J.R.R. Tolkien was an Oxford University professor who began telling his children stories about a fictional time and place as bedtime stories. Eventually, Tolkien molded and reshaped these stories into the novels The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Tolkien's books became classics of the fantasy genre, and have been turned into successful film franchises.

J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye is the story of the teenager Holden Caulfield, who feels disillusioned with his life at a boarding school and leaves for a break to go back to his native New York City. The book is told from Holden's point of view and presents an early version of teenage angst as it details Holden's wanderings. The book is a popular book still, and often appears on "Best Books" lists.

Ellen Olenska, Newland Archer, and May Welland are main characters in Edith Wharton's novel Age of Innocence. The novel was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Jane Austen, who published between 1811 and 1816, wrote novels that centered on the romantic interests and pursuits of well-born women in England during the early nineteenth century. Some of her best-known works are Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma, which all deal with women finding their husbands.

Mary Shelley's landmark gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is told first from the perspective of an explorer who meets the inventor Victor Frankenstein. After an introductory chapter, the story is told by Frankenstein himself in a series of flashbacks, or scenes that take place in the past of the novel's timeframe.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick; or, The Whale, first published in 1851, tells the story of a whaling vessel, led by the intense Captain Ahab, as it tracks down the great white whale who gives the book its name. Told through the perspective of the sailor Ishmael, it is a highly allegorical tale featuring allusions to biblical themes, classical mythology, and historical issues.

Ebenezer Scrooge is the main character of the novella A Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens in 1843. The story features three Christmas ghosts who each visit the miserly rich man Scrooge on Christmas Eve night. The three ghosts show Scrooge his past, present, and future, which make him reconsider his life and become more charitable and generous.

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace focuses on the lives of two young members of the Russian nobility, Pierre Bezhukov and Andrei Bolkonsky, who struggle with their identities during the Napoleonic wars. Bezhukov is a student who has spent time in Paris, and Bolkonsky is his old friend who is a carouser and bon vivant. War and Peace is considered one of the great novels of world literature.

The Scarlet Letter was written in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who often wrote about the colonial period in his native Massachusetts. The Scarlet Letter is the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman who is castigated by Puritan society for becoming pregnant and refusing to reveal the father of her child. The book's title derives from the bright red "A" she is required to wear by the town's magistrates.

Even though Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are the titular Three Musketeers in Alexandre Dumas' 1844 novel, the story is told through the point of view of D'Artagnan, a new recruit to the Musketeers of the Guard for French King Louis XIV. Dumas' novel was so popular that the story of D'Artagnan would get picked up in his later works Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne.