Washington Square follows the coming-of-age of its plain-faced, kindhearted heroine, Catherine Sloper. Much to her father's vexation, a handsome opportunist named Morris Townsend woos the long-suffering heiress, intent on claiming her fortune. When Catherine stubbornly refuses to call off her engagement, Dr. Sloper forces Catherine to choose between her inheritance and the only man she will ever truly love. Cynthia Ozick, in her Introduction to what she calls Henry James's "most American fiction," writes that "every line, every paragraph, every chapter of Washington Square] is...

One of America's most celebrated poets--and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923--Edna St. Vincent Millay defined a generation with her passionate lyrics and intoxicating voice of liberation. Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, this Modern Library Paperback Classics collection captures the poet's unique spirit in works like Renascence and Other Poems, A Few Figs from This-tles, and Second April, as well as in "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" and eight sonnets from the early twenties. As Milford writes in her Introduction, "These are the poems that made Edna St....

The complexity and range of Robert Louis Stevenson's short fiction reveals his genius perhaps more than any other medium. Here, leading Stevenson scholar Barry Menikoff arranges and introduces the complete selection of Stevenson's brilliant stories, including the famed masterpiece Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as "The Beach of Falesa" and Stevenson's previously uncollected stories. Arthur Conan Doyle has written that " Stevenson's] short stories are certain to retain their position in English literature. His serious rivals are few indeed."

This Modern Library...

Both an official chronicle and the highly personal memoir of the emperor Babur (1483-1530), The Baburnama presents a vivid and extraordinarily detailed picture of life in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Babur's honest and intimate chronicle is the first autobiography in Islamic literature, written at a time when there was no historical precedent for a personal narrative--now in a sparkling new translation by Islamic scholar Wheeler Thackston.

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes notes, indices, maps, and...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
'I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams, ' said Gore Vidal. 'He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors.'
His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War.
Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author&'s death in 1918, The...

Dickens's widely read satirical account of the Industrial Revolution.

Dickens creates the Victorian industrial city of Coketown, in northern England, and its unforgettable citizens, such as the unwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the factory owner Josiah Bounderby, and the result is his famous critique of capitalist philosophy, the exploitative force he believed was destroying human creativity and joy. This edition includes new notes to the text.

Hailed by Victor Hugo as 'the real epic of our age, ' Ivanhoe was an immensely popular bestseller when first published in 1819. The book inspired literary imitations as well as paintings, dramatizations, and even operas. Now Sir Walter Scott's sweeping romance of medieval England has prompted a lavish new television production.
In the twelfth century, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe returns home to England from the Third Crusade to claim his inheritance and the love of the lady Rowena. The heroic adventures of this noble Saxon knight involve him in the struggle between Richard the...

Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin s honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him. In her revision of the Garnett translation, Anna Brailovsky has corrected inaccuracies wrought by Garnett s drastic anglicization of the novel, restoring as much as possible the syntactical...

Edited and with an Introduction by Frank Kermode

A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood
Volpone by Ben Jonson
The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur
The Maid's Tragedy by John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
The lyrical, bloodthirsty tragedies and witty urban comedies in this original collection were first performed during the reign of King James I (1603--25). Though nearly four centuries old, they display...

Richard Howard's exuberant and definitive rendition of Stendhal's stirring tale has brought about the rediscovery of this classic by modern readers. Stendhal narrates a young aristocrat's adventures in Napoleon's army and in the court of Parma, illuminating in the process the whole cloth of European history. As Balzac wrote, "Never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this...one sees perfection in every detail."

With beautiful illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker.