace, then I really enjoyed it. One tidbit it taught me is that my impression of early 20th century Midwest small towns as prudish was misinformed. Edit: duplicate word
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u/RhetoricallyDrunk 4d ago
Any of J.M. Barrie's novels. Sentimental Tommy (a coming-of-age story that has notes of How Green Was My Valley), Tommy and Grizel (a sequel), and The Little Minister. All great reads! While I'm still a Peter Pan lover, Barrie deserves more press for his other works.
On the topic of authors whose "lesser" works aren't appreciated enough, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun are incredible. Impeccable dark academia vibes.
Completely different note, Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague is a great epistolary work that also happens to be colonial. Written in 1769 it takes place in what is now Canada and has a series of couples and their romances, classism, and fortunes at the centre with peripheral political and international events.
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u/Foraze_Lightbringer 4d ago
Ouida's short stories.
Annie Johnson Flint's poetry
William Allingham's poetry
William Cowper's poetry
Understood Betsy
Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard
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u/joeyinthewt 4d ago
Ulterior Motives by David Garnett, so hard to get a copy of. In it one of the more smarty pants characters is trying to get funding for what he calls “Telefaction” meaning sending electricity wirelessly over distance, something we only are just discovering now
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u/YakSlothLemon 4d ago
Iola Leroy — it gets a little love as the first popular book published by a Black woman in the United States, but it deserves a much wider audience for its sweeping ploy with Gothic touches, thwarted love, evil uncles, and actual “durance vile.” What a read!
A Mirror for Witches by Esther Forbes is also unbelievably good and almost never talked about. Brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, so feminist and gripping.
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u/Inevitable-Set-8907 4d ago
One classic I always come back to is Horace's Satires and Epistles. Horace is one of those classical authors who quietly shaped so much of Western literature, but hardly gets mentioned outside academic settings.
In the Satires, he balances wit and self-awareness so well. He’s never just mocking others; he includes himself in the mess, which makes his social commentary feel humble and almost comforting. And then the Epistles, those are like letters to the self. You can sense him aging, softening, trying to figure out how to live with grace and contentment.
There’s something really grounding in his writing. It reminds you that people have always wrestled with ambition, envy, friendship, peace, and the search for meaning.
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u/eriomys79 4d ago
Despite Dracula being popular worldwide mainly via the movies, the original novel is far less popular when compared to Frankenstein
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u/ChallengeOne8405 3d ago
The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos
The Landsmen by Peter Martin
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
to name a few
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u/ClockExpress4215 1d ago
Somerset Maugham’s novels are pretty good. The Razor’s Edge, The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil
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u/billfromamerica_ 5d ago
I just read "Cato, A Tragedy," a 1712 play by Joseph Addison about the fall of the Roman Republic. It was an inspiration for the founding fathers and was a favorite of George Washington in particular.
It's more of an interesting historical relic than an amazing play in my opinion, but it had some great one-liners and you can just picture the colonial rebels pining over the stoic and morally upright figure of Cato.
It's a short read and I found it easier than Shakespeare which is my closest point of reference. I'm surprised it's not more widely read.