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Rating: 
Summary: Worth the price!
Review: "Literature" here means fiction and non-fiction -- great works of philosophy and political theory are included alongside famous novels, plays, and poems. This book covers 275 of the "great books" of the western canon. (Make no mistake: this is unabashedly the Western Civ definition of Great Books. It also lacks racial diversity -- but see "Masterpieces of African-American Literature in the same series.) For each work covered, the book gives a well-written, concise plot summary; descriptions of major characters; all the important facts of date and authorship; and a critical evaluation. The list of authors is too long to give here. But since $35 is nothing to sneeze at -- and you need to know if the book covers works you're interested in -- here's a sampling: Shakespeare, Proust, Henry James, Tolstoy, Yeats, Trollope, Nietzsche, Coleridge, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Edith Wharton, Voltaire, Chaucer, Kafka, Kant, St, Augustine, Dickens, Plato, Ibsen, Henry Adams, Jane Austen, Emerson, Thoreau, Goethe, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Freud, Jung, Marx, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Sartre, Camus, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, etc., etc. Whether you feel you have an incomplete education or you've just forgotten the basics of the books you read (or were supposed to read!) in high school and college -- this is the book for you. As it says on the flap copy" Invaluable for syudents and fascinating to every dedicated reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful reference but....
Review: Of the available references of its kind, this one is the best. However, the latest compilation pales beside its 1952 counterpart which has 510 entries, compared to the 270 entries in this volume. This "new" edition has larger type and revised entries. Some of the articles/summaries are actually better than earlier versions. However, none of the works of (for example) Thomas Wolfe, among others, are included in this new edition. I suppose the editors wished to keep the new volume as lean and basic as possible. They managed to do so in mostly an excellent way, but at the expense of omitting some essential literary masterpieces. I do recommend this book, but definitely don't throw out your early editions of the title!
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