"When it comes to walking the mean streets, Dickens could give modern genre authors the tour of their lives." -Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times When a corpse is found in the Thames River and identified as John Harmon, many lives will be forever changed. John, who had been abroad and estranged from his miserly father for years, will no longer collect his inheritance. It will instead go to the miser's employees, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, transforming...

The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister The Virginian is a 1902 novel by the American author Owen Wister, set in Wyoming Territory during the 1880's. It describes the life of a cowboy on a cattle ranch and is considered the first true fictional western ever written, aside from short stories and pulp dime novels, though modern scholars debate this.

First published in 1921, "Alice Adams" is a novel by American dramatist and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Newton Booth Tarkington (1869–1946). Among only three other novelists to have won the Pulitzer Prize more than once, Tarkington was one of the greatest authors of the 1910s and 1920s who helped usher in Indiana's Golden Age of literature. One of his most famous and successful novels, "Alice Adams" follows the eponymous character and her struggle...

Talkative, ten-year-old Rebecca goes to live with her spinster aunts, one harsh and demanding, the other soft and sentimental, with whom she spends seven difficult but rewarding years growing up.

In the early 1900s, the advent of coal and the resulting industrialization of the isolated Cumberland Mountain region of Kentucky and Virginia bring many changes to the feuding Tolliver and Fallin clans. Engineer Jack Hale comes to the region to make his fortune, but stays when he falls in love with the mountains and with a simple mountain girl.

Here is the story of Christy Mahon, hailed as a hero (and an immediate object of romantic attention) for his claim to have killed his cruel father. However, when he finds out his father survived, Mahon attempts to murder him a second time. Will he succeed? Considered Synge's masterpiece, this play was viewed as indecent and met with riots when first performed.

Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. Controversial for its honest depiction of work, desire, and urban life, Sister Carrie has endured as a classic of naturalist fiction and remains a powerful example of social critique over a century after its publication. Despite poor reviews upon publication, the novel is now considered a landmark of American literature. Tired of the countryside, Carrie Meeber moves to Chicago to live with her older...

Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse (December 1916), was one of the first novels about the Great War to be published. Although it is a piece of fiction, the novel was based on Barbusse's own war experiences as a French soldier on the Western Front. It follows a squad of French volunteer soldiers on the front in France after the German invasion. The anecdotes are episodic in nature, each with an individual chapter title. The best-known...

Guy de Maupassant, one of the 19th century's most admired French writers, is considered to be one of the fathers of the modern short story. Maupassant's stories are characterized by their wealth of style, clever plotting and effortless resolutions. Many of his stories are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, describing the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught in the conflict, emerge from catastrophe and change. "Bel Ami",...

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic work of early science fiction and one of H. G. Wells' most visionary novels. It recounts the harrowing ordeal of Edward Prendick, an Englishman who survives a shipwreck in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rescued by a man named Montgomery, Prendick finds himself on an island belonging to Dr. Moreau, formerly an eminent physiologist in London who was expelled from his homeland for his cruel vivisection experiments. Prendick...