The Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern is a work of enormous proportions. Setting out with the simple goal of offering "American households a mass of good reading" the editors drew from literature of all times and all kinds what they considered the best pieces of human writing, and compiled an ambitious collection of 45 volumes. Besides the selection and translation of a huge number of poems, letters, short stories and sections of books the collection offers before each chapter a short essay about the author or subject in question.
