A groundbreaking study of society, nature, and human needs, Edith Wharton's starkly simple Summer---a portrayal of a young woman's sexual and social awakening---is admittedly one of the author's favorites.

The heroine of this powerful novel is the spirited young American Isabel Archer. Blessed by nature and fortune, she journeys to Europe to seek her future, but what she finds may prove to be her undoing. She is courted by three men: ...

In THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, Kate Croy, a penniless young Englishwoman, tries to arrange a marriage between her fiancT Merton Densher and the American heiress she has befriended, knowing that Millie, the heiress, has a fatal illness and ...

According to legend, Sweeney Todd had his barber shop at number 186 Fleet Street, next door to St. Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks away from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, they say, he robbed and murdered more than 150...

When it was first erected, the House of Seven Gables typified the mechanical Colonel Pyncheon; but it developed through the years until, by Hepzibah's time, it has become humanized and almost organic. The history of the house is thus ...

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's eth...

The classic, elegant translation of Stendhal's masterful novel of ambition, desire, and politics in post-Napoleonic France. A BRILLIANT PORTRAIT of one of the most ruthlessly charming heroes in literature. The Red and the Black chroni...

First published in 1935, when Americans were still largely oblivious to the rise of Hitler in Europe, this prescient novel tells a cautionary tale of the fragility of democracy and offers an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fasci...

Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, retur...

In the first of Willa Cather's renowned prairie novels, Alexandra Bergson takes over the family farm after her father's death and falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie.

Set in seventeenth-century Canada, an evocation of North American origins highlights the men and women who struggled to adapt to the new world even as they clung to the one they left behind. Reprint.

A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose wil...

Barnaby Rudge, set against the background of the anti-catholic riots of the 1780s, follows the plight of young Barnaby and his widowed mother. Martin Chuzzlewit is a darkly comic masterpiece in which a disinherited Martin sets sail fo...

Three of Charles Dickens's much-loved Christmas novellas---The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man---are brought to life in this classic audiobook collection.

Les Miserables is primarily a great humanitarian work that encourages compassion and hope in the face of adversity and injustice. It is also a historical novel of great scope, and provides a detailed vision of nineteenth-century Frenc...

While Europe drifts toward Nazism, four students share an apartment in Paris. Thackara brilliantly forges the stories of these four men whose lives mirror the larger picture, while the listener follows Hitler's rise from a dozen diffe...

The works collected here span the early and late periods of Henry James' career. Widely considered the finest of his early novels, The Portrait of a Lady exemplifies a familiar theme in James' writing: the meeting of Europe and Americ...

Bold, passionate, and erotic, this classic tale of love and discovery pits the paralyzed and callous Clifford Chatterley against his indecisive wife and her persuasive lover.

Take a journey on a giant raft with Joam Garral down 800 Leagues on the Amazon. Garral, a Brazilian, lives on a thriving fazenda (plantation) in the Peruvian frontier with his loving family. But, his daughter's imminent marriage to a ...

Indoors are her duties. There, too, is The Man of Wrath, her upright Teutonic husband. But outdoors, Elizabeth can escape her domestic routine to read books, play with her three babies, and garden to her hearts content.

In his National Book Award winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher's Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It...

After King Shahryar had his wife killed for cheating, he began to corrupt-then kill-one virgin a night, as revenge on womankind. Then he meets Scheherazade, who, night after night, saves her own life by telling him fantastical tales o...

When a jealous Zeus discovers that the compassionate Titan, Prometheus, has introduced the gift of fire to liberate mere mortals from oppression and servitude, he has Prometheus bound to a rocky prison in the Scythian desert, where th...

The only complete trilogy to survive from the ancient Greek theater is here presented in the first sound recording of all three plays: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatizes the myth ...

At Plumfield, an experimental school for boys, the little scholars can do very much as they please, even slide down banisters. For this is what writer Jo Bhaer, once Jo March of Little Women, always wanted: a house "swarming with...

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women. In the mid-1860s, Alcott wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories. She also produced wholesome stories for children, and after th...

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - 'Ragged Dick' was contributed as a serial story to the pages of ...

In Jane Austen's comic masterpiece, the inimitable Emma Woodhouse, a self-proclaimed matchmaker, just may find herself the victim of her own best intentions by the novel's conclusion.

The funny and heartwarming story of a young lady whose zeal, snobbishness, and self-satisfaction lead to several errors in judgmentEmma takes Harriet Smith, a young woman previously unknown to good society, under her wing, scheming fo...

This volume presents three of Jane Austen's smaller works, treating readers to the author's timeless observations on life and love in nineteenth-century England. In Lady Susan, a beautiful and flirtatious widow seeks an advantageous s...