Professors, students, and anyone who loves to read will want this fascinating and attractive volume. It offers a detailed introduction, beginning with great works from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, this literary timeline gallops from Mesopotamian pictograms and Julius Caesar's "Commentaries on the Gallic" to Renaissance and Baroque masterworks by Machiavelli and Moliere, and on to modernism. Along the way, it presents the birth of the novel, Gothic chills, Thomas Paine's rabble-rousing, as well as landmark French and Russian authors, Emerson's essays. Victoriana, the Aesthetic Movement, Utopian Literature and Naturalism make their appearance, all the way up to today's Tom Stoppard and Tony Kushner.