Originally published over one hundred years ago, "Roughing It" tells the (almost) true story of Mark Twain's rollicking adventures across the United States. A hilarious account of how the author tried finding wealth in the rocks of Nevada, it was published before his most famous works and shows why he would grow to become one of the most beloved American writers of all time. The story follows many of Twain's early adventures, including a visit to...

"Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate...

A young man's quest for eternal youth and beauty ends in scandal, depravity and death. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The picture of Dorian Gray was a...

The Pyncheons, having lived for generations under the curse of a supposed witch who once occupied the land on which the family mansion was built, gain a new lease on life with the arrival of young Phoebe Pyncheon from the country.

Jane Austen's first published novel, sparkling with wit and artistry, captures the inequities of birth, class, and marriage faced by the sisters Dashwood. Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support....

"Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a classic work of American literature that explores the harsh realities of slavery in the nineteenth century. Published in 1852, the novel follows the lives of several characters, including the titular character Tom, a long-suffering slave on a plantation in Kentucky. Through the characters' stories, Stowe paints a vivid picture of life in slavery, as well as its psychological, emotional, and spiritual...

Fearing for the safety of her young child's life, a young slave called Roxy swaps her light-skinned baby with that of her master. Her master's child grows up as a slave, while Roxy's child grows up as a white man called "Tom" who becomes cruel and ends up leading a life crime. The book is a cutting indictment of a society based on racial prejudice and slavery brimming with Twain's characteristic wit and irony. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835—1910),...

His background is shadowy, his presence commanding. He brings law and order to a frontier town and wins the love of a pretty schoolteacher from the East. He is the Virginian -- the first fully realized cowboy hero in American literature, a near-mythic figure whose idealized image has profoundly influenced our national consciousness. This enduring work of fiction marks his first appearance in popular culture -- the birth of a legend that lives with...

The tragic story of Lily Bart, a beautiful young lady caught up in the glittering but shallow and corrupt world of New York society at the turn of the 20th century.

Mormon elders in the town of Cottonwoods pressure the widow Jane Withersteen to remarry so that her lands and herds will remain in their control. Gradually they frighten away most of her cowboys, and rustlers steal away her cattle, but the gunfighter Lassiter stands by her as the inevitable confrontation draws near.