A good little introduction to some of the finest writers in literature from Chaucer to Hemingway. It is light-hearted and clearly intended for a young audience (around the early teens), making it at times a bit embarrassingly chummy, but nevertheless it was informative enough even for me at age 24. There are one or two downsides; firstly, it only covers English-language literature (essentially British, American and the odd Irishman). Consequently, it omits the likes of Tolstoy, Voltaire, Dostoevsky and Homer. Curiously, both Joseph Conrad (a Pole who wrote in English) and Edgar Allan Poe are absent.

Secondly, and more importantly, it only includes writers born before 1900 (Dicks claims in the introduction that a good rule of thumb as to what makes a classic writer is whether they have stood the test of time, and so sets this as a cut-off date). This makes sense, but it does mean some writers who deserve to be included are omitted because they were born a couple of years too late. I don't think anyone would dispute the importance of the likes of Orwell (born 1903) or Steinbeck (1902) but because of Dicks' self-imposed rule they are not lined up alongside their contemporaries like Hemingway (who just makes the cut having been born in 1899, though Dicks mistakenly says he was born in 1898). But the book doesn't claim to be comprehensive, and I suppose you need to have objective criteria for your selections. Otherwise, you'd just pick whatever writers you like.

Rather, the book's aim is to give the reader a brief sketch of each author; not enough to immerse you in their work, but just enough to whet your appetite for what they're all about. It does this very well, and is particularly good at humanising these iconic writers and making some of their works seem less daunting. I've read a fair amount of classic literature but even so I am still intimidated by some of it, and Dicks' short primer did help bolster my resolve to pick some of them from my bookshelves perhaps a little less gingerly in the future. ( )