Thackeray, William Makepeace 1811-1863

Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
1,752 editions published between 1800 and 9999 in 32 languages and held by 6,281 libraries worldwide
Vanity Fair is a story of two heroines---one humble, the other a scheming social climber---who meet in boarding school and embark on markedly different lives. Amid the swirl of London's posh ballrooms and affairs of love and war, their fortunes rise and fall. Through it all, Thackeray lampoons the shallow values of his society, reserving the most pointed barbs for the upper crust. What results is a prescient look at the dogged pursuit of wealth and status---and the need for humility.

The history of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
826 editions published between 1778 and 2010 in 16 languages and held by 3,189 libraries worldwide
The history of man influential in colonial society.

The memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
423 editions published between 1800 and 2011 in 12 languages and held by 2,215 libraries worldwide
The racy memoirs of the Irish braggart and rogue who flourished, if that's the right word, in the late 1700s, are delightfully imagined by one of the great Victorian writers. Even more than Dickens, his contemporary, Thackeray can still beguile the modern reader, as is well testified in his first important novel.

The history of Pendennis : his fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest enemy by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
726 editions published between 1800 and 2011 in 10 languages and held by 2,056 libraries worldwide
Set mainly in London's bohemian and literary underworld, Pendennis (1848-50) is the funny and uninhibited story of Arthur Pendennis. Son of a selfless widow, he moves from one disastrous romantic entanglement to another. After running up bills at university and studying to become a lawyer, he drifts into a literary career, meeting a host of second-rate journalists and circling the corrupt fringes of the upper classes. Pendennis is one of the earliest and greatest of the Victorian Bildungsromanen - introspective novels chronicling the author's growth to maturity under a thin veil of fiction. On coming across Pendennis in later life, Thackeray was heard to mutter: 'It is very like. Yes, it is very like.' Born into the upper classes, Thackeray had lost his patrimony on the gambling tables and had married imprudently. He had slaved for ten years in London's literary bohemia, and it was here that he met the men who inspired many of his characters. In his introduction John Sutherland considers the parallels between Thackeray's life and that of Pendennis, and examines the changes taking place in Victorian England throughout the years of the novel, particularly during the revolutionary 1840s.

The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
501 editions published between 1800 and 2010 in 5 languages and held by 1,913 libraries worldwide
Virginia and London, 1756-80. Introduces George Washington, Dr. Johnson, Fielding and Richardson. For other editions, see Author Catalog.

The rose and the ring by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
228 editions published between 1843 and 2010 in 14 languages and held by 1,666 libraries worldwide
A facsimile of Thackeray's own manuscript and illustrations of a fairy tale, created for a sick child, telling about nonsense adventures at a royal court.

The English humourists of the eighteenth century by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
253 editions published between 1800 and 2007 in 3 languages and held by 1,407 libraries worldwide

The Newcomes : memoirs of a most respectable family by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
351 editions published between 1800 and 2010 in English and Undetermined and held by 1,379 libraries worldwide
The Newcomes is a sprawling novel by English author William Makepeace Thackeray, who also penned the popular novel Vanity Fair. Considered by many critics to be Thackeray's finest work, The Newcomes follows the fortunes of several generations of the Newcome family, a nouveau riche clan that begins to mingle and intermarry with the British aristocracy. In particular, the novel focuses on the relationship between Colonel Newcome and his artistically inclined son, Clive.

The history of Henry Esmond, esquire by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
25 editions published between 1778 and 1966 in English and held by 1,103 libraries worldwide
Orphaned in the England of the later Stuarts, Henry Esmonde is raised by his aristocratic, Jacobite relatives the Castlewoods. As a young man he falls in love with both Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, her beautiful, headstrong daughter, and is inspired to join the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to reinstate James Stuart to the throne.

Catherine a story by William Makepeace Thackeray ( Book )
63 editions published between 1839 and 2010 in 4 languages and held by 1,051 libraries worldwide
Though he originally set out to depict criminals in as harshly accurate a light as possible, without the sentimentalization that he saw and disdained in Dickens' work, Thackeray's fictionalized account of the life of Catherine Hayes, an eighteenth-century woman who was burned at the stake for the murder of her husband, depicts the titular character in a somewhat more appealing and charming manner than the author intended. A must-read for fans of rollicking picaresque tales such as ...