Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. It tells of the Joad family who travel West in search of the promised land, and find only broken dreams.

Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature

"The most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)." -Ezra Pound

Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of narrative poems, ingeniously linked by the common theme of transformation. Here a chaotic universe is subdued into harmonious order: animals turn to stone; men and women become trees and stars. Ovid himself transformed the art of storytelling, infusing these stories with new...

Throws light on William Wordsworth's creative process, and shows how the interdependence of brother and sister was a vital part in the writing of many of his great poems. This work helps trace the processes by which they were committed to paper.

After living abroad for 20 years, Henry James returned to his native America and travelled down the East Coast from Boston to Florida. This a journal describing his feelings on the rediscovery of the New York of his childhood, and the growth of modern commercial America. He muses on Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson; in Washington, he finds a cityscape devoid of spiritual symbols; in Richmond, thoughts of the civil war haunt him. Published in 1907, this journal also served as a farewell address to the country James would never live in again.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the...

The era in the United States between the Civil War and the end of World War I, was marked by increased nation-building, immigration, internal migration and racial tension. This period of time saw the rise of local colour literature, which described the peculiarities of regional life through "lived experiences." This anthology brings together works from every part of America, written by men and women of many cultures, ethnicities, ideologies and literary styles. The book features such familiar writers as Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, and introduces...