Biographies & history

In this New York Times bestseller, legendary actor and star of the acclaimed documentary Val shares the stories behind his most beloved roles, reminisces about his star-studded career and love life, and reveals the truth behind his recent health struggles in a remarkably candid autobiography.

Zane Grey (1872-1939) was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that were a basis for the Western genre in literature and the arts.

A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy describes the love triangle of a young woman, Elfride Swancourt, and her two suitors from very different backgrounds.

In 2002, Sam Williams wrote Free as in Freedom, a biography of Richard M. Stallman. In its epilogue, Williams expressed hope that choosing to distribute his book under the GNU Free Documentation License would enable and encourage others to share corrections and their own perspectives through modifications to his work.

"Childhood", Tolstoy’s first published work in 1852, is also the first novel in Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy, which also includes Boyhood, and Youth. Published when Tolstoy was twenty-three, the book gained immediate notice among Russian writers including Ivan Turgenev, and heralded the young Tolstoy as a major figure in Russian letters. Childhood is an expressionist exploration of the internal life of a young boy, Nikolenka, and was a new form in Russian writing, mixing fact, fiction and emotions to render the moods and reactions of the narrator.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1919, “The Education of Henry Adams” is the autobiography of Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, and the great-grandson of President John Adams.

Youth (Russian: Юность [Yunost']; 1857) is the third novel in Leo Tolstoy's autobiographical trilogy, following Childhood and Boyhood. It was first published in the popular Russian literary magazine Sovremennik.

"The Judge's House" is a classic ghost story by the Irish author Bram Stoker. The story was first published in the December 5, 1891, special Christmas issue of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News weekly magazine.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.

Biographical books, or bios, are detailed descriptions of a person's life. A biography is more than simply the basic facts, like education, work, relationships, and death. It portrays a person's experience of major life events.

"Pride and Prometheus," a story in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence involving characters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is winner of the 2008 Nebula award for Best Novelette.

Boasting some of Sherlock Holmes's finest adventures, this classic 1894 collection was originally written in serial form. Eleven of the most popular tales of the immortal sleuth include "Silver Blaze," concerning the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time"; "The Greek Interpreter," starring Holmes's even more formidable brother, Mycroft; and "The Final Problem," the detective's notorious confrontation with arch-criminal Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.

Voltaire said, "Machiavelli taught Europe the art of war; it had long been practiced, without being known." For Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), war was war, and victory the supreme aim to which all other considerations must be subordinated.

Ex-slave Frederick Douglass's second autobiography-written after ten years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison-catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight as the foremost spokesman for American blacks, both freed and slave. Written during his celebrated career as a speaker and newspaper editor, My Bondage and My Freedom reveals the author of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) grown more mature, forceful, analytical, and complex with a deepened commitment to the fight for equal rights and liberties.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process.