Ragged Dick
or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks
Written by Horatio Alger
Introduction by David K. Shipler

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: September 13, 2005
Price: $11.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7358-7 (0-8129-7358-5)

“Alger was perhaps American Capitalism’s greatest and most effective propagandist.”—Richard Wright

Written to inspire schoolboys to strive for “honesty, industry, frugality, and a worthy ambition,” the novels of Horatio Alger (1832–99) are infused with great humanity, broad humor, and a surprisingly sophisticated view of Gilded Age propriety. Central to Alger’s philosophy is... Read more >

Never Come Morning

Written by Nelson Algren
Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: November 5, 2002
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-58322-279-9 (1-58322-279-0)

Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author’s only romance, the novel concerns Brun Bicek, a would-be pub from Chicago’s Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. “It is an unusual and brilliant book,” said The New York Times. “A... Read more >

Winesburg, Ohio

Written by Sherwood Anderson
Introduction by John Updike

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: March 2, 1999
Price: $8.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75313-8 (0-375-75313-3)

Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction--evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an... Read more >

Winesburg, Ohio

Written by Sherwood Anderson

Format: Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: March 1, 1995
Price: $5.95
ISBN: 978-0-553-21439-0 (0-553-21439-X)

Sherwood Anderson's timeless cycle of loosely connected tales--in which a young reporter named George Willard probes the hopes, dreams, and fears of the solitary people in a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--embraced a new frankness and realism that ushered American literature into the modern age. Read more >

Cassandra at the Wedding

Written by Dorothy Baker
Afterword by Deborah Eisenberg

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: August 21, 2012
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-601-6 (1-59017-601-4)

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent... Read more >

Young Man with a Horn

Written by Dorothy Baker
Afterword by Gary Giddins

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: September 11, 2012
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-577-4 (1-59017-577-8)

Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn’t matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of... Read more >

Black Thunder
Gabriel's Revolt: Virginia, 1800
Edited by Anna Bontemps

Format: Trade Paperback, 248 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: April 1, 1992
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6337-8 (0-8070-6337-1)

“Written in 1936 and based on an actual slave revolt, this critically acclaimed novel celebrates slave Gabriel Prossier’s struggle to end racial oppression.” — Publishers Weekly

“Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 slave revolt allowed Bontemps to warn of the rebellion that would come of poverty and racial oppression. This metaphor of revolution is at... Read more >

The Outward Room

Written by Millen Brand
Afterword by Peter Cameron

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: October 19, 2010
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-359-6 (1-59017-359-7)

The Outward Room is a rediscovered classic of American literature, a book about a young woman’s journey from madness to self-discovery that is as immediate and moving today as when it first appeared in 1937. Having suffered a nervous breakdown after her younger brother’s death in a car accident, Harriet Demuth... Read more >

Tarzan of the Apes

Written by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Afterword by Gore Vidal
Introduction by James Taliaferro

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: February 11, 2003
Price: $10.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6706-7 (0-8129-6706-2)

The first and best of the Tarzan novels, of which Edgar Rice Burroughs eventually wrote several dozen, Tarzan of the Apes remains one of the signature stories of American popular literature, as readable as it is famous. Tarzan himself, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, is “the best known character... Read more >

The Rise of David Levinsky

Written by Abraham Cahan
Introduction by Seth Lipsky

Format: Trade Paperback, 556 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: November 13, 2001
Price: $27.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75798-3 (0-375-75798-8)

The Rise of David Levinsky, written by the legendary founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, is an early Jewish-American classic. According to the scholar Sam B. Girgus, "The novel is more than an important literary work and cultural document. It forms part of the traditional ritual of renewal of... Read more >

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories

Written by James M. Cain

Format: Hardcover, 632 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: July 22, 2003
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-41438-1 (0-375-41438-X)

These three classics from the master of the noir novel, along with five otherwise unavailable short stories, are electric with the taut narrative voice, the suspense, and the explosive violence and eroticism that were James M. Cain’s indelible hallmarks.

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s first novel—tried for obscenity in Boston, the... Read more >

Three by Cain
Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, The Butterfly
Written by James M. Cain

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 14, 1989
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72323-3 (0-679-72323-4)

All three books are written with an enduring view of the dark corners of the American psyche. Cain hammered high art out of the crude matter of betrayal, bloodshed, and perversity. Read more >

Alexander's Bridge

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: August 28, 2012
Price: $11.00
ISBN: 978-1-61219-105-8 (1-61219-105-3)

The characteristic themes of Cather’s mature work are already present in her debut novella, an evocation of a tragic love triangle.

Bartley Alexander, renowned engineer of bridges, is a man with a past who “looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look.” Discovered by his mentor “sowing wild oats in... Read more >

April Twilights and Other Poems

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: March 26, 2013
Price: $13.50
ISBN: 978-0-307-96146-4 (0-307-96146-X)

Before Willa Cather went on to write the novels that would make her famous, she was known as a poet, the most popular of her poems reprinted many times in national magazines and anthologies. Her first book of poetry, April Twilights, was published in 1903, but Cather significantly revised and expanded... Read more >

Collected Stories

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 1, 1992
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73648-6 (0-679-73648-4)

In these nineteen stories Cather examines the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; the ways in which the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather... Read more >

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 16, 1990
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72889-4 (0-679-72889-9)

There is something epic--almost mythical--about this sparsely beautiful novel, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of... Read more >

A Lost Lady

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 16, 1990
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72887-0 (0-679-72887-2)

In this masterpiece of nuance and revelation, Cather's portrait of Mrs. Forrester--through the eyes of her aging husband; Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as a man; and the town of Sweet Water--is something like an answer to Madame Bovary, a lady... Read more >

Lucy Gayheart
Reissue
Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 26, 1995
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72888-7 (0-679-72888-0)

In this haunting 1935 novel, Cather performs a series of crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a... Read more >

My Antonia

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 15, 1994
Price: $10.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74187-9 (0-679-74187-9)

On one level, My Antonia is a straightforward narrative, written in limpid prose of uncanny descriptive accuracy, about the struggles endured by a family of immigrant pioneers and the small community that surrounds them on the unsettled Nebraska plains. On another, it is a novel that represents a perfect marriage of... Read more >

My Antonia

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: January 1, 1994
Price: $4.95
ISBN: 978-0-553-21418-5 (0-553-21418-7)

An unconventional novel of prairie life, My Antonia tells the story of a remarkable woman whose strength and passion epitomize the pioneer spirit. Antonia Shimerda returns to Black Hawk, Nebraska, to made a fresh start after eloping with a railway conductor following the tragic death of her father. Accustomed to living... Read more >

My Mortal Enemy

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 112 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 31, 1990
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73179-5 (0-679-73179-2)

Myra Henshawe is a young woman who gave up a fortune to marry for love. This worldly, sarcastic, and even wicked woman may have been destined for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to... Read more >

O Pioneers!

Written by Willa Cather
Introduction by Elaine Showalter

Format: Hardcover, 216 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: September 6, 2011
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-70091-9 (0-307-70091-7)

The novel that first made Willa Cather famous—a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman—in a handsome hardcover volume.

No other work of fiction so vividly evokes the harsh beauty and epic sweep of the Nebraska prairies that Cather knew and loved. The heroine... Read more >

O Pioneers!

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 1, 1992
Price: $9.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74362-0 (0-679-74362-6)

O Pioneers! is considered Cather's first great novel and to many remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier--and the transformation of the people who settled it. At once a sophisticated... Read more >

O Pioneers!

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: March 1, 1989
Price: $4.95
ISBN: 978-0-553-21358-4 (0-553-21358-X)

O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier -- and the transformation of the people who settled it... Read more >

One of Ours

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 5, 1991
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73744-5 (0-679-73744-8)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, in One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, Cather creates a canny... Read more >