The Online Books Page

Character sketches

Here are entered works in prose and/or verse containing descriptive sketches of persons typifying some definite quality, vice or virtue, e.g. the miser, the busybody, the fop, etc.

See also what's at your library, or elsewhere.

• Character sketches -- Early works to 1800
• Characters and characteristics in literature

• Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm (Gutenberg texts)
• Twelve Men (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), by Theodore Dreiser (multiple formats at Indiana)
• The Wooden World Dissected, in the Character of a Ship of War: As Also, the Characters of All the Officers, From the Captain to the Common Sailor (seventh edition, 1760), by Edward Ward (page images at HathiTrust)
• Mars Stript of His Armour: or, The Army Displayed in All Its True Colours (London: Printed for H. Serjeant, ca. 1710), by Edward Ward
  • multiple formats at archive.org; missing pp. 11-14
  • page images at HathiTrust; includes pp. 11-14, but some other pages imperfect
• Impressions of Theophrastus Such (second edition; Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1879), by George Eliot (Gutenberg text)

• The Character of a Jacobite, by What Name or Title Soever Dignifyed or Distinguish'd (London: Printed for the author, 1690), by A Person of quality (multiple formats at archive.org)
• The Characters of Theophrastus, by Theophrastus, trans. by R. C. Jebb (HTML at eudaemonist.com)

• The Joycean Monologue (revised edition, with added articles; 2010), by Constantin-George Sandulescu (PDF with commentary in Romania)
• Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c1989), by James Phelan (PDF files with commentary at Ohio State Press)
• The Transformation of Rage: Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot's Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1994), by Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone (HTML with commentary at NYU Press)
• Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (prepublication version, 2012), by Lisa Zunshine (PDF at MLA Commons)
• The Mark and the Knowledge: Social Stigma in Classic American Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c1979), by Marjorie Pryse (PDF at Ohio State)
• Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature (New York and London: New York University Press, c1992), by Bernard J. Paris (HTML with commentary at NYU Press)
• Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century (1891), ed. by Henry Morley (Gutenberg text)
• Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: L. and V. Woolf, at the Hogarth Press, 1924), by Virginia Woolf (Gutenberg text)

• Who's He When He's At Home: A James Joyce Directory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), by Shari Benstock and Bernard Benstock (page images at Wisconsin)
• Faulkner's People: A Complete Guide and Index to Characters in the Fiction of William Faulkner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), by Robert W. Kirk, contrib. by Marvin Klotz (page images at HathiTrust)
• A Zola Dictionary: The Characters of the Rougon-Macquart Novels of Emile Zola, by J. G. Patterson (Gutenberg text)

• Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello, trans. by Edward Storer
  • HTML at ibiblio.org
  • Librivox audio performance

• Mistress Masham's Repose (c1946), by T. H. White (HTML in Canada; NO US ACCESS)

Items below (if any) are from related and broader terms.