Dictionary of Literary Characters is a stunning, five-volume set containing descriptions of more than 40,000 characters in great literary works from the United States, Britain, and around the world.

The wide assortment of characters featured in this comprehensive work are compiled from novels, short stories, and plays—ranging from such ancient classics as Sophocles' Antigone to 21st-century prizewinners such as Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. No other reference work covers such an extensive assortment of characters from so many different works of literature.

Appendixes include alphabetical lists of authors and literary works covered in the set.Characters covered include:

The 17 main characters in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The 87 main characters in Charles Dickens's Bleak House

The 10 main characters in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

The 14 main characters in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

The eight main characters in Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"

The 33 main characters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

The 14 main characters in Albert Camus's The Stranger

The 10 main characters in Don Delillo's Underworld

The 22 main characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

The nine main characters in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

The five main characters in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

The 15 main characters in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

The 20 main characters in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

The three main characters in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

The 15 main characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ringand many more works.