Popular American essayist, novelist, and journalist CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (1829-1900) was renowned for the warmth and intimacy of his writing, which encompassed travelogue, biography and autobiography, fiction, and more, and influenced entire generations of his fellow writers. Here, the prolific writer turned editor for his final grand work, a splendid survey of global literature, classic and modern, and it's not too much to suggest that if his friend and colleague Mark Twain-who stole Warner's quip about how "everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it"-had assembled this set, it would still be hailed today as one of the great achievements of the book world. Volume 43 is Part Two of a dictionary of authors-from Hans Vilhelm Kaalund to Ulrich Zwingli-that serves as a handy, condensed reference to the authors quoted in the first 40 volumes, as well as a guide to thousands more authors whose works are notable but not featured in this set.

In Dickens's lifetime, and for a generation or so after, Edmund Hodgson Yates and George Augustus Sala were the best known and most successful of his "young men" - the budding writers who acknowledged him as their guide and mentor and whose literary careers the publicity and privately fostered. The book considers their personal and literary relationships with Dickens, with each other, and with other writers of the period, Bohemian and "respectable", including Yates's arch-enemy, his post-office colleague Anthony Trollope. But it also demonstrates that their life and writings - their fiction, private letters and occasional essays in verse and drama, as well as their already recognised contributions to the development of the "new journalism" - are interesting and historically illuminating in their own right, not merely pale reflections of the glory of greater writers. Extensive use is made of previously unpublished material.