Ethan Hawley, a descendant of proud New England sea captains, works as a clerk in the grocery store owned by an Italian immigrant. His wife is restless; his teenaged children are troubled and discontented, hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.

Three Lives, by Gertrude Stein, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

A young American, vaguely conscious that he is "missing something," goes to Paris and India in search of God and the infinite.

The powerful drama of Willy Loman & his tragic end. Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has...

This classic of the Jewish-American immigrant experience was an instant critical and popular success upon its 1912 publication. Author Mary Antin arrived in the United States from Russia in the 1890s at the age of 12. Her memoir vividly recaptures scenes from both Old and New World cultures, chronicling the poverty and oppression of Czarist Russia as well as the excitement and challenges of her assimilation into American life at the turn of the twentieth...

A treasury of Eliot's most important early poems combines poetic elements from diverse sources with bits of popular culture and common speech to recreate the chaos of Europe in the aftermath of World War I.

In a brawling Chicago of crooks, con artists, second-story men, extravagant dreamers, snappy dressers, and cold-eyed pragmatists, Augie March undergoes his sentimental education an education that, though imbued with reality, will take him into realms progressively stranger, more marvelous, more filled with indecipherable meaning.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.

"The Crucible" is a study of the events which led to the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials, and a parable for 1950s McCarthyism in the USA.

On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassidy, "a side burned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance. Kerouac's classic novel of...