Best of
American

1931

Three Plays: Desire Under the Elms / Strange Interlude / Mourning Becomes Electra


Eugene O'Neill - 1931
    These three plays exemplify Eugene O'Neil's ability to explore the limits of the human predicament, even as he sounds the depths of his audiences' hearts.

A Little House Traveler: Writings from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Journeys Across America


Laura Ingalls Wilder - 1931
    She had traveled by wagon, by train, and by car; alone, with her husband, and with her daughter. She had watched the times, seasons, and people change over six decades of traveling. But one thing remained the same: Laura always kept a pencil and paper with her to jot down notes about her experiences.For the first time ever, writings from three of Laura's most memorable trips have been collected in one special omnibus edition featuring historical black-and-white photographs. On the Way Home recounts her 1894 move with Rose and Almanzo from South Dakota to their new homestead in Mansfield, Missouri. West From Home consists of letters from Laura to Almanzo as she traveled to California in 1915 to visit Rose. And previously unpublished materials from Laura and Almanzo's car trip in 1931 now tell the story of their first journey back to DeSmet, the town where Laura grew up, where she met Almanzo, and where they fell in love. Laura's candid sense of humor and keen eye for observation shine through in this wonderful collection of writings about the many places Laura Ingalls Wilder called home.

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1931
    Scott Fitzgerald was at the height of his creative powers, these ten lyric tales represent some of the author's finest fiction. In them, Fitzgerald creates vivid, timeless characters -- a dissatisfied southern belle seeking adventure in the north; the tragic hero of the title story who lost more than money in the stock market; giddy and dissipated young men and women of the interwar period. From the lazy town of Tarleton, Georgia, to the glittering cosmopolitan centers of New York and Paris, Fitzgerald brings the society of the "Lost Generation" to life in these masterfully crafted gems, showcasing the many gifts of one of our most popular writers.

Mourning Becomes Electra


Eugene O'Neill - 1931
    A returning victor, General Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon), is poisoned by his unfaithful wife Christine (Clytemnestra) and then avenged by his son Orin (Orestes) and daughter (Lavinia). With Orin's subsequent suicide, Lavinia (the Electra of the title) becomes a fatalistic recluse in the Mannon mansion.

Black No More


George S. Schuyler - 1931
    Schuyler's satiric romp. Black No More is the story of Max Disher, a dapper black rogue of an insurance man who, through a scientific transformation process, becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man. Matt dreams up a scam that allows him to become the leader of the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist group, as well as to marry the white woman who rejected him when he was black. Black No More is a hysterical exploration of race and all its self-serving definitions. If you can't beat them, turn into them.Ishmael Reed, one of today's top black satirists and the author of Mumbo Jumbo and Japanese by Spring, provides a spirited Introduction.The fertile artistic period now known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920- 1930) gave birth to many of the world-renowned masters of black literature and is the model for today's renaissance of black writers.

Government


B. Traven - 1931
    Traven wrote an epic of the birth of the Mexican revolution in what have become known as the "Jungle Novels." Government is the first of the six novels that comprise the series. Depicting the political corruption that infected even the smallest villages in Mexico, the novel tells the story of Don Gabriel, a minor government functionary who has a virtual license to steal from the Indian village where he is secretary—except that the Indians have nothing to steal. By chance he finds an opportunity in the labor agent business, shanghaiing luckless Indians into debt-slavery so that he can ship them off to work in the great mahogany plantations owned by foreign capital. The novel reaches a moving climax in a clash of cultures between the simple dignity of the illiterate Indians and the cynicism and corruption of the politicians and petty bureaucrats.

Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930


Edmund Wilson - 1931
    S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer."

Shadows on the Rock


Willa Cather - 1931
    Set in seventeenth-century Canada, an evocation of North American origins highlights the men and women who struggled to adapt to the new world even as they clung to the one they left behind.

ViVa


E.E. Cummings - 1931
    E. Cummings' most experimental poems as well as some of his most memorable. The volume includes such no-famous celebrations as "i sing of Olaf glad and big" and "if there are any heavens my mother will (all be herself) have," along with such favorites as "Space being (don't forget to remember) Curved," "a clown's smirk in the skull of a baboon," and "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond."

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's


Frederick Lewis Allen - 1931
    Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday has an exuberance and proximity to its subject—the Roaring Twenties in all its scandal and glory—that uniquely captures the feel of the era.

The Glass Key


Dashiell Hammett - 1931
    Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.

Turnabout


Thorne Smith - 1931
    So an ill-tempered minor god, tired of their bickering, worked a modest miracle......and Sally Willows, no occupying her husband's body, experienced the full horrors of the Nationwide Advertising Agency, while Tim, now outwardly Sally, dealt with the amourous advances of a local Lothario.It was a toss-up whether Sally/Tim's well-earned dismissal or Tim/Sally's bizarre attempt at murder was more spectacular - but both seemed insignificant when Tim found he was pregnant!

The Epic of America


James Truslow Adams - 1931
    A beautifully written story of America's historical heritage, by one of the country's greatest historians.

The Whisperer in Darkness


H.P. Lovecraft - 1931
    Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham. When local newspapers report strange things seen floating in rivers during a historic Vermont flood, Wilmarth becomes embroiled in a controversy about the reality and significance of the sightings, though he sides with the skeptics. Wilmarth uncovers old legends about monsters living in the uninhabited hills who abduct people who venture or settle too close to their territory.

Red-Headed Woman


Katharine Brush - 1931
    Brush's risqué novel of a red headed vamp who steels her boss from his wife served as the basis for the ever popular pre-code Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer black and white talking film directed by Jack Conway and featuring Jean Harlow and Chester Morris.