The Originals (Set Of 4 Books) : The Iliad | The Odyssey | A Passage to India | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Homer :- The Greek poet Homer is believed to have been born sometime between the 12th and 8th centuries BC somewhere along the coast of Asia Minor. Though very little is known about this enigmatic figure, he is renowned for his epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad tells the tale of the siege of Troy, the Trojan war, and Paris’ kidnapping of Helen – the world’s most beautiful woman. The Odyssey, set in the period after the fall of Troy, traces the trajectory of the life and exploits of the Greek hero, Odysseus. The Iliad has a strictly formal structure while The Odyssey adopts a more colloquial style. Both epics are laden with startling insights into early human society and human nature.

E.M. Forster :- Edward Morgan ForstEr (1879–1970), British novelist, essayist, short story writer and critic, was born at Marylebone, London. His architect father died when Forster was very young and he was brought up by his mother. Forster’s celebrated works include the novels A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924), and Maurice (1971) as well as a large corpus of criticism. Forster broke new ground by departing from the elaborate, flowery style of his predecessors and adopted a freer, more colloquial style in his books. His novels were seeped in social commentary, which was based on his in-depth observations of middle-class lives. He also had a deep-rooted interest in Mediterranean “paganism,” which called for humans to maintain their connection with the natural world and live a life attuned to the earth’s rhythms.

Mark Twain :-Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, was America’s most famous literary icon. Born on 30 November 1835, in the town of Florida, Missouri, he was the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. Four years after his birth, in 1839, the Clemens family moved to the town of Hannibal, a developing port city on the banks of the Mississippi. At the age of nine, Twain witnessed the murder of a cattle rancher and when he turned 10, he saw a slave being struck by a piece of iron by a white overseer. Violence was commonplace and such incidents shaped the writer in him. Twain became the chronicler of hypocrisies and vanities through the colloquial, raw, and vivid voice of the common folk. Satire and irreverence were the weapons that he used to deflate the arrogance of the pretentious. In 1865, one of his remarkable short stories about life in a mining camp, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’ was published in newspapers and magazines, earning him national acclaim. A few years later, in 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and became a bestseller. This one-of a kind travel book was born out of his five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are among Twain’s seminal works. In 1935, Ernest Hemingway remarked, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain died on 21 April 1910.