The Greater Inclination was the earliest collection of short fiction from Edith Wharton. It was published by Charles Scribner's Sons on the 25th of March, 1899. The first edition printing of 1,250 sold out by June of the same year. The collection...
The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a woman plagued by scandal whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s' New York...
Like most Wharton novels, The House of Mirth examines the conflict between rigid social expectation and personal desire. Lily Bart is adept at playing society's games, which expect her to achieve an advantageous marriage. Yet, torn between her...
Ethan Frome is set in a fictional New England town named Starkfield, where an unnamed narrator tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with dreams and desires that end in an ironic turn of events. The narrator tells the story...
The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje. The story deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned English accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and...
O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland...
The Light That Failed is a haunting and powerful novel of human suffering, love and loss. In Dick Heldar, artist and journalist, we see a man struggling to rise above his cruel beginnings and neglected childhood to grasp at a chance for happiness in...
A master of naturalism, Theodore Dreiser brought the American novel into the twentieth century. Fascinated by the city street, its parade of fashion and its threat of poverty and degradation, his journalistic eye lets us see as they were first...
Daddy Long-Legs is a 1912 epistolary novel by the American writer Jean Webster. It follows the protagonist, a young girl named Jerusha "Judy" Abbott, through her college years. She writes the letters to her benefactor, a rich man whom she has...
Dear Enemy is the sequel to Jean Webster's novel Daddy-Long-Legs. First published in 1915, it was among the top ten best sellers in the US in 1916.[1] The story is presented in a series of letters written by Sallie McBride, Judy Abbott's...