Milton Retweets His Way to Revolution (Well, He Tries) (Paradise Lost, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on John Milton's Paradise Lost, we welcome editor Stephen B. Dobranski to discuss Milton's life in the midst of religious and political controversy, pamphlet wars and the representation of failed revolution through writing, and Milton's characterization of Eve. 

Stephen B. Dobranski is Distinguished University Professor of English at Georgia State University and the editor of the journal Milton Studies. He has published nine books including Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (2005); The Cambridge Introduction to Milton 2012); and Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in “Paradise Lost” (2015).

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Paradise Lost, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/ParadiseLostNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

[Music]

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the first of our two episodes devoted to John Milton's Paradise Lost, as we interview its editor, Stephen Dobranski. In part one, we discuss Milton's life and times, his engagement with the political and religious issues of seventeenth-century England. We discuss the greatness of Paradise Lost—its design, epic form, and significance. Stephen B. Dobranski is distinguished professor of English at Georgia State University and the editor of the journal Milton Studies. He has published nine books, including the Cambridge Introduction to Milton, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England, and Milton's Visual Imagination: Imagery in Paradise Lost. We are so pleased he could join us today. Stephen Dobranski, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Stephen:] Oh, I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you so much for having me. 

[Mark:] Stephen, it's great to have you, and we are so delighted to be able to talk about your edition—for the Norton Library—of John Milton's Paradise Lost. And there's a lot to get to. Why don't we start by talking about John Milton himself? Who was he? Where and when did he live? And what do we really need to know about him in order to approach Paradise Lost?

[Stephen:] John Milton was a seventeenth-century Englishman. He grew up in London. He was born in 1608, to be precise, and if you wanted to be more precise it was the 9th of December, and if you wanted to be even more precise, we think it was 6:30 in the morning. [Laughter] And how do we know that? Because he wrote it down. And that's a crucial thing to know about Milton, is he was very—to some people's mind, he might say selfish, but I would just say self-interested. He was very self-conscious that he wanted to be a great writer, that he wanted to leave something. Um, he phrased it in one of his works, “so written that after times would not willingly let it die.” But he grows up in the heart of London, he's a middle child—older sister and younger brother by seven years, Christopher—with his mom and dad. His dad was a scrivener, something like a public notary today, and his father was also an amateur—and quite well-regarded amateur—musician. So, we know that art was an important part of his life early on. And growing up in the heart of London, he was very close to the center, or the heart, of the English book trade. And we know where his school was and how—St. Paul's, the grammar school he attended—and how he would go back and forth every day for lunch and to get to school and then back, he'd have to walk through these book stalls. And so, that must have been another early influence on him. And he was a deeply religious man. His religion, though, while Christian at its core, was heterodox. He, um, by his adult years, did not attend—as well as we can tell—weekly service and developed his own, in some cases, heterodox, individualistic ideas about religion. And, gradually, in his later years, he wrote his own theology, where he worked systematically through the Bible and accumulated a set of beliefs based on his interpretation of scriptures.

[Mark:] Stephen, what could we say about his education, and how did he become focused on writing as his trade?

[Stephen:] He was originally planning to be a priest. He records that his parents thought it, his friends thought it, and he felt like there was an in—something inside him that he would become a priest. So, he attended grammar school. First, he had a private tutor at home, which was a little bit unusual. He would be what we would call probably middle-class today. Um, but for him to have a private tutor was somewhat remarkable. And then, he went off to St Paul's School—a very well-regarded school in London—and he studied there mostly languages, Latin and Greek. You had to know Latin just to be admitted. And he was fluent in both, but then they would have moved on in the curriculum, um, to Hebrew as well as other subjects. From there, he was admitted to Christ College Cambridge, meaning it was one of the colleges at Cambridge University, and there he received his B.A. and then he stayed on for his Master’s. After that, he went home to live with his parents. This was not uncommon, to fill in the blanks in your education before you entered the priesthood and take your final vows. And that's when he became a writer. That's when he said, “There's so much going on in England,”—or so he wrote, when I say “say”—"that I can't in good conscience join the church.” He felt that the church and the way it was integrated with the state, how church and state were not separated at all, had become corrupted. And he felt that he had to, instead, write according to his conscience, and he launched into a career. For a little bit—for a moment, it seems—he entertained the idea of writing for the aristocracy, and he wrote an early work of a dramatic poem called a masque. It was performed at Ludlow Castle, which the ruins still stand today, it's very close to Wales and England. Very much worth a trip, if you're ever in that part of the world. And it looks like maybe he wrote another aristocratic drama—part of one—called Arcades, and it looks like for a moment he's considering becoming a writer who would be supported by the aristocracy. But his politics and his own personal interest moves him into becoming a professional writer. And when I say a professional writer, that's not how he earned his money. He earned his money as a teacher. To write for money, at that time, was thought to taint one's works.—[Mark:] Hmm.—[Stephen:] So, he worked as, he was, uh, he lent money, a bit of a businessman, he was a teacher, he opened his own school. His first two pupils were his, uh, sisters, two boys. And then later in life, he went on to work for the government. And that was after the English Revolution, after the British Civil Wars, when the king had been deposed and beheaded, and he worked for this new government. 

[Mark:] So, you're touching on it, Stephen, but when you mentioned that Milton thought so much was going on that he needed to respond to—for those of us who are a little rusty on our seventeenth-century British history, what was going on in Milton's world?

[Stephen:] Yeah, so, it's going on—yeah, that's a great question, thanks. What's going on are a couple things. But it starts out, the British Civil Wars—if I had to give you a sound bite—it starts as religious controversy, and then it evolves into a political controversy. And the religious controversy is about the way that the king is trying to have a uniform Church of England across all parts of what we would today call Great Britain. And, in doing so, he's messing with, interfering with how individual congregations are organizing themselves: imposing a new prayer book, um, changing the architecture, moving the communion table from the center of the church to the one end and putting up a railing. And many people, such as Milton, thought that this was not only undue interference, it was moving the Church of England back toward Catholicism. So, that's where in its, uh, early days and early years the British Civil War starts. And it then, when people start to oppose the king's modifications of worship and raise up arms, the king raises up an army to go put them down. And that is seen by some people, such as Milton, as an act of treason, of, uh, using military against your own people. And so, what happens is eventually as the British Wars breaks out, that Charles the First surrenders to the forces—I'm simplifying slightly the different factions who were fighting—and then he goes on trial for eleven days, is found guilty of treason, and is then publicly executed. And for eleven years, England does not have a monarch. So that's what I meant by what's going on, it's this religious controversy that evolves into a political controversy about the extent of the monarch's power. And Milton comes to despise the institution of kings, of monarchy. He feels like it robs people of their individual liberty. 

[Mark:] And so, his response is to counter that in writing?

[Stephen:] That's correct. He counters it, as I mentioned earlier, eventually by joining the government and working for them as a translator and also a propagandist, we might call it. He also does some minor, um, type of police work and surveillance work. But largely he gets that position because he writes these impassioned tracts, these prose works defending the English government, uh, that has been put in place after Charles the First is beheaded, after there's no king. And leading up to that, when he argues that the people and the king have a contract, that it's not a divine right to rule, that there's an unwritten contract, and if the king or queen were to break that, even if they were not a tyrant, then they should be removed from power. And so, he sees the powers resting with the people. He's not for democracy—I don't want to overstate the point. But this is a really groundbreaking position he takes about limiting the authority of a monarch and not subscribing to the divine right of kings.

[Mark:] And was Milton a citizen of sufficient prominence that his writing at the time had traction? Or are we only looking back at it years later?

[Stephen:] Yeah! Well, what's really interesting is this is how he gains the traction. He publishes some works early on—he publishes five tracts about the church controversy and about the interference with the church—but some of them are anonymous, and even when his initials appear on the title page, and even in one of them where he digresses and talks about himself personally, he was a nobody. He—There's no kind of celebrity endorsement, “Oh! So, this is what Mr. Milton thinks.” On the contrary, he's writing as just a private person who is going up against—in writing—some really prestigious figures within the church, some really well-established and, uh. storied bishops. Over time, what's striking to us—I was going to say stunning, but that might over rate the point—but striking to us is it's through that that he becomes famous. In his own life, he's more famous as a polemicist internationally, because some of these tracts that he writes, then, when he's working for the government under Oliver Cromwell and the Council of State—and that's the executive branch that replaces the Monarch. Parliament still survives in a different form, the House of Lords is disbanded, and there's still a Judiciary. But working for this new Executive Branch, the Council of State, the most well-known member of which was Oliver Cromwell, he writes some tracts in Latin that are circulated across Europe. And, in doing so, he becomes famous. People start, when they come to London, asking where the house is of Mr. Milton, so they can walk past it. And, uh, it's important, because think about continental Europe at this time—that's also a bunch of monarchs. And so, Milton also becomes notorious, not just well-known but also notorious, because here's somebody who's so eloquently and in beautiful Latin defending a type of government that's a threat to the individual nation states on the continent as well.

[Mark:] And so, in the way that you're describing his life, and his career, is Paradise Lost a logical extension of what he was working on and how his thought was proceeding, or does it come—is it like a bolt from the blue?

[Stephen:] It's both. Um, it's both logical and somewhat surprising. It's logical in that in his early prose works, when he is, uh—and you can imagine the early prose works in the seventeenth century as something like our online controversies or debates or Twitter, formerly known as Twitter or X today, where some person would publish one tract and then someone else would publish an argument refuting it and then a third person would come in refuting it in a different angle and then the original author would respond again. So, these were these ongoing involved—they were called Pamphlet Wars, because these treatises were coming fast and thick. And they were cheaply printed and coming out, um, before the ink was dry. And what happens is, for Milton, he is writing these tracts about the church government. So, what happens is, these tracts are coming fast and thick—as I say, it's a little bit like online message boards and trolling. And what Milton ends up defending himself, even though he's an anonymous writer, he's so self-interested that he sometimes includes digressions explaining his education, explaining himself, and, uh, explaining, for example, this is how we know he intended to go into the priesthood. And, in defending himself, he goes through how, “You should listen to me, readers, because one day I'm going to write something great.”—[Mark:] Oh.—[Stephen:] And he works through, “I could write a tragedy, I could write an ode, I could write an epic.” So, we can know early on—he's born in 1608, this is in the 1640s—that he's already anticipating a great work. But what happens then is that the revolution eventually fails. Milton is a full-throated supporter of getting rid of monarchy, but it's a revolution that has support from the most educated people but not the general population. And so, the revolution fails. And eventually, England reverts to monarchy. The son of Charles the First is welcomed back from exile with open arms. There’s a long parade, by one count, of 20,000 people through the Streets of London. He ascends back to the throne, appropriately, on his birthday in 1660, and England reverts to monarchy. Milton then goes into hiding. He fears for his life. And because he was such a vocal supporter of getting rid of Charles the First and getting rid of the institution of monarchy, he's briefly imprisoned. Um, and then he begins writing poetry for the rest of his career. He still writes some treatises, but for the most part, he's devoting himself to verse. And this is when he now gives all the tension and time to finishing Paradise Lost. He started it much earlier, we think in the 1650s, but now he writes it fully. So, it is a poem about a rebel, about someone who tried to have a revolution and failed. And that's the character of Satan. And Milton must have—we don't know this for a fact, but it seems so plausible—he must have been made Satan such a powerful figure because he could channel into him all of his own personal disappointment as a failed revolutionary, as someone who himself had tried to have a revolt and not succeed.

[Mark:] Okay, that's excellent. To take one step back, can you just give an overview of the project of Paradise Lost? Simply, what is he depicting in this narrative?

[Stephen:] Paradise Lost retells the story from Genesis of Adam and Eve’s creation and eventual expulsion from the Garden of Eden. But in doing so, in taking—if you go back and look in the Bible, if you look in Hebrew scriptures, and you just see how short that narrative of Adam and Eve is—it's stunning that Milton expands it then into a poem that's 10,565 lines long. Uh, that is, he divides eventually into 12 books, 12 different sections. And so, what he does, he takes that kernel of a story, and he expands it by beginning with the fall of Satan. The poem begins in the middle of things, or in medias res, so that the first, the opening books of Paradise Lost start in hell, where Satan and his bad angels have just had a failed rebellion against God. And then Satan goes off on a journey to try to get revenge and attack Adam and Eve. And so the story then follows Adam and Eve, where we get to see them in the garden being happy in paradise and then, um, the confrontation and temptation by Satan, and then the, uh, consequences of the temptation. So, it starts with the kernel of the story of Genesis but expands it until we get to the final books, where Milton, in a way, tries to encompass 2,000 years of Biblical history and has angels come in and summarize for Adam and Eve's benefit what's going to happen for them afterwards.

[Mark:] Would you say that his presentation of this story is traditional, or is he introducing revolutionary or controversial elements that would, if not shock twenty-first-century readers, certainly shock seventeenth-century readers?

[Stephen:] There—Oh, I'm so delighted with this question, because it wouldn't shock—I'll start with what you said at the end. It wouldn't shock twenty-first-century readers, because so much of what, when we try to imagine the Garden of Eden or Satan or Adam and Eve today, and what various well-known artists have depicted, um, in their works, has been influenced by Milton's presentation. Often,—[Mark:] Wow.—[Stephen:] when I, uh, I'm teaching this to students—undergraduate or graduate—and I bring in and have them read the opening chapters from Genesis, they're shocked by how brief they are. And they're also shocked that there's no mention of Satan, because they think, “But of course there's Satan in Genesis.” And all of that could be traced to Milton. So, it was shocking for his readers. There's an introductory poem that was published in the second edition by a great poet and friend of Milton, Andrew Marvell, in which he, um, expresses that he's concerned, “Oh my gosh, how is Milton going to carry this off? But please be reassured, reader, I've read it and we're in good shape.” I'm—just for the record, I'm paraphrasing haphazardly. [Laughter] But that's the idea that Marvell is conveying. And so, Milton does this, you know, develops a full, psychologically complex, uh, Shakespearean, proto-novelistic—I mean he, sometimes Paradise Lost is seen as a forerunner of the novel, because he creates this wonderfully fallible yet sympathetic figure of Satan, and he develops the psychology of Adam and Eve. And he turns them into such rich characters that, uh, it's a striking extrapolation of the skeletal account in scripture.

[Mark:] Is it audacious or blasphemous to treat Satan with psychological depth?

[Stephen:] It's audacious, for sure. But what Milton sets up at the beginning, he says, “Look, I'm trying to justify the ways of God to men.” In other words, he's writing—and this is before the term existed. It was invented, or coined, by Leibniz not until the eighteenth century—but he's writing thus a “theodicy.” A theodicy. He is trying to vindicate God. He says, “I know evil exists. I know God exists. How do I reconcile those two facts?” And so, he's trying to vindicate God, given the existence of evil. And so, in trying to do such a bold undertaking, and then saying, “I'm going to do it in a poem”—because most theodicies are treatises, are philosophical works, where you syllogistically or logically work through those two premises and try to reconcile them. But Milton says, “I'm going to do it in a poem, and”—this was audacious—"I'm going to do it in English.” You know, because that was not an international language in the seventeenth century! Um, there were not a great number of people speaking it, and even within what we would today call Great Britain people were speaking, you know, Irish-Gaelic and Gaelic and, uh, there was a dialect language in Penzance, and so on. So, for Milton then to do those things as audacious, and then to begin with Satan. To put the reader in Satan's mind and to see beyond his bluster. Yes, that was a really striking decision. Now, as you might already know, epics that he inherited from Homer and Virgil always had a descent to the underworld. And what Milton says is, “Okay, descent to the underworld. I'm going to start in the underworld.” Whereas Virgil has Aeneas go into the underworld mid-epic in the Aeneid and Odysseus’ descent to the underworld also occurs within the larger narrative of the Odyssey, Milton foregrounds that. He takes the epic convention, and he almost suggests, in doing so, that these epic conventions that he inherited from his pre-Christian precursors need to be relegated to the demonic realm. That he's going to try to come up with a new type of epic, a new type of heroism, a new type of, uh, sense of what great poetry should be about.

[Mark:] So, he's writing in that tradition. You also mentioned Shakespeare. Is there any evidence of an overlap, that Milton would have been aware of Shakespearean tragedy?

[Stephen:] Oh yeah! Um, he was very aware. One, he wrote an encomium to Shakespeare when he was very young, and it was printed in the, uh, second folio of Shakespeare's plays in 1632. Also, the, uh—it's pleasing to speculate—the Mermaid Tavern where Shakespeare, but at least Ben Jonson, liked to go, uh, was very close to Milton's boyhood home—so, for those eight years that their lives overlap, because Shakespeare dies in 1616, it's pleasing to speculate, as I say, [Laughter] that Shakespeare and Milton could have met in the street outside his home. But that's pure idle speculation. Um, but Milton, you might know there was a copy—Was it now three years ago? It was during the pandemic, or the height of the pandemic—that a copy of Milton's folio that he owned, of Shakespeare's works—[Mark:] Oh!—[Stephen:] …with his handwritten annotations was found in Philadelphia, the Free Library. In addition, he has multiple allusions and references to Shakespeare in his works, and he compares, uh, Charles the First as a bad king in one of his political tracts for the government, he compares him to Richard III, which, if you're familiar with that play, you know is no way a compliment. [Laughter] And, um, so, you know, there are many ways in which Milton was engaged with the works of Shakespeare and, um, apparently admired them a great deal.

[Mark:] We also seem to have skipped over an aspect of Milton's life that would have really influenced, uh, the way that Paradise Lost was written, and this is the turn that is taken in Milton's health.

[Stephen:] Yeah, that's right. He, in 1652—so, he's born in 1608—in his 40s, I guess that's age 44, he goes completely blind. Because of his self-interest, we have, um, accounts of him talking about the gradual loss of his sight and how the symptoms were. And to our best guess, we think it was a tumor that was pressing on the optic nerve that might have led to his blindness. There have been multiple people who have written scholarly pieces trying to piece together what it is—that seems to be the most cogent theory in 2025. His blindness meant that he relied on other people, and this is what he would do in his later years: he'd wake up at 4:00 a.m., he would have an attendant read to him from the Old Testament, that attendant would leave, he would pray or have quiet contemplation—uh, they would read to him for about 30 minutes—he'd have a period of quiet contemplation, then the attendant would come back and he would recite the verses that he said he had composed during the previous night. Um, “The muse had visited him,” as he phrases it in Paradise Lost at night. But how he understood it outside of the poem is open to speculation. And if he did some 40 verses in a morning, that was a good day. But then he would painstakingly go over them, revise them, recalibrate them, and, uh, it also seems that, in working with secretaries or amanuenses, that he would rope anybody who came to the house, to ask them to help him to move a comma or change a word. And we also know that his daughters—uh, he had three daughters, uh, by his first marriage—and that they also were sometimes an unenthusiastic participant in helping him record this work. [Laughter] But, you know, Milton wrote very early that, about poetry, the sense is more than meets the eye, or there's more sense than meets the ear.—[Mark:] Mm.—[Stephen:] But it's from an early work, and one of his, uh, pair of poems he wrote, “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” and it's remarkable how beautifully Milton's poetry is when read aloud. Uh, that recaptures the way he composed it, and it recaptures the way, at a time when literacy was, um, at, you know, less than 10% of the population, how many people would have experienced poetry.

[Mark:] Maybe we can consider also the poem itself in the sense for novices, that you open up the book and you see just an avalanche of words. And yes, it's divided into twelve books. Can you sort of describe what the design of the book is, and what we're going to find when we open up Paradise Lost?

[Stephen:] It was first published in 1667, and between the first edition, 1667, and the second edition, 1674, Milton, at the prompting of his printer, added prose summaries of each of the twelve books, and those are very helpful to a reader today. Now, the prose is still a little bit stodgy by twenty-first-century internet standards. It's still a little bit less, um, simple—it's a little bit more complex syntactically. But those summaries could be very useful as you're reading, because they serve as an, in effect, a kind of SparkNotes or CliffsNotes of the books to follow that come. The first two books of Paradise Lost take place in Hell. This is Satan and the bad angels waking up and devising the plan to attack Earth. Book Three is then a description of Heaven, that's where Milton introduces the Divine Realm, we meet God, and we meet the Son of God. In Book Four, we finally meet Adam and Eve. And in Book Five, God sends a—right at the end of Book Four into Book Five and Six—God sends an angel down to Adam and Eve to educate them and to warn them about this guy, Satan, who's going to probably tempt them. In Book Seven and Eight, which were, in the first edition, one book, we have that, uh, story then of the creation of the cosmos, uh, by the angel. Adam says, “Hey, can you tell me about it?” And so, it very much follows Genesis, in the six days of creation and then the day of rest. In Book Eight, the angel then turns to Adam and quid pro quo says, “Tell me some stuff.” And Adam tells the story of his creation and Eve's creation, as he remembers it. Then Book Nine is the crucial one, that's where Adam and Eve eat the fruit and fall from God's grace. Book Ten is then where they begin to repent, and we also find out what happens to Satan when he goes back to hell to celebrate his great victory over humankind. In Book Eleven and Twelve, then we have that, as I mentioned a moment ago, that biblical summary. Another angel comes down to Adam and Eve and informs them about both good and bad things that are going to come in the generations after them. And at the very end of the epic, Adam and Eve are forced to leave paradise as they are expelled for their sin.

[Mark:] What about the verse?

[Stephen:] The poem is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, also known as blank verse. And, uh, Milton, between the first and second edition, was asked also by the printer to explain why it doesn't rhyme. And he writes this somewhat caustic note that is included in the Norton Library Edition explaining how he doesn't like “the jingling sounds of like endings,” uh, to quote him. And what's striking is that it does not mean there's no rhyme at all in Paradise Lost. So, when you're reading it, and you catch a couple lines that rhyme, they are very important. And so, he—it is an unrhymed poem, but every once in a while, he deploys it meaningfully, like a soundtrack in a motion picture, to arrest the reader’s attention and to bring some connection or subtlety to mind.

[Mark:] Stephen, I want to end, if I might, with a consideration of how Milton conceived of Eve. We haven't talked too much about Eve, and you said she comes about in Book Four. How does she appear as a character, and what might be notable about how Milton presents her?

[Stephen:] Eve is many people's favorite character in the epic, because of her complexity. There are multiple moments that we should not try to deny or, um, brush under the rug, where Milton or one of the characters in the epic will reinforce a hierarchy, a rigid hierarchy of Adam above Eve. But Milton himself didn't seem to unconsciously accept that. And he goes back to the account in Genesis where the, um, there are multiple versions of the fall as told in Genesis, and in one of them, she is the person who sins first, and in another one they are sinning together. And Milton creates Eve with a great deal of intelligence and dignity. And he refuses to blame the fall of humankind on Eve. He invents a scene where Satan attacks Eve while she's sleeping and tries to seduce her in her dream, when she can't exert her free will, to eat the forbidden fruit. And he also has her have mastery over the garden, and he also, in Book Four, has her tell her own version of her creation story. All of these moments—there's a moment where, in Book Five, she corrects Adam. There's another moment where Adam is being instructed by an angel and, in Book Eight, and Eve decides to leave, and the narrator steps in and says she doesn't leave because she wasn't intelligent, she left because she wanted to hear it told by Adam—she preferred him as her teacher. So, there are all these ways that Milton complicates the rigid hierarchy that in other moments in the epic are reinforced. But he absolutely treats a sin as a sin. It doesn't matter who eats the forbidden fruit first. Um, Adam is culpable, Eve is culpable. And this is at a time when Eve was very much blamed by a slew of misogynistic writers. There’s this deep, as you probably know, tradition of blaming it all on Eve and reading the Bible in terms of women as either, uh, well, women as these terrible temptresses like Delilah or Eve. And Milton doesn't buy into that and wonderfully complicates her character.

[Mark:] Stephen Dobranski, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss Paradise Lost. Thanks, Stephen.

[Stephen:] Oh, thank you so much for having me, it's been my pleasure.

[Music] [Mark:] The Norton Library edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, edited by Stephen B. Dobranski, is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.