Best of
Classic-Literature

1939

The Big Sleep and Other Novels


Raymond Chandler - 1939
    Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective's iconic image burns just as brightly in 'Farewell My Lovely', on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner. And the inimitable Marlowe is able to prove that trouble really is his business in Raymond Chandler's brilliant epitaph, 'The Long Goodbye'.

Lucia Victrix


E.F. Benson - 1939
    "Lucia's progress" first published 1935. "Trouble for Lucia" first published in 1939.

Anne of Windy Poplars / Anne's House of Dreams / Anne of Ingleside


L.M. Montgomery - 1939
    One of the best-loved & most enduring books in all of children's literature, written with sweetness and charm. Ages 10 & up

The Grapes of Wrath


John Steinbeck - 1939
    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 yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.