The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon | 
History of the Plague in London
by Daniel Defoe | 
Joseph Andrews
by Henry Fielding | 
The Vicar of Wakefield
by Oliver Goldsmith | 
Moll Flanders
by Daniel Defoe | 
Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding | 
Pamela
by Samuel Richardson | 
Evelina
by Frances Burney | 
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne | 
Clarissa
by Samuel Richardson | 
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
by Tobias Smollett |
Rasselas
by Samuel Johnson | 
Roxana
by Daniel Defoe | 
Letters from a Stoic
by Seneca | 
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee | 
Poor Richard's Almanack
by Benjamin Franklin | 
The King of Pirates
by Daniel Defoe | 
The Elements of Style
by William Strunk | 
A Night to Remember
by Walter Lord | 
The Book of Five Rings
by Miyamoto Musashi |
Defoe's account of the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665 remains as vivid as it is harrowing. Based on Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, A Journal of the Plague Year walks the line between fiction, history, and reportage. In meticulous and unsentimental detail it renders the daily life of a city under siege; the often gruesome medical precautions and practices of the time; the mass panics of a frightened citizenry; and the solitary travails of Defoe's narrator, a man who decides to remain in the city through it all, chronicling the course of events with an unwavering eye. Defoe's Journal remains perhaps the greatest account of a natural disaster ever written.