The Mysterious Stranger, published posthumously in 1916 and belonging to Twain's "dark" period, belies the popular image of the affable American humorist. At the time this work was written, Twain had suffered a series of painful physical, economic, and emotional losses. In this antireligious tale, he denies the existence of a benign Providence, a soul, an afterlife, and even reality itself. As the Stranger in the story asserts, "nothing exists; all is a dream."

Features stories focusing on the development and existence of the male, the trials and tribulations of adolescence, maturity, and old age. This book takes complicated emotional experiences and presents them clarity allowing readers to vicariously share the experience.

Novelist Harold Frederic (1856-1898) played a critical role in the development of realistic American fiction. His best work analyzes the narrow-mindedness of the small towns of his native upper New York State. Frederic's most famous novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), chronicles the life of an idealistic young Methodist minister who, as he falls under the influence of progressive ideas, becomes a skeptic. He comes to regard his old religion as intellectually and spiritually bankrupt, but in the process is nearly destroyed by those who condemn him for "going to the bad".

The classic novel The Ecstasy of Owen Muir is the story of what happens in 1940s America when an idealistically, fiercely honest young man, with no strong religious affiliation, marries a Roman Catholic woman. In this brilliantly comic and pungent tale, Lardner dissects the thought control of the McCarthy era, business ethics, racial intolerance, attitudes toward sex, the Manhattan nightclub set, judicial procedures, and other social phenomenon. The author is a former Hollywood screenwriter who won Academy Awards for Woman of the Year in 1942 and MASH in 1970.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) championed the belief that people of conscience were at liberty to follow their own opinion. In these selections from his writings, we see Thoreau the individualist and opponent of injustice. Civil Disobedience (1849), composed following Thoreau's imprisonment for refusing to pay his taxes in protest against slavery and the Mexican War, is an eloquent declaration of the principles that make revolution inevitable in times of political dishonor. Solitude, from his masterpiece, Walden (1854), poetically describes Thoreau's oneness with nature...

Written in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, English novelist, essayist, and iconoclast Samuel Butler (1835-1902) describes an imaginary visit to a topsy-turvy country called Erewhon (an anagram of "nowhere"), where it is a punishable offense to be physically ill, but where criminality and immorality are looked kindly upon as treatable diseases. The English church is pilloried in the system of "Musical Banks," whose currency nobody believes in but everyone pretends to value. Universities teach courses on how to say nothing at great length, and all machines have been banned...

Called the "Tenth Muse" by the ancients, Greece's greatest female lyric poet Sappho (ca. 610-580 B.C.E.) spent the majority of her life on the famed island of Lesbos. Passionate and breathtaking, her poems survive only in fragments, following religious conspiracies to silence her. This excellent translation includes Roche's brilliant essay, "Portrait of Sappho". Illustrations.

An autobiography of Frank Harris (1856-1931), an Irish writer and editor who founded Pearson's Magazine in the United States (1914-1918). It includes depictions of his sexual exploits with willing Victorian Age debutantes.