Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian author of short fiction and novels. His works include everything on the list except The Cherry Orchard (1904) which was the last play written by Anton Chekov.

Across Five Aprils was published in 1964 and written by Irene Hunt. The Killer Angels was published in 1974 and written by Michael Shaara. Gone With the Wind was published in 1936 and written by Margaret Mitchell. Shiloh was published in 1952 and written by Shelby Foote. Stephen Crane published The Red Badge of Courage in 1895.

The Last of the Mohicans was written by American James Fenimore Cooper and published in 1826. It is the second book in his Leatherstocking Tales series which takes place during the mid-18th century on the American East Coast. Jack London wrote primarily adventure novels such as Call of the Wild.  Victor Hugo is best known for Les Miserables andThe Hunchback of Notre Dame. Sir Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island.

Gulliver's Travels is a satirical novel by the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, published in 1726. In it, Swift satirizes the popular "travelogue" by having his main character, Lemuel Gulliver, visit various odd worlds and locations. Among these are the civilized horses called the Houyhnhnms, the giant Brobdingnagians, and the diminutive Lilliputians.

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was based on the true story of the lost Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk. Defoe's work, first published in 1719, is often considered the first novel to be written in English, as Defoe recounted the story of Crusoe in a manner not unlike a prose account of a real event.

The two-part literary work The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha was a landmark of world literature, as it was written in a prose style in epic length. This makes it one of the earliest novels, and made its author, the Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, world famous. Its influence would stretch centuries, as it was still a model for novels during the nineteenth century.

The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling was one of the very first English novels, with its author, Henry Fielding, being more well known at the time of its publication as a playwright than as a novelist. Fielding's picaresque novel unfolded over eighteen books, detailing the eponymous protagonist's romantic and social life in a comic vein. Fielding's work provided a great deal of inspiration for the large wave of novelists that emerged in England in the nineteenth century, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is a novel that takes the form of a series of letters from a young man named Werther to his friend about the peasants in the fictional town of Wahlheim. The book was an important part of the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany that valued emotionalism and subjectivity in writing. Its publication made an instant literary star out of its author, the twenty-five-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, launching his incredible career.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was published in nine volumes over eight years, from 1759 to 1767. The book is a humorous take on the sprawling novel of the eighteenth century, wherein the author, Laurence Sterne, has the protagonist and narrator ostensibly tell his life story, but takes so many digressions that very little of his story is actually told. The book was immediately popular among the reading public, and its winding narrative has been seen as a major foreshadowing of modernist narrative, prevalent in the twentieth century.

The first Glass family story was "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," originally published in The New Yorker in 1948, which detailed the eldest sibling Seymour's suicide. J.D. Salinger subsequently wrote many more stories about the entire group of siblings in the Glass family. The stories appear in his collections Nine Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, and Franny and Zooey.