The Vocabulary of Literature contains ten chapters that highlight the most frequently used words in classic English and American literature. Word challenges, grammar exercises, creative readings, biographies, and photographs of famous authors help students internalize these words and thereby pave a path to a lifetime of enjoyment and love of great literature.

Each of the ten lessons presents ten new classic words and ten words brought forward from Caesar’s English I and Caesar’s English II so that students have two hundred powerful words to learn and use. These are not words chosen arbitrarily for the purpose of a textbook; they are the words most frequently used in classic literature as identified by Michael’s painstaking research. They are, therefore, the words that Michael believes must be known as a necessary component of an educated vocabulary.

The authors featured in this book are Jack London, Jane Austen, Stephen Crane, Mary Shelley, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.

And because we love literature and visiting writers’ houses, we have included not only their portraits but also our photographs of where they wrote and with what, including Jane Austen’s tiny writing table and Charles Dickens’s desk.