-The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.- Thus speaks W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk, one of the most prophetic and influental works in American literature. In this eloquent collection of essays, first published in 1903, Du Bois dares as no one has before to describe the magnitude of American racism and demand an end to it. He draws on his own life for illustration, from his early experiences teaching in the hills of Tennessee to the death of his infant son and his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.
Far...

Perhaps the greatest "cloak and sword" story ever written, The Three Musketeers, first published ion 1844, is a tale for all time. Pitting the heroic young d'Artagnan and his noble compatriots, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis against the master of intrigue, Cardinal Richelieu, and the quintessential wicked woman, Lady de Winter, Alexandre Dumas has created an enchanted France of swordplay, schemes and assignations. The era and the characters are based on historical fact, but the glittering romance and fast-paced action spring from a great writer's incomparable imagination. From the perilous...

H.G. Wells's science fiction classic, the first novel to explore the possibilities of intelligent life from other planets, it still startling and vivid nearly after a century after its appearance, and a half-century after Orson Wells's infamous 1938 radio adaptation. The daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary imperialism, technological holocaust and chaos, is central to the career of H.G. Wells, who died at the dawn of the atomic age. The survival of mankind in the face of "vast and cool and unsympathetic" scientific powers spinning out of...

This timeless Christian allegory has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery fo its own identity. In the Inferno, the first of the Comedy's three parts, Dante is conducted by the spirit of the classical poet Virgil through the nine circles of Hell on the initial stage of his arduous journey toward God.

In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps the most popular heroine in English literature. Countless scholars have tried to define the charm of the Alice books-with those wonderfully eccentric characters the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum, and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, Mock Turtle, the Mad Hatter et al.-by proclaiming that they really comprise a satire on language, a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children's...

Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonicera, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure storyis one of the most widely read romantic novels ofall time. In it the dashing young hero, EdmondDantes, is betrayed by his enemies and throwninto a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If -- doomedto spend his life in a dank prison cell. The storyof his long, intolerable years in captivity, hismiraculous escape, and his carefully wroughtrevenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigueand paints a vision of France -- a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France -- that has become immortal."

When the Time Traveller courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700--and everything has changed.In another, more utopian age, creatures seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony.The Time Traveller thought he could study these marvelous beings--unearth their secret and then retum to his own time--until he discovered that his invention, his only avenue of escape, had been stolen.H.G. Well's famous novel of one man's astonishing journey beyond the conventional limits of the imagination first appeared in 1895.It won him immediate recognition,...

Jules Verne Great excitement and awe greeted its publication in 1873, and today Around the World in Eighty Days remains Jules Verne's most successful novel. A daring wager by the eccentric and mysterious Englishman Phileas Fogg that he can circle the globe in just eighty days initiates this marvelous travelogue and exciting suspense story. Together with his manservant, Passepartout, Fogg makes a breathless world tour, overcoming wild misadventures and finding time to rescue a beautiful Indian maharani from a burning funeral pyre--all the while restlessly pursued by a bumbling detective called...

This is Edmond Rostand's immortal play in which chivalry and wit, bravery and love are forever captured in the timeless spirit of romance. Set in Louis XIII's reign, it is the moving and exciting drama of one of the finest swordsmen in France, gallant soldier, brilliant wit, tragic poet-lover with the face of a clown. Rostand's extraordinary lyric powers gave birth to a universal hero--Cyrano De Bergerac--and ensured his own reputation as author of one of the best-loved plays in the literature of the stage. This translation, by the American poet Brian Hooker, is nearly as famous as the...

The Bhagavad-Gita has been an essential text of Hindu culture in India since the time of its composition in the first century A.D. One of the great classics of world literature, it has inspired such diverse thinkers as Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and T.S. Eliot; most recently, it formed the core of Peter Brook's celebrated production of the Mahabharata.