Classics and Me

Ladies and gentlemen, honored readers, I am looking to you for advice. After letting myself wallow in cultural degeneration during the early part of this year, I have decided my book a week resolution from last year must be reborn in another form. Therefore, I am declaring this year to be The Year of Classics™. That is to say that for the remainder of the year, I shall select one well-regarded classic author per month and read selected works, preferably two or three of their better-known and/or best-regarded works. The schedule currently appears as follows:

1. January -- Not part of resolution.
2. February -- Not part of resolution
3. March -- Dostovesky Depression Month®, consisting of The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot
4. April -- Austen Acrimony Month®, consisting of Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice
5. May -- Tolstoy Tedium Month®, consisting of War and Peace (duh, hence the tedium) and Anna Karenina
6. June -- Someone Something Month
7. July -- Someone Something Month
8. August -- Hugo Social Justice Month® (I couldn't think of a fair synonym for Hugo's thematic sentiment that started with H), consisting of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables and Last Days of a Condemned Man
9. September -- Someone Something Month
10. October -- Someone Something Month
11. November -- Someone Something Month
12. December -- Dickens Dreams Month®, consisting of Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol (duh, December)

What do you think? I need five authors comprising 10-15 books from the vague category "classics." Let me narrow it down. Whereas I consider writers like James Joyce to offer amazing classics, and I consider Dante Alleghieri's Divine Comedy to be a classic piece of poetry, I keep these fine authors-cum-poets off the list for specific reasons. For Joyce, it is because he is a well-regarded twentieth century author, and I would very much like to dedicate a year for twentieth century writers in the future (Rand, Joyce, Faulkner, Kerouac, et al.). And for Dante, it is because I would like to read his work in accordance with a poetry year in the future, suffused with Longfellow's Hiawatha, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Homerian epics and Virgil's Aeneid. In many ways, poetry is a whole other category to novels, despite that they are both literature.

So here is the criteria: authors from between 1500 and the early 1900's (Twain would qualify if you would think he was recommendable, but I've never actually finished one of his books, so I kept him off the list off-hand) writing on periods in that time frame, or, say, Jules Verne with sci-fi writing in that era. They must be fairly well-known to the general public, not just in academic cricles (say goodbye to most Gothic authors) and their works must be fictional novels or novellas written in prose.

Let the recommendations flow!