Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prizewinning books cover subjects from philosophy to the arts, and his bestselling six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC (massive open online course) have brought four thousand years of literature to students across the globe. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Introduction: Earthrise
Map and Timeline of the Written World

Chapter 1: Alexander’s Pillow Book
Chapter 2: King of the Universe: Of Gilgamesh and Ashurbanipal
Chapter 3: Ezra and the Creation of Holy Scripture
Chapter 4: Learning from the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus
Chapter 5: Murasaki and The Tale of Genji: The First Great Novel in World History
Chapter 6: One Thousand and One Nights with Scheherazade
Chapter 7: Gutenberg, Luther, and the New Public of Print
Chapter 8: The Popol Vuh and Maya Culture: A Second, Independent Literary Tradition
Chapter 9: Don Quixote and the Pirates
Chapter 10: Benjamin Franklin: Media Entrepreneur in the Republic of Letters
Chapter 11: World Literature: Goethe in Sicily
Chapter 12: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao: Readers of The Communist Manifesto, Unite!
Chapter 13: Akhmatova and Solzhenitsyn: Writing Against the Soviet State
Chapter 14: The Epic of Sunjata and the Wordsmiths of West Africa
Chapter 15: Postcolonial Literature: Derek Walcott, Poet of the Caribbean
Chapter 16: From Hogwarts to India

Acknowledgements
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index