Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

Rasselas follows a young Abyssinian prince who escapes the Happy Valley — a hidden paradise where every physical want is met and every prince is kept, by design, from ever leaving — because contentment there has left him wanting something the valley cannot supply: a life that means something. With his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the philosopher-poet Imlac as his guide, Rasselas travels through Egypt sampling one way of life after another — a hermit's solitude, a rich man's household, a scholar's learning, a shepherd's simplicity — testing each in turn and finding every one of them incomplete.

Samuel Johnson wrote the book quickly, reportedly in a single week, to pay for his mother's funeral, and published it in 1759; it reads less as an adventure story than as a sustained philosophical argument about the impossibility of a final, settled happiness, ending — deliberately — with "the conclusion, in which nothing is concluded."

Bibliomancer publishes the 1759 text exactly as Samuel Johnson wrote it.