Best Selling Books by George Gordon Byron

THE CLASSIC: Childe Harold''s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron. Childe Harold''s Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. It was published between 1812 and 1818 and is dedicated to "Ianthe". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood. Childe Harold became a vehicle for Byron''s own beliefs and ideas, but in the preface to canto four Byron complains that his readers conflate him and Child Harold too much, so he will not speak of Harold as much in the final canto. According to Jerome McGann, by masking himself behind a literary artifice, Byron was able to express his view that "man''s greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain".

Don Juan is Lord Byron''s satirical masterpiece. It was based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as a man easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it Epic Satire. Modern critics consider it Byron''s masterpiece. When the first two cantos were published anonymously in 1819, the poem was criticized for its immoral content by the critics of the day despite its immense popularity.

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At a time when the Romantic movement was sweeping the European continent in the early 19th century, among musicians, writers and playwrights, perhaps nobody embodied and personified the Romantic movement quite like Lord Byron, the famous English poet whose life and works are both the stuff of legend. In addition to being celebrated for poems like She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we''ll go no more a roving, Byron was also notorious for living in excess, racking up debts and liaisons at increasingly reckless speeds. Despite his fame and abilities, he eventually exiled himself, ultimately traveling to fight in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Turks. Lord Byron would fall ill and die during the war at the young age of 36, but the Greeks consider him a national hero, and people have been reading his material and talking about his life ever since.