The Great Courses

Accessing the great American books - the classics - is a unique way of understanding the history of this country and of adding to our own personal estate of literary wealth.

You definitely know how to read. But do you know how to read artfully? Unlike everyday reading, artful reading—the way we read novels and short stories—is less about reading for specific information and more about reading to revel in the literary experience.

For more than 1,500 years, the literature of this tiny island has taught, nurtured, thrilled, outraged, and humbled readers both inside and outside its borders. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Swift, Conrad, Wilde—the roster of British writers who have made a lasting impact on literature is remarkable.

When John Keats first read Chapman’s translation of the epics of "deep-brow’d Homer," he was so overwhelmed, so overcome with the joy of discovery, that he compared his experience to finding "a new planet."

It is part of the human endeavor to invent and inhabit literary landscapes. Literature, though "fiction," provides experiential knowledge to readers who enter those landscapes.

Classical mythology—the stories of gods and heroes ranging from Athena to Zeus—has inspired everything from great art and literature to popular films and TV programs.

What makes a written work eternal—its message still so fundamental to the way we live that it continues to speak to us, hundreds or thousands of years distant from the lifetime of its author?

There are few fictional characters who have entrenched themselves so thoroughly in the popular imagination as Count Dracula.

Thor, Odin, Loki, Freyja, the Valkyries, Valhalla, Ragnarok - many of the places we encounter these and other names, places, and events from Norse mythology in daily life and pop culture are connected to the medieval sources in name only.

While short stories exist in traditions all over the world, American short stories are a genre all their own.