An instant classic with girls everywhere, LITTLE WOMEN tells the gripping story of the four March sisters--Jo, Amy, Beth, and Meg--as they struggle to grow up in New England, amidst poverty during the Civil War. Based on the author's own interesting childhood, the novel was first printed in two volumes, as initially, Louisa May Alcott didn’t expe...more
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote THE GREAT GATSBY in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had by Fitzgerald's time become increasingly focused on money and pleasure--a phenomenon the high-liv...more
A 19th-century boy, floating down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, becomes involved with a feuding family, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt, who mistakes him for Tom.
Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. With illustrations from the movie starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, desp...more
Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nations historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of thre...more
Set during the Salem witchcraft trials, this play is most famous for its metaphor for McCarthyism--in fact, three years after the play was produced, Miller himself was called before HUAC. In the play, Miller used colonial language to near-poetic effect; the plot involves characters who have to make certain moral choices concerning their communities...more