Candide

Voltaire sent his naive hero Candide through war, earthquake, the Inquisition, slavery, and massacre — and gave him a tutor who keeps insisting, through all of it, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Published in 1759 and banned immediately by the Geneva city council, the book is a direct attack on the philosophical position that suffering is part of a divine plan and therefore acceptable. The form is the weapon: Voltaire adopts the cheerful optimism he is destroying and follows it to its logical conclusion until it collapses under the weight of the bodies. The foundational text of political satire in prose fiction — the ancestor of everything from A Modest Proposal to Cat's Cradle to Look Who's Back on this shelf. Everything that came after it in the satirical tradition owes it a debt.