Misérables loves company

If you were not one of the millions of audience members who held their breath in the dark over the decades for a chance to see and hear the stories of the French Revolution march across the many stages worldwide, perhaps you were caught by surprise to see the banner unfurl on the movie screen. 

The timeless vision of the great author Victor Hugo has been sparking these characters and their stories to life over many generations of readers and viewers.  Could he have imagined that his fictional documentation of the plight of French peasants and workers would touch the 21st Century? 













His gift at universalism is not unique.  Many writers over many eras have used fictional, epic plots to tell the timeless story of their peoples to the world.  Readers of the world have united in love of these titles:

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears
A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Native Son, by Richard Wright
Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens
North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy


And to those who thought it ridiculous to set Les Misérables to music? Let them eat their words!