This page is a work in progress, where I’ll chronicle a number of non-Shakespearean related works – fiction and non-fiction – that I recommend. The aim is to be suitably eclectic, but with an eye toward the enlightening, unusual, or important.

Ancient World

Catullus, Carmina [1st C. BCE]
Ovid, Metamorphoses [1st C.]
Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars [2nd C.]

The Middle Ages

Li Po, Poems [8th C.]
Dante Aligheri, Divine Comedy [1320]
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron [1353]

1500s

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus [1589]
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta [1589]
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander [1593]
Edmund Spenser, Amoretti [1590s]

1600s

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi [1614]
Samuel Daniel, Delia [1610s]
John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore [1633]
William Drummond, Poems [1620s-1640s]
Racine, Phedre [1677]
Basho, Haiku [c. 1680s]

1700s

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels [1726]
Voltaire, Candide [1758]
Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy [1758]
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience [1789]
William Lisle Bowles, Poems [1789-1800s]

1800 – 1850

William Wordsworth, Poems [1790s-1810s]
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility [1811]
Jane Austen, Persuasion [1817]
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poems [1810s-1820s]
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans [1825]
Stendhal, The Red and the Black [1830]
Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Poems [1820s-1860s]
John Keats, Poems [1810s-1840s]
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems [1830s – 1880s]
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems [1830s-1860s]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems [1840s-1870s]
Christina Rossetti, Poems [1830s – 1880s]
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights [1847]
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield [1849]

1850 – 1900

Emily Dickinson, Poems [1850s – 1880s]
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick [1851]
Charles Dickens, Bleak House [1852]
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [1850s – 1880s]
Charles Dickens, Litttle Dorrit [1855]
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [1856]
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865]
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace [1869]
Emile Zola, Les Rougons-Macquart cycle [1871-1893]
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd [1874]
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems [1880s]

W.B. Yeats, Poems [1880s – 1930s]
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough [1890]
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890]
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbevilles [1891]
Kate Chopin, The Awakening [1899]
A.E. Housman, Poems [1890s-1930s]
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Poems [1890s-1930s]

1900 – 1919

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie [1900]
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career [1901]
Constanin P. Cavafy, Poems [1900s-1930s]
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth [1905]
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows [1908]
E.M. Forster, Howards End [1910]
Amy Lowell, Poems [1910s-1920s]
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary [1911]
Siegfried Sassoon, Poems [1910s]
Robert Frost, Poems [1910s-1940s]
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [1913-1927]
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1914]
James Joyce, Dubliners [1914]
Wilfred Owen, Poems [1917-1918]
May Gibbs, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie [1918]
Earl of Harewood, The Definitive Kobbe’s Opera Book [1918, revised several times]
T.S. Eliot, Poems [1910s-1930s]
Claude McKay, Poems [1910s-1920s]
P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and Wooster [1919-1974], especially Very Good, Jeeves (1930); The Code of the Woosters [1938]; Joy in the Morning [1947]; and Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit [1954]
D.H. Lawrence, Poems [1910s-1930s]

1920s

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poems [1920s-1940s]
Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay [1923]
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India [1924]
Herman Melville, Billy Budd [published 1924]
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925]
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [1925]
Louise Bogan, Poems [1920s – 1960s]
Langston Hughes, Poems [1920s – 1940s]
Virginia Woolf, Orlando [1928]
Countee Cullen, Poems [1920s]
W.H. Auden, Poems [1920s – 1960s]

1930s
Wallace Stevens, Poems [1930s-1950s]
Virginia Woolf, The Waves [1931]
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World [1932]
Dorothy Wall, Blinky Bill [1933]
Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express [1934], The A.B.C. Murders [1936], inter alia