This is a biography of Joseph Paxton, horticulturist to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, architect of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and a great unsung heroe of the Victorian Age.

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...

When it first appeared in 1936, Bread and Wine stunned the world with its exposure of Italy's fascist state, depicting that regime's use of brute force for the body and lies for the mind. Through the story of Pietro Spina, who returns from fifteen years of exile to organize the peasants of his native Abruzzi into a revolutionary movement, this courageous work bears witness to the truth about any totalitarian regime--a warning as relevant today as it was in Mussolini's Italy.

Surprisingly tender and rich in humor, this twentieth-century masterpiece brings to life priests...

Beloved for generations as one of Robert Louis Stevenson's most thrilling adventure novels, Kidnapped tells the story of David Balfour, a shrewd and orphaned Lowlander, and Alan Breck Stewart, the brave and flamboyant Jacobite rebel. Together with its less familiar sequel, David Balfour, both novels constitute what many scholars consider to be Stevenson's greatest achievement in fiction. In this reinterpretation, Barry Menikoff questions the traditional understanding of these twin novels as mere adventure stories. He suggests instead that Stevenson wrote the volumes with a broader and more...

David Balfour: The Original Text was originally published by Huntington Library Press and is now distributed by Stanford University Press. This edition of David Balfour, which continues the epic story begun in Kidnapped, is based upon the original manuscript at Harvard University's Houghton Library, and presents--for the first time--the text as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it. The introductory essay by Barry Menikoff restores the novel to its rightful place, alongside Kidnapped, as Stevenson's finest achievement in fiction, while Menikoff's extensive notes and...