After being cracked on the head with a crowbar at the Colt factory in Hartford, Connecticut, Hank Morgan awakens to find himself in sixth-century England. Captured by a knight and sentenced to death by King Arthur, the cagey Yankee instead becomes the king's right-hand wizard. Though homesick for the nineteenth century, Morgan makes the best of his surroundings, setting up factories and phone lines, as well as introducing such strange customs as advertising...

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.' Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society, she charms, hoodwinks, manipulates everyone she meets, rising in the world as she attaches herself to a succession of rich men. Becky's fortunes are contrasted with those of her best friend Amelia, who has none of Becky's wit and vitality but whose gentle-heartedness attracts the devotion...

"1906 bestseller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page." --Amazon.com

This novel is about how the artistic soul is sacrificed on the altar of big business. Except in this case the artist willingly makes the sacrifice and has no regrets afterward. Thus, the novel can't be counted a tragedy. John Sheridan lives by one mantra: Bigger is better. He owns the Sheridan Pump Works and is determined to make it an industrial giant. He brings his two oldest sons into the business only to see them fail. His youngest son, Bibbs,...

Winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Edna Ferber's crowning achievement. A rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges.

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is the coming-of-age story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet fromative years in the turn-of-the-century Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn. This poignant and moving classic of American literature is filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and incident.

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel-a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The...

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...

"The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel." — James Atlas, The Atlantic Monthly

From acclaimed author Russell Banks, a masterful novel of hope lost and gained—a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.

Banks's searing

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