"In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark Twain combines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually manages to come out on top. From petty triumphs over his friends and over his long-suffering Aunt Polly, to his intervention in a murder trial,...

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...

Elnora Comstock's first day at high school is a disaster. The other students laugh at her clothes, and then -- to make matters worse -- she learns she has to pay for her books and tuition. --- [Excerpt from back cover.]

"The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years' War), when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. During this war, both the French and the British used Native American allies, but the French were particularly dependent, as they were outnumbered in the Northeast frontier areas by the more numerous British colonists. The novel is primarily set in the upper New York wilderness, detailing...

"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

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

Set in the Limberlost Swamp area of Indiana, “Freckles” is American writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter's 1904 novel about the titular character, a one-handed adult orphan who takes a job guarding timber in the swamp. Freckles has lived all his life in a Chicago orphanage and has been missing his right hand as long as he can remember. Now an adult, he is hired on by the Grand Rapids lumber company to guard their valuable timber in the Limberlost...

Clara Kelley is not who they think she is. She's not the experienced Irish maid who was hired to work in one of Pittsburgh's grandest households. She's a poor farmer's daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. But the other woman with the same name has vanished, and pretending to be her just might get Clara some money to send back home.If she can keep up the ruse, that is. Serving as a lady's maid in the household of Andrew Carnegie...

Fifteen-year-old Laura loves her prairie home, but knows it is time for her to serious about getting a teachers certificate so she can help Ma and Pa pay for her sister Mary's education at the college for the blind.

Two Secret Service agents, one of them retired, have each had similar experiences losing presidential candidates while assigned to protect them. As the two discredited agents enter a maze of lies, secrets, and deadly coincidences, they uncover a shocking truth: that the separate acts of violence that shattered their lives were really a long time in the making --and are a long way from over.