The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells | 
The Invisible Man
by H. G. Wells | 
The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H. G. Wells | 
The Magic Shop
by H. G. Wells | 
The History of Mr Polly
by H. G. Wells | 
Tono-Bungay
by H. G. Wells | 
Love and Mr. Lewisham
by H. G. Wells | 
Bealby
by H. G. Wells | 
The Wheels of Chance
by H. G. Wells | 
You Can't Be Too Careful
by H. G. Wells | 
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell | 
Persuasion
by Jane Austen | 
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck | 
1984
by George Orwell | 
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen | 
Emma
by Jane Austen | 
And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie | 
Dracula
by Bram Stoker | 
Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier | 
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte |
The present outlook of human affairs is one that admits of broad generalizations and that seems to require broad generalizations. We are in one of those phases of experience which become cardinal in history. A series of immense and tragic events have shattered the self-complacency and challenged the will and intelligence of mankind. That easy general forward movement of human affairs which for several generations had seemed to justify the persuasion of a necessary and invincible progress, progress towards greater powers, greater happiness, and a continual enlargement of life, has been checked violently and perhaps arrested altogether. The spectacular catastrophe of the Great War has revealed an accumulation of destructive forces in our outwardly prosperous society, of which few of us had dreamt; and it has also revealed a profound incapacity to deal with and restrain these forces. The two years of want, confusion, and indecision that have followed the Great War in Europe and Asia, and the uncertainties that have disturbed life even in the comparatively untouched American world, seem to many watchful minds even more ominous to our social order than the war itself. What is happening to our race? they ask. Did the prosperities and confident hopes with which the twentieth century opened, mark nothing more than a culmination of fortuitous good luck? Has the cycle of prosperity and progress closed? To what will this staggering and blundering, the hatreds and mischievous adventures of the present time, bring us? Is the world in the opening of long centuries of confusion and disaster such as ended the Western Roman Empire in Europe or the Han prosperity in China? And if so, will the debacle extend to America? Or is the American (and Pacific?) system still sufficiently removed and still sufficiently autonomous to maintain a progressive movement of its own if the Old World collapse?