Mark Twain was known as a great American short-story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, from the well known to the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and equality.Begin...

Pierre Glendinning is the nineteen-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel, Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father’s name, spare his mother’s grief, and give ...

Set in a crumbling Venetian villa, The Aspern Papers is a story about the heart’s romantic ambitions and the pragmatic methods we use to pursue them. An American editor arrives in Venice on a quest to acquire some unpublished letters written by his favorite Romantic poet, Jeffrey Aspern. He tracks down the mistress to whom the letters were addressed, a now elderly Miss Bordereau, and presents himself as a prospective lodger. In hopes of gaining access to the secret papers, he begins courti...

In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork,Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy.During the same period, Thoreau endured a one-day imprisonment ...

A brilliant and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters, dispatches, and memoirs.A mere eighteen years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power—Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony—young...

One of the great innovative figures in American letters, Walt Whitman created a daring new kind of poetry that became a major force in world literature. His poems have been woven into the very fabric of the American character and have continued to provide inspiration to people and poets for generations.Leaves of Grass is Whitman's masterpiece, written in a pure, uninhibited style and combining sensual and mystical sensibilities. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay "The Poet" ...

The first volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize–winning series, Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization, Volume I chronicles the early history of Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia. In this masterful work, readers will encounter:Sumeria, birthplace of the first cities and written lawsthe Egyptians, who perfected monumental architecture, medicine, and mummification more than 3,500 years agothe Babylonians, who developed astronomy and physics, and planted the seeds o...

The Civil War is Julius Caesar’s personal account of his war with Pompey the Great—the war that destroyed the five-hundred-year-old Roman Republic. Caesar the victor became Caesar the dictator. In three short books, Caesar describes how, in order to defend his honor and the freedom of both himself and the Roman people, he marched on Rome and defeated the forces of Pompey and the Senate in Italy, Spain, and Greece. Julius Caesar himself was one of the most eminent writers of the ag...

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant's is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically rescued him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man told with great courage as he r...

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the nineteenth century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says—at least they think they do.The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon its publi...

Mark Twain is a master of adventure, mystery, and wit. This collection, containing three tales of mystery, offers a healthy dose of each—and more! In Tom Sawyer, Detective, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, take a ride down the Mississippi to Uncle Silas’ farm. Mark Twain’s satirical take on the immensely popular detective novels of the time provides enough twists and turns to satisfy any...

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known.Yet as the years pass, William Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife an...