One Hundred World's Best Novels Condensed

David Copperfield to Quo Vadis, Don Quixote to The War of the Worlds — a hundred of the world's great novels, each condensed to a brisk summary with its author's life story, as read in 1919.

About the Book

1919Published
Edwin Atkins Grozier (ed.)Author
146Novels
382Pages on this site

One Hundred World's Best Novels Condensed (1919) squeezed the whole canon into one volume: a hundred great novels — English, American, French, Russian, Polish, Spanish — each reduced to a brisk summary, prefaced by a life of its author. Edwin Atkins Grozier, editor of the Boston Post, assembled the set for readers who wanted the world's literature and had a commuter's schedule.

The choices are a time capsule of 1919 taste: Dickens and Thackeray in force, Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur at their peak of fame, Wells's scientific romances already classics, and a dozen titles the century has since forgotten — which makes the collection as interesting for what it chose as for what it kept.

This digital edition presents the complete keyed text, one novel (with its author's biography) per entry.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1919 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of One Hundred World's Best Novels Condensed (1919) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.