Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.

    It is Wolfe's first novel, and is considered a highly autobiographical American Bildungsroman. The character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Wolfe himself. The novel covers the span of time from Gant's birth to the age of 19. The setting is the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, a fictionalization of his home town, Asheville, North Carolina. Playwright Ketti Frings wrote a theatrical adaptation of Wolfe's work in a 1957 play of the same title.

    Cloud's, Maine, Homer Wells has become the protege of Dr. Wilbur Larch, its physician and director. There Dr. Larch cares for the troubled mothers who seek his help, either by delivering and taking in their unwanted babies or by performing illegal abortions. Meticulously trained by Dr. Larch, Homer assists in the former, but draws the line at the latter. Then a young man brings his beautiful fiancee to Dr. Larch for an abortion, and everything about the couple beckons Homer to the wide world outside the orphanage ...

    Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune—in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this masterful, harrowing saga of people trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.

    In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.

    At the center of the story are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler. Powell always denied that Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce, until years later when she discovered a memo she’d written to herself in 1939 that said, “Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?” Which prompted Powell to write in her diary “Who can I believe? Me or myself?”

    They represent the crowning achievements of his career.O’Neill described Ah, Wilderness! as “the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been.” Set in the summer of 1906, it affectionately depicts the warm, close family of 16-year-old Richard Miller and the innocence with which he faces the trials of first love, strong drink, and sexual temptation.John Loving, hero of Days Without End, is split by his lack of faith into two selves: John and his Mephistophelian double Loving, who wears John’s death mask and plots his destruction. Burdened by guilt but desperately wanting to love, John struggles with Loving’s nihilistic hatred in what O’Neill termed his “modern miracle play.”In A Touch of the Poet, Irish tavern-keeper Con Melody is drawn by his proud past as a Byronic cavalry hero of the Napoleonic Wars toward a fatal confrontation with his wealthy Yankee neighbors, the Harfords.Throughout More Stately Mansions, the idealistic yet cunning Simon Harford, his wife, Sara Melody Harford, and his mother, Deborah, continually shift roles and alliances as they engage in an eerie psychological and sexual battle for possession of each other and their own maddeningly elusive dreams. This volume presents the never-before-published complete text of the revised typescript for this unfinished play.The derelict inhabitants of Harry Hope’s saloon in The Iceman Cometh find solace in their comradeship until their drifting calm is destroyed by the visiting salesman Theodore Hickey, who insists that they abandon all “pipe dreams” and face the truth about their lives. O’Neill carefully orchestrates the voices of over a dozen characters to form a chorus of overwhelming despair and surprising compassion.Hughie is a one-act dialogue between a reminiscing gambler and a weary hotel night clerk about the promise and loneliness of city life.Long Day’s Journey into Night unsparingly dissects the pain, rage, guilt, and love that drive a wounded family apart and bind it together. In their summer home the four Tyrones—James, a proud actor haunted by poverty, his devout, morphine-addicted wife, Mary, and their sons, Jamie, a cynical drunkard, and Edmund, an aspiring poet—slowly unveil the truth about their lives until they can no longer hope either to save or to escape one another. Published and produced posthumously, it won O’Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize.In its elegiac coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone seeks the peace that has long eluded him in the arms of sharp-tongued Josie Hogan.The volume concludes with “Tomorrow” (1917), O’Neill’s only published short story.

    This magnificent trilogy also contains two other superb short novels. In Revenge, love causes the course of a man's life to be savagely and irrevocably altered. Nordstrom, in The Man Who Gave up his Name, is unable to relinquish his consuming obsessions with women, dancing and food.'

    The book quickly won a respected readership and later an audience for the movie with the same name starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. The Hustler is about the victories and losses of one "Fast" Eddie Felson, a poolroom hustler who travels from town to town conning strangers into thinking they could beat him at the game when in fact, he is a skillful player who has never lost a game. Until he meets his match in Minnesota Fats, the true king of the poolroom, causing his life to change drastically. This is a classic tale of a man's struggle with his soul and his self-esteem.

    It remains as fresh as when it was first published.