Based upon the actual incident, this is the story of Clyde Griffiths, an ordinary boy driven by passion and ambition into a tragic conflict with the conventions and inequities of society. Rising steadily toward his goal of wealth and social prestige, Clyde unexpectedly learns that Roberta, a factory girl with whom he had had an illicit love affair, is pregnant. Desperately entrapped, he kills her. He is arrested and brought to trial in a climax of...

Tells the stories of a mourning family remembering its past, a vicious gangster, a young pregnant woman searching for her child's father, and barnstorming pilots at an air show.

No American writer of the 19th century was more universally enjoyed and admired than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His works were extraordinary bestsellers for their era, achieving fame both here and abroad. Now, for the first time in over 25 years, Poems and Other Writings offers a full-scale literary portrait of America's greatest popular poet. Here are the poems that created an American mythology: Evangeline in the Forest Primeval, Hiawatha by the...

"With this volume (a companion to Collected Stories 1911-1937), The Library of America presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction, drawn from the more than eighty stories she published over the course of her career. Here, in settings familiar and exotic, are all of Wharton's characteristic qualities and themes: her candid exploration of relations between the sexes; her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes despairing, of social class...

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

Celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of "The Adventures of Augie March," and reflects the mid-twentieth-century's psychological turmoil from more inhibited times in a volume that also includes "The Victim" and "Dangling Man." Dangling man: Expecting to be inducted into the army to fight in World War II, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself...

In 1831, the then twenty-seven year old Alexis de Tocqueville, was sent with Gustave de Beaumont to America by the French Government to study and make a report on the American prison system. Over a period of nine months the two traveled all over America making notes not only on the prison systems but on all aspects of American society and government. From these notes, Tocqueville wrote "Democracy in America", an exhaustive analysis of the successes...