Henry James's third novel is an exploration of his most powerful, perennial theme - the clash between European and American cultures, the Old World and the New. Christopher Newman, a 'self-made' American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde. Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage. When Newman discovers a guilty secret in the Bellegardes' past,...

American humorist and literary master Mark Twain takes on tough issues like slavery, race, and the ugliness that can lurk beneath the surface of rural life in this novel. An interwoven tale of three families whose fates are thrown together in the aftermath of a murder, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is one of Twain's more serious works, although it is told with the same love of quirky misfits and wonderful observations that enliven books like The...

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances, that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray -- he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants -- Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they...

Booker T. Washington, the most recognized national leader, orator and educator, emerged from slavery in the deep south, to work for the betterment of African Americans in the post Reconstruction period.

Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dickens invokes to portray London society, rich and poor,...

Algernon pretends to be Jack's troublesome younger brother, in Wilde's satirical assault on nineteenth-century fashions, manners, and morality.

This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...

When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)--critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other...

In her first play, the now-classic A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry introduced the lives of ordinary African Americans into our national theatrical repertory. Now, Hansberry tells her own life story in an autobiography that rings with the voice of its creator.

"I never truckled. I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth," declared Frank Norris, shortly before his death at the age of thirty-two. Of his novels, none have shocked the reading public more than McTeague, and few works since have captured the seamy side of American urban life with such graphic immediacy as does...