John Masefield: 41 books

Francis Drake, the first Englishman to make himself "redoubtable to the Spaniards" on the Spanish Main, was born near Tavistock about the year 1545. He was sent to sea, as a lad, aboard a Channel coaster engaged in trade with the eastern counties, France and Zeeland. When he was eighteen...

Sir Francis Drake, Sir Henry Morgan, and other legendary figures from the age of buccaneers star in this 1906 history of the Elizabethan age of sailing ships. Ocean voyages, shipwrecks, treasure hunts, raids, sacks, sea battles and privateer customs and politics round out accounts of how ships were rigged, sailed, armed, and crewed.

The Gallipoli campaign of World War I was a bold strategic move to capture the Ottoman Turkish capital of Istanbul, but things began to go wrong from the very start. Allied troops found the landing  beaches heavily defended, and the fighting soon stalemated into a brutal battle of attrition...

I have been asked to write why I wrote this poem of "Reynard the Fox." As a man grows older, life becomes more interesting but less easy to know; for, late in life, even the strongest yields to the habit of his compartment. When he cannot range through all society, from the court to the...

Stratford-on-Avon is cleaner, better paved, and perhaps more populous than it was in Shakespeare's time. Several streets of mean red-brick houses have been built during the last half century. Hotels, tea rooms, refreshment rooms, and the shops where the tripper may buy things to remind him that he has...

Strange things begin to happen the minute young Kay Harker boards the train to go home for Christmas and finds himself under observation by two very shifty-looking characters. Arriving at his destination, the boy is immediately accosted by a bright-eyed old man with a mysterious message: “The wolves...

I was born at Oulton, in Suffolk, in the year 1672. I know not the day of my birth, but it was in March, a day or two after the Dutch war began. I know this, because my father, who was the clergyman at Oulton, once told me that in the night of my birth a horseman called upon him, at the rectory, to ask...

This 1911 novel about a twelve-year-old boy who falls in with a band of bloodthirsty pirates is a maritime thriller on par with Robert Louis Stevenson or Rudyard Kipling. At first Jim loves the excitement of his new lifestyle, but soon finds out he’s in over his head! The author, who spent part of...

The great poet, who served as an orderly at a military hospital in World War I, took up his pen in 1916 to aid the British cause. One of the results, written to counter German propaganda in the United States, was this account of the Allied failure against well-entrenched Turkish forces in the Dardanelles.

This 1910 novel tells the story of Martin Hyde, a spirited teenage boy who served the Duke of Monmouth in his ill-fated attempt to usurp the throne of James II in 1685.  It is narrated by an older—and perhaps wiser—Hyde, reflecting on his youthful adventures.

This fascinating classic text is among the most definitive of the biographical volumes about Shakespeare and his works.