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."

In his quest for a truly native idiom, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) incarnated the American geography and its people in a new and transcendent poetic form. His monumental work, Leaves of Grass, celebrates sexuality, gender equality, and the astonishing beauty of the everyday. For Whitman, "The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science and to common lives, endowing them with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to real things, and to real things only."

This complete edition of Leaves of Grass,...

Features two acclaimed short works by Henry James: The Turn of the Screw, a psychological thriller; and The Lesson of the Master, a tale of the young writer Paul Overt.

Esther, a young New York socialite and artist raised without religion, falls in love with Episcopal clergyman Stephen Hazard, but she cannot embrace his Christianity and remain true to herself.

In this remarkable work, master story-teller Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) builds on known scientific truths to propound a universe governed by the immutable laws of attraction and repulsion, i.e., expansion and a return to unity. The irascible, vindictive God of the Old Testament and the Deists' Master Clockmaker are routed by Poe's pantheistic World Spirit who, through the force of expansion, is diffused throughout his creation. Moreover, we humans are all part of this universal spirit and each of us is his own god. Published after his death, as Poe desired, Eureka remains a startlingly...

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...