A collection of four plays from the master of twentieth-century American drama includes Orpheus Descending, in which a nomadic guitar player falls in love with a storekeeper's wife only to find his life plagued by violence when the to...

The Girl from Hollywood is a 1923 novel by acclaimed science fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. The story revolves around a California ranching family and a young woman with aspirations to be a Hollywood star who comes to stay with ...

A Breathtaking adventure of the high seas—and a true story In 1834, Richard Henry Dana went from Harvard student to common seaman, sailing from California to Cape Horn. This journal survives as one of the most vivid accounts of the ...

Amy Dorrit's father is not very good with money. She was born in the Marshalsea debtors' prison and has lived there with her family for all of her 22 years, only leaving during the day to work as a seamstress for the forbidding Mrs. ...

Love, jealousy, and a floral obsession combine to produce riveting drama in Alexandre Dumas’s last major historical novel Cornelius von Baerle lives only to cultivate the elusive black tulip and win a magnificent prize for its c...

George Eliot's masterpiece, portraying every level of society in a provincial English town, tells the story of the romantic idealist Dorothea Brooke, her misguided marriage to a dessicated scholar incapable of loving her, and the pass...

An utterly gripping story of a wealthy French lawyer being held prisoner by the Germans during World War II. The lawyer is chosen by the soldiers to die, but instead he makes a cowardly trade for his life--one that he will have to pay...

Here are Masters's dramatic monologues written in free verse about a fictional Midwestern town called Spoon River. The dead, 'sleeping on the hill' in their village cemetery, awaken to tell the truth about their lives, toppling the m...

Fiercely independent and idiosyncratic, Aurora Greenway is used to the world revolving around her, but her daughter's hasty marriage and subsequent struggle with cancer cause Aurora to rethink her life. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

America and Americans is a representative, noteworthy collection of John Steinbeck's journalism, including the title piece, actually his last book. Editors Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, who provide an able, informative intr...

The essential, classic text of Taoism. These 81 poems comprise an Eastern classic, the mystical and moral teachings of which have profoundly influenced the sacred scriptures of many religions.

Out of print for several decades, here is Edith Wharton's superb satirical novel of the Jazz Age, a critically praised best-seller when it was first published in 1927. Sex, drugs, work, money, infatuation with the occult and spiritual...

Repetitive, indecent, often very funny, it is wonderfully sustained by the author, who achieves all those ancient effects to be got from a hero who is in some ways inferior, and in some ways superior, to the reader....Why, then, with ...

Tolstoy's great novel, one of his last works of fiction, tells the story of a harmless flirtation that gradually develops into a destructive passion: the love affair between Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. Anna turns to Vronsky, a da...

Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lol...

Kitty Fane has an affair, and when her husband, a bacteriologist, finds out, he forces her to go with him to a cholera epidemic in the hopes that she will contract the disease and die. Once she is surrounded by all the desolation and ...

Among the greatest novels of the twentieth century and the basis for director David Lean's Academy Award-winning film, A Passage to India tells of the clash of cultures in British India after the turn of the century. In exquisite pros...

In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, ver...

Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all...

Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the same time Joe's life is a study of the divided self and becomes a symbol of 20th century man.

I think my sense of right and wrong, my feeling of noblesse oblige, and any thought I may have against the oppressor and for the oppressed came from [Le Morte D'Arthur]....It did not seem strange to me that Uther Pendragon wanted the ...

Louisa May Alcott’s little–known novella is an ingenious study of deception, betrayal, and the ruthless power of a woman scorned. Foreword by Doris Lessing. When demure Scottish governess Jean Muir arrives at a wealthy ho...

Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China. Revolutions sweep ...

Louisa May Alcott's semiautobiographical story of a nurse's experiences in the Civil War. Alcott, most famous for her 'Little Women' novel, weaves a light but fulfilling story.

For more than a century, L. Frank Baum’s kingdom of Oz and its delightful denizens have enchanted readers of all ages. In this illustrated Modern Library edition, the bestselling novelist and children’s book writer Gregory...

Helen Keller at age 12 was like a wild animal. Deaf, blind and utterly unable to communicate, she went through her young life alienated and terrified, struggling against all who tried to help her. Annie Sullivan was half-blind herself...

For the condemned nobles during the French Revolution, there is a ray of hope: rescue by the Scarlet Pimpernel. His identity remains a mystery to his sworn enemy, the ruthless Chauvelin, and to his devoted admirer, the beautiful Lady ...

From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality—two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debutsIN AWARDING John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with T...

John Updike takes the Hamlet story as the basis for this absorbing novel about power and lust in 12th-century Denmark. Using both Shakespeare's play and original historical sources, Updike concentrates his narrative on Danish history,...

Prendrick, a survivor of a shipwreck, is picked up by a schooner bound for Noble's Isle. On the island, Prendrick encounters the Beast People, roughly human but with animalistic traits. It turns out that Dr. Moreau, a scientist who ca...