Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-- two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with 'The Winter of Our Discontent, ' he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of the novel,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. The literary sensation The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) launched its twenty-five year old author on the world stage overnight. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel gave voice to young bourgeois intellectuals who despaired of finding fulfillment and authenticity in a hierarchical, convention-bound society.
In the novel, Werther, a social rebel with artistic leanings,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells. The protagonist of The History of Mr. Polly is an antihero inspired by H. G. Wells's early experiences in the drapery trade: Alfred Polly, born circa 1870, a timid and directionless young man living in Edwardian England, who despite his own bumbling achieves contented serenity with little help from those around him. Mr. Polly's most striking characteristic is his "innate sense of epithet",...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Financier (1912) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. The first installment of Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, The Financier has endured as a classic of naturalist fiction and remains a powerful example of social critique over a century after its publication. Followed by The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947), The Financier captures the greed at the heart of the Gilded Age, a time when tycoons rose with total impunity to take over swaths of American industry....
Author
Language
English
Description
The Longest Journey (1907) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. Despite its critical success, the novel was a commercial failure for Forster, but has since grown in reputation and readership to help cement his reception as one of twentieth century England's most talented writers.
Rickie Elliot enters Cambridge as a young man, exploring his interests in poetry and art and joining a circle of intellectuals centered around, a philosopher named...
Author
Language
English
Description
"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history, " Arthur Miller wrote in an introduction to The Crucible, his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant Career when she was only sixteen, intending it to be the Australian answer to Jane Eyre. But the book she produced--a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about a young girl hungering for life and love in the outback--so scandalized her country upon its appearance in 1901 that she insisted it not be published again until ten years after her death"--Publisher.
10) East of Eden
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
More Lists...
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
More Lists...
Description
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
H. G. Wells' prophetic The War in the Air foretold the use of airplanes in warfare and the coming of World War I. First serialized in 1907 and published in book form in 1908, the novel tells the story of the forward-thinking tinkerer Bert Smallways. Alfred Butteridge is said to be the only English aviator to know the "secret of the flying machine." When Bert Smallways accidentally falls into Butteridge's hot air balloon, he soon finds himself
...13) Cannery row
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Unburdened by the material necessities of the more fortunate, the denizens of Cannery Row discover rewards unknown in more traditional society. Henry the painter sorts through junk lots for pieces of wood to incorporate into the boat he is building, while the girls from Dora Flood's bordello venture out now and then to enjoy a bit of sunshine. Lee Chong stocks his grocery with almost anything a man could want, and Doc, a young marine biologist who...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. The work was Forster's first novel, and its success helped launch his lengthy and critically acclaimed career as a writer of literary fiction. Where Angels Fear to Tread, the title is drawn from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), is a moving meditation on class, gender, social convention, and the grieving process.
Following the death of her husband, a widow named...
15) Armadale
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret her reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Swilt: flame-haired temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husband-poisoner. Her malicious intrigues fuel the plot of this gripping melodrama: a tale of confused identities, inherited curses, romantic rivalries, espionage, money--and murder. The character of Lydia...
Author
Language
English
Description
Part surrealistic comedy, part psychological thriller, G. K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" inventively unravels the nightmare of paradox and surprise to probe the mysteries of human behavior. The seven members of Europe's Central Anarchist Council, who, for reasons of security, call themselves by the names of the days of the week, have sworn to destroy the world. But events soon cast doubt upon their real identities, for the man called Thursday...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Adult - Halloween Fun
Classic Horror Novels--Melrose Park Public Library
Classics - St. Charles Public Library
More Lists...
Classic Horror Novels--Melrose Park Public Library
Classics - St. Charles Public Library
More Lists...
Description
Miss Jessel is dead. A new governess arrives at a remote estate in Bly to care for Miles and Flora. Wild but angelic they charm their guardian with flowers, poetry and song. But as she grows to love her two wards, figures appear in the darkness outside and the corners of the house are haunted by those that have gone before. The Governess must confront her fear and protect the children from the alarming dangers that surround them.
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-- driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human...
19) Babbitt
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Prosperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appears to have everything a man could wish. But when a personal crisis forces the middle-aged real estate agent to reexamine his life, Babbitt mounts a rebellion that jeopardizes everything he values. Widely considered Sinclair Lewis' greatest novel, this satire of the American social landscape created a sensation upon its 1922 publication. Babbitt's name became an instant and enduring synonym for...
20) Of mice and men
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
More Lists...
ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
More Lists...
Description
"They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Suggest a purchase. Submit Request