Typee is a fast-moving adventure tale, an autobiographical account of the author's Polynesian stay, an examination of the nature of good and evil, and a frank exploration of sensuality and exotic ritual.The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature a limited edition collection is published under the auspices of The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration

    She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead.Like the other tales collected here - 'Sir Edmund Orme', 'Owen Wingrave', and 'The Friends of the Friends' - 'The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's `infernal imagination', which torments but also entrals her?'The Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, 'the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read'?

    It began life as a slapstick comedy about Siamese twins, but as he wrote, something deepened. "The tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more time with their talk and their affairs. It changed from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it," Twain wrote in his frank afternote to the novel. In the end, the voice that comes to dominate the tale is Roxana's, a light-skinned slave who switches her infant son with her master's son to keep him from being sold down the river. Roxana, Twain's most complex and fully-realized adult female character, is a compelling and memorable tragic heroine, trapped with her son by the brutal system of slavery and by their own inescapable racial identities. At his best, Twain is the most uniquely American of writers, and it is inevitable that his best work revolves around the issues of race and of slavery embedded in the American psyche. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a dark and powerful novel of race in America, written by the American master.

    But the group is a powerful mix of competing ambitions and its idealism finds little satisfaction in farmwork. Instead, of changing the world, the members of the Blithedale community individually pursue egotistical paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Hawthorne's tale both mourns and satirizes a rural idyll not unlike that of nineteenth-century America at large.

    These four classic plays cover such taboo-breaking but timely themes as family guilt, social hypocrisy, and sexual mores.

    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.

    Today she is considered a forerunner of the feminist authors of the 20th century. This powerful little story concerns a Southern gentleman who disowns his wife because he fears she has "negro" blood. The truth makes for a dramatic ending.

    William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age.After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society.

    This chilling account of postpartum depression and a husband's controlling behavior in the guise of treatment will leave you breathless.

    This modern section has been overhauled to reflect the diversity of American writing since 1945. A section on 19th-century women's writing is included.

    In the first of these stories from the Catskill Mountains, a superstitious schoolmaster encounters a headless horseman; in the second, a man sleeps for twenty years, waking to a much-changed world.

    'In what may be Dickens's best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman — and one day, under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of "great expectations." In this gripping tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the compelling characters include Magwitch, the fearful and fearsome convict; Estella, whose beauty is excelled only by her haughtiness; and the embittered Miss Havisham, an eccentric jilted bride

    But despite its masterly control, this startlingly modern tale is also a simmering, rebel cri de coeur unleashed by a writer who was herself unappreciated in her own time. The combination of these attributes make this edgy novella a moving and suspenseful homage to the power of literature itself.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

    After she is freed by the Union army, she works to reunify her family and embrace her heritage, committing herself to improving the conditions for blacks in America. Through her fascinating characters-including Iola's brother, who fights at the front in a colored regiment-Harper weaves a vibrant and provocative chronicle of the Civil War and its consequences through African American eyes in this critical contribution to the nation's literature.

    Dreiser's unsparing story of a country girl's rise to riches as the mistress of a wealthy man marked the beginning of the naturalist movement in America. Both its subject matter and Dreiser's objective, nonmoralizing approach made it highly controversial, and only a heavily edited version could be published in 1900. In this restored version, the truly revolutionary nature of Sister Carrie is made fully evident.