The first social expose in fiction to render "how the other half lives," Stephen Crane's Maggie is one of the most powerful depictions of the urban poor of its time. As a reviewer stated shortly after the work's appearance in 1893: "Maggie is a study of life in the slums of New York, and of the hopeless struggle of a girl against the horrible conditions of her environment; and so bitter is the struggle, so black the environment, so inevitable is the end, that the reader feels a chill at his heart."

Poorly received when first published in 1857, The Confidence Man is now considered Herman Melville's "most nearly perfect work," and one that occupies a central place in the American literary tradition of masquerade and trickery.
Set on April Fool's Day aboard a Mississippi steamer, this powerful and engaging novel, through the conversations of the confidence man (who may be looked on as the Devil or God), explores America and American values.
Part satire, part hoax, The Confidence Man is also a dark look at the nothingness lurking beneath our beliefs and assumptionsa look at a...

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,...

The Salem witch trials, a shameful episode in early New England history, provided a salient theme for several nineteenth-century American writers, including John Greenleaf Whittier and John William De Forest. This book deals with the hysteria and scape-goating that surrounded the trials.

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.

The women of Athens concoct a daring scheme: penetrate the male-dominated Assembly disguised as men and vote themselves into power, after which they will overturn the old laws and inaugurate a new society where all are equal and where property and sex, too is shared. This new translation of Aristophanes' last extant play recaptures the spirit, the bawdiness, and the brilliance of this rollicking farce, which is at the same time a profound critique of contemporary Greek customs and manners.

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.