Epic

Paradise Lost

by John Milton

An angel falls, builds a case for his own rebellion with genuinely persuasive rhetoric, and somehow ends up the most compelling character in a poem explicitly written to justify the ways of God to men. Milton dictated the whole epic blind, to whichever family member happened to be nearby to write it down. Whether he intended the devil to be this charismatic remains one of literature’s oldest arguments.

The librarian

Read it in the Library After Dark Or read it as plain text

Reading time

About 5 hr 25 min

Where to find it

On the Epic shelves

Edition

Project Gutenberg, eBook #26. In the public domain in the United States.