John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)—Written while its author was imprisoned for preaching without a license, this spiritual autobiography was tremendously influential among seventeenth-century Puritans, and in the eighteenth century it helped to inspire the early English novel.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaison dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons; 1782)—This epistolary novel recounting corruption and sexual gamesmanship among the high and mighty fed pre-revolutionary France's taste for tales about aristocratic decadence.

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722)—Often cited as one of the first novels, this text spins a rollicking good yarn about an eighteenth-century foundling turned prostitute and her many adventures.

John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)—These exhortations and meditations upon death show the English author at his finest. Together with his Divine Poems (1601–1615), they are a testimony to the strength of the Anglican tradition of spirituality in the seventeenth...