"I stepped upon the land of my forefathers - but felt than I was a stranger in the land." "With these words, Washington Irving expresses the dilemma of every American artist in the nineteenth century. The Sketch Book (1820-1) looks simultaneously towards audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. He sketches a series of encounters with the cultural shrines...

Jack London's 1904 novel "The Sea Wolf" is the story of Humphrey van Weyden, an effete gentleman, who finds himself shipwrecked when the San Francisco ferry his is aboard collides with another ship in the fog. Adrift in the bay, Humphrey is rescued by Wolf Larsen, the brutish captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the "Ghost". However, his relief in being saved is short-lived, for he is soon put to work, essentially enslaved as a cabin boy forced to...

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother,...

"The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is a Christian allegory by English writer and Puritan preacher John Bunyan. Begun during Bunyan’s twelve-year imprisonment for refusing to abide by English laws forbidding nonconformist evangelism, The Pilgrim’s Progress is his most famous work as well as one of the most republished works in English literary history. Often cited as the first English novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress is told as a dream sequence from...

With an Introduction by Anthony Briggs Translated by Louise Maude This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murder, a young woman whom he once seduced, propelling her into prostitution....

Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James....

Contains the text of the play, information about Shakespeare and his theatre, bibliography, key to famous lines, and explanatory notes.

D. H. Lawrence's 1915 novel "The Rainbow" is the story of three generations of the Brangwens family. While tame by today's standards, "The Rainbow", for its frank treatment of human sexuality, caused Lawence to be prosecuted on an obscenity charge in England when it was first published. Through richly personal characterizations, "The Rainbow" deals profoundly with the very nature of human relations as it explores the sexuality of Ursula Brangwen and...

In this literary classic, Fyodor Dostoevsky focuses on a nobleman whose gentle, childlike nature has earned him the nickname 'the idiot', and presents a superb, panoramic view of mid-nineteenth-century Russian manners, morals, and philosophy.

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...