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...

This nineteenth-century tale of an electric submarine, its eccentric captain, and the undersea world, anticipated many of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century. The adventures of a French scientist and his companions who travel the seven seas as prisoners in the submarine of the mysterious Captain Nemo.

"No better introduction to William Shakespeare's dramatic masterpieces exists than the delightful prose adaptations of Charles and Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb, perhaps the preeminent essayist in English lierature, and his gifted sister selected twenty of Shakespeare's best-known plays and set out to make them accessible to children and to pay enthusiastic homage to the original works." -- Book jacket.

When Black Beauty was born one sweet spring day, he could not have imagined the life ahead of him. Following his mother's advice to do his work with a good will, he enjoys the adventures of country and city life, makes new friends, and suffers from the cruelty and greed of his human masters. Beauty faces each challenge with bravery and kindness -- and then a chance encounter with an old friend brings him the greatest joy of all. Anna Sewell's classic...

The direct and unadorned narrative describes four remarkable journeys of ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, among them one to the land of Lilliput, where six-inch-high inhabitants bicker over trivialities; and another to Brobdingnag, a land where giants reduce man to insignificance. Written with disarming simplicity and careful attention to detail, this classic is diverse in its appeal: for children, it remains an enchanting fantasy. For adults, it is...

"Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel: a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman...

"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,...

The most popular pirate story ever written in English, featuring one of literature's most beloved “bad guys,” Treasure Island has been happily devoured by several generations of boys-and girls-and grownups. Its unforgettable characters include: young Jim Hawkins, who finds himself owner of a map to Treasure Island, where the fabled pirate booty is buried; honest Captain Smollett, heroic Dr. Livesey, and the good-hearted but obtuse Squire Trelawney,...

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, is one of America's best-known novels. In his Reader's Companion to this new edition, Daniel Dyer provides a wealth of annotations explaining the book's many "sourdough" expressions and geographical references in order to help the modern reader see what London saw. Dyer also identifies characters in the novel - human and canine alike - whom London had known, and he spices his annotations with Northern lore and...

A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fanatical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul. Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel,...