The five little Peppers are an adorable family of children growing up in a small town and cared for by their widowed mother. She is so poor that the pittance she earns as the town seamstress fails to support or even sustain the family.The children are happy despite privation, and the smallest pleasures cause delight and merriment in the little house. Everything happens to this brood while mother is away sewing, and no matter how dangerous the situation, they come out of it safe and...

One of Edith Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The Custom of the Country is a blistering indictment of materialism, power, and misplaced values. Its heroine, Undine Spragg, is one of the most ruthless characters in all of literature, as selfishly unscrupulous as she is fiercely beautiful. When her family acquires a small fortune, they leave America’s heartland and head east. As Undine climbs the social ladder through a series of marriages and affairs, she shows little concern for wh...

A story filled with danger and excitement, Johnny Tremain tells of the turbulent, passionate times in Boston just before the Revolutionary War.Johnny, a young apprentice silversmith, is caught up with Otis, Hancock, and John and Samuel Adams in the exciting and dramatic operations and subterfuges leading up to the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington. As Johnny is forced into the role of a full-grown man in the face of his new country’s independenc...

First published in 1899, this revolutionary novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. Rooted in the romantic tradition of Melville and Dickinson, it is the story of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier, a surprisingly modern woman trapped in a dehumanizing marriage and in search of self-discovery. Turning away from convention and socie...

This spare, mesmerizing novel is Edith Wharton’s money-can’t-buy-happiness tale. Young Stephen Glennard is poor, but he has an unanticipated gambling chip: a collection of love letters from a scorned but now famous lover, the distinguished novelist Margaret Aubyn. To raise money for his forthcoming wedding to another woman, Stephen stoops to selling the letters. His decision brings him wealth and admission to society, but a mystery contained in the missives comes back to haunt him, and it ...

Genius, artist, monstre sacr├®, Orson Welles had one of the most brilliant and tempestuous careers in show business. Here he confides his most intimate feelings and recollections of his extraordinary life. With remarkable detail and intimacy, Barbara Leaming reveals the private Welles: from child prodigy and young lion in Dublin and New York, to the succ├¿s de scandale of his The War of the Worlds broadcast; from his auspicious directing debut with the legendary ...

Margaret Leech's Pulitzer Prize–winning history paints a wonderfully vivid and lively picture of Washington, DC, during the Civil War. In addition to the major events and figures such as Lincoln, Leech uses telling anecdotes and draws upon cameo players such as Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Andrew Carnegie, and a Confederate lady spy to create a living portrait of a sleepy, unfinished city as it struggles to become the strong capital of a united nation.

Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, was the most powerful woman of the ancient Mediterranean and the only person standing between Rome and its dominion over the world. She was wife to Julius Caesar and bore his only son. After his death, she took his greatest general, Mark Antony, as her lover and consort—and as her partner in a vast political enterprise. Together, they strove to unite Egypt and Rome under one throne.Throne of Isis shows us an extraordinary woman wielding the power...

Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the most original painters America has ever produced. Her vivid visual vocabulary—sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth—has had a profound and lasting influence on American art in this century.Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, O'Keeffe had a personal mystique as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvasses. Here is a full account of her exceptional life—from her girlhood...

She was known for her outrageous one-liners, her ruthless theater criticism, her clever verses and bittersweet stories. But there was another side of Dorothy Parker: a private life set on a course of destruction through two divorces, a string of painful affairs, a lifelong problem with alcohol, and several suicide attempts.In this lively, absorbing biography, Marion Meade illuminates both sides of the fascinating Parker: her dark days, as well as her days in the sun at the Algonqui...

When Harriet Mahoney first saw it, Isabel Krug’s bed was covered in sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. The unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted Harriet had fled wintry Manhattan in response to a mysterious ad in the New York Review of Books: “Book in progress? Why not share my Cape Cod retreat? Roomy and peaceful—your life will be your own.”In a room with a view atop a Truro dune, Harriet starts on a different path to fulfillment by ghostwriting

Jesse, a Hebrew slave, and Jennat, a half-Egyptian, half-Syrian servant girl, both serve the Egyptians, but they live in vastly different worlds. Though Jennat serves a wealthy mistress, Memnet, she is content to share in the glitter of Egyptian life and idol worship. But Jesse’s life is filled with cruelty inflicted upon him by Egyptian task-masters. Jesse’s father believes only in survival and will stop at nothing to gain favors from the rich and powerful. His mother, however, believes t...