The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction (HCF)

Note: Links have been added to all of the entries. This label will show you the Listings of any author included in this list.

These look absolutely mossy with age

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The Harvard Classics came out in 1909, just over 100 years ago; and the "Shelf of Fiction" followed separately eight years later, in 1917. It must have seemed a good idea at the time, but today's readers will find some of the choices more than a little outdated.

To that end, I'm offering a "bounty": I'll give one U.S. dollar ($1) to any native speaker of English who can prove to me beyond a reasonable doubt that, before this date (April, 2017), he or she has read two or more of the following books:

• Gottfried Keller: The Banner of the Upright Seven
• Theodor Storm: The Rider on the White Horse
• Theodor Fontane: Trials and Tribulations
• Björnstjerne Björnson: A Happy Boy
• Alexander L. Kielland: Skipper Worse

I've got a feeling my money's pretty safe.

Anyway, the books are linked from this table of contents, so here's your chance to catch up on the "top picks" of fiction in 1917 (coincidentally, the year the first Pulitzer Prizes were given for literature--but not to any of these books).

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Volumes I and II

• Henry Fielding: The History of Tom Jones

Volume III

• Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey
• Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Volume IV

• Sir Walter Scott: Guy Mannering

Volumes V and VI

• William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair

Volumes VII and VIII

• Charles Dickens: David Copperfield

Volume IX

• George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss

Volume X

• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter; "Rappaccini's Daughter"
• Washington Irving: "Rip Van Winkle"; "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
• Edgar Allan Poe: Three Short Stories ["Eleonora"; "The Fall of the House of Usher"; "The Purloined Letter"]
• Francis Bret Harte: Three Short Stories ["The Luck of Roaring Camp"; "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"; "The Idyl of Red Gulch"]
• Samuel L. Clemens: "Jim Smily and His Jumping Frog"
• Edward Everett Hale: "The Man without a Country"

Volume XI

• Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

Volume XII

• Victor Marie Hugo: Notre Dame de Paris

Volume XIII

• Honoré de Balzac: Old Goriot
• George Sand: The Devil's Pool
• Alfred de Musset: The Story of a White Blackbird
• Alphonse Daudet: Five Short Stories ["The Siege of Berlin"; "The Last Class—The Story of a Little Alsatian"; "The Child Spy"; "The Game of Billiards"; "The Bad Zouave"]
• Guy de Maupassant: Two Short Stories ["Walter Schnaffs' Adventure"; "Two Friends"]

Volumes XIV and XV

• J. W. von Goethe: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; The Sorrows of Werther
• Gottfried Keller: The Banner of the Upright Seven
• Theodor Storm: The Rider on the White Horse
• Theodor Fontane: Trials and Tribulations

Volumes XVI and XVII

• Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenin; "Ivan the Fool"

Volume XVIII

• Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment

Volume XIX

• Ivan Turgenev: A House of Gentlefolk; Fathers and Children

Volume XX

• Juan Valera: Pepita Jimenez
• Björnstjerne Björnson: A Happy Boy
• Alexander L. Kielland: Skipper Worse

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