Edna Ferber's novels portray the lives of a wide variety of Americans in a vigorous, colorful, and panoramic fashion. Among her best-known novels are So Big (1924, Pulitzer Prize), Show Boat (1926, musical version 1927), Cimarron (1929), Saratoga Trunk (1941), Giant (1952), and Ice Palace (1958). Ferber also collaborated with George S. Kaufman on such plays as The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936).

Dreiser made his debut with Sister Carrie, a powerful account of a young working girl's rise to success and her slow decline. "She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken." (from 1981 edition) The president of the publishing company, Frank Doubleday, disapproved the work - Dreiser allowed vice to be rewarded instead of punished. No attempt was made to promote the book. Sister Carrie was reissued in 1907 and it became one of the most famous novels in literary history. Among its admirers was H.L. Mencken, an aspiring journalist, whom Dreiser had hired as a ghostwriter in his paper.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the Jazz Age, based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. In this definitive text, This Side of Paradise captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's youth and offers a poignant portrait of the "Lost Generation."

Fitzgerald's first novel, reprinted in the handsome Everyman's Library series of literary classic, uses numerous formal experiments to tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazy years following the First World War.

With scenes from English life and her diversity of light-hearted, witty, wise, or patient heroines, Jane Austen has delighted generations of readers while exploring the social and moral values of the early nineteenth century with elegantly barbed perception. This edition includes all six of Austen's completed novels--Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Predjudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Also included are Catherine, a key work of her youth; Lady Susan, which was unpublished in her lifetime; and the unfinished novels The Watsons and Sanditon. All demonstrate the irony, wit, and skill in characterization, as well as faultless control of tone and narrative, which mark them as timeless classics of provincial romance and intrigue.

Collected together in one volume, The Complete Novels show the development of Austen as a writer and social commentator. From the early optimism and youthful energy of Northanger Abbey to the quiet and subtle art of Persuasion, this collection reveals the breadth of one of the best loved novelists of all time.

A classic tale of British middle-class love, this novel displays Edward Morgan Forster's skill in contrasting British sensibilities with those of foreign cultures, as he portrays the love of a British woman for an expatriate living in Italy.

Published in 1908, A Room with A View is one of Edward Morgan Forster's most celebrated works. Forster explores love among a cast of eccentric characters gathered in an Italian pension and in a corner of Surrey, England. Caught up in a world of social snobbery, Lucy Honeychurch must make a decision that will decide the course of her future: She is forced to choose between convention and passion.

"She 'never exactly understood,' she would say in after years, 'How he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.'"

Peacock’s retelling of the legend of Robin Hood is as fresh today as it was when he penned it, nearly two hundred years ago. Here are all the heroes and villains we know and love, recast by a keen Victorian wit. The heroes are heroic (and just a little self-serving, though generous) the villains are villainous (and greedy!); and the tale is told as keenly as it can be. Those who haven’t read Peacock are in for a treat.

"Yes, that's true, too," Mollie agreed. "I remember our doctor telling mother that if people only wouldn't try to force confidences from the boys and would try to keep all thought of the awful things they had been through out of their minds, there would be fewer cases of nervous breakdowns."

"Pop!" said Grace, snapping her finger resignedly. "There go all our hopes of a good time, Amy. When the boys come home all we shall be allowed to do will be to smooth their fevered brows and hold their hands."

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists tells the story of a group of working men who are joined one day by Owen, a journeyman-prophet with a vision of a just society. Owen's spirited attacks on the greed and dishonesty of the capitalist system rouse his fellow men from their political quietism. A year in the life of a group of painters and decorators in the town of Mugsborough at the turn of the century. Haunted by fears of unemployment, the men struggle to keep their jobs at any cost, but some of them begin to realize that their poverty is neither "natural" nor "just". The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is both a masterpiece of wit and political passion and one of the most authentic novels of English working class life ever written.

Churchill called it a Renaissance tragedy. Indeed, before Count Ciano's execution by Mussolini, his father-in-law, now head of the Italian Social Republic, only two women attempted his rescue. His wife, Edda, who defied her father, and a female Nazi secret agent, Frau Beetz, who loved him.

Between history and fiction, in the struggle for Ciano's life and his diaries, an indictment of Hitler and Ribbentrop's treacheries, is also the son of a cockney and a Roman noblewoman. Carlo Rufus Williams joins the Resistance after the King and his generals abandon Rome to the Germans. With sensuous, leftist, aristocratic Mirta della Rovere, he fights back until a street attack provokes a Nazi massacre in reprisal.

The milieu of the poor writer, admirably sketched in the eighteenth century by the satirist Tobias Smollet, relives more than a hundred years later in George Gissing’s fiction. Another place, another time…and yet his masterly work resembles a media scenario of our own day, with the same contrast between the idealist and the pushy, the romantic and the cynic, the generous and the selfish, the thoughtful and the flippant, the stylist and the pedantic. Yes, its players seem to anticipate the main ingredients of the present literary world, from the brutality of the market to the hardship of intellectual life to the poverty of mass taste to such controversial issues as women’s rights. No wonder George Orwell regarded Gissing as one of the most fascinating Victorian novelists and New Grub Street as one of most poignant novels in the history of English literature.

Everybody is a conformist of some conformity, and so were the English upper class in the thirties as the winds of change challenged the dogmas of the Empire. A story of individual emotional struggle within the impositions of society towards the end of the Forsyte saga. A plot of love and conflict revolving around a Great War veteran and poet, his adoring fiancée, and a bigoted dandy: the unconventional Wilfrid Desert, the son of a lord, a loner who renounced Christianity for Islam when Arab fanatics threatened him at pistol point; the charming Dinny Cherrell, a patrician girl who loved him and was prepared to defy her world’s moral code for him; and the elegant horse breeder Jack Muskham, a formalist sticker who used all plausible means to ostracize him for bringing the country into disrepute.

Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869 - May 19, 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. In his novel titled "Seventeen" he describes the hilarious misadventures of a small town boy who falls head-over-heels in love with a beautiful stranger. This "A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family - Most Especially William" is a classic coming-of-age story set at the turn of the 20th century in America's heartland ... a warmer, simpler era before the first World War, when a boy's hopes and dreams and loves could be the center of his universe.