William Makepeace Thackeray

I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year, observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest and most appealing women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray 's wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use...

In this sweeping novel that spans decades, Thackeray tells of the virtuous and upstanding Colonel Thomas Newcome and of his son Clive. After Clive's mother dies, he is sent to school and studies his true passion, art. Set in the mid 1800s, the novel explores the theme of life repeating itself from one generation to the next-for example, the tendency to sacrifice love in favor of marrying for financial security or for social position. A masterful portrayal...

Becky is determined to make something of herself. She accepts a job as a nanny for the children of Sir Pitt Crawley. Becky catches the eye of Crawley's son Rawdon. Becky is introduced to London's most exclusive social circle, where she becomes re-acquainted with Amelia. Becky weds Rawdon, but the social and economic stability she dreamed of begins to collapse when he begins drowning his troubles, and soon she turns to the powerful Marquess of Steyne...

"Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling version of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O'Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years' War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of...