Dutiful Newland Archer, an eligible young man from New York high society, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a suitable match from a good family, when May's cousin, the beautiful and exotic Countess Ellen Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of perceived scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. Her worldliness, disregard for society's...

The classic novel of two mixed-race siblings who flee the South after the Civil War, hiding their identities'until a romance brings the truth to light. A landmark in African American literature, The House Behind the Cedars tells the tale of Rena Walden, who runs away from North Carolina to start a new life with her brother. Their mixed ancestry allows them to "pass" as white'and they settle into life in Clarence, South Carolina, keeping their past...

Story of the fiercely independent Janie Crawford and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose.

Chronicles one young woman's emotional breakdown as she journeys from the glamorous world of Manhattan publishing to the isolation of the asylum. The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful -- but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia...

First published in 1895, America's greatest novel of the Civil War was written before the twenty-one-year-old Stephan Crane had "smelled even the powder of a sham battle." But this pwerful psychological study of a young soilder's struggle with the horror's, both within and without, that war unleashes strikes the reader with its undeniable realism and it's masterful description of the moment-by-moment riot of emotions felt by men under fire. Esteemed...

Every reader knows the obsessive story of Captain Ahab and the famous white whale. Moby Dick is the great American novel, a monument of literature. Based on the events depicted in the "Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex" and the legend of "Mocha Dick," it is the story of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage aboard the whaling ship the Pequod. Commanded by the obsessed Captain Ahab, a man who...