Preface (Tamerlane and other poems 1827)--Letter to Mr.--(Poems-1831)-Preface (The Raven and other poems-1845) --O Tempora! O, Mores!--To Margaret--To Octavia--(etc.).

Washington Square: Originally published in 1880 as a serial in Cornhill Magazine and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it is a structurally simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, unemotional father. The portrait of a lady: When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy Aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to determine...

"Henry David Thoreau wrote four full-length works, collected here in a single volume. Interweaving natural observation, personal experience, and historical lore, they reveal his brilliance not only as a writer, but as a naturalist, scholar, historian, poet, and philosopher. "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is based on a boat trip taken with his brother from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire. "Walden" is at once a personal...

In his brief career -- he died at 32 -- Frank Norris introduced fresh and sometimes shocking elements into American fiction. Inspired by the naturalistic "new novel" developed in France by Zola and Flaubert, he adapted it to American settings, adding his own taste for exciting action and a fascination with the emerging sciences of economics and psychology. Vandover and the brute, set in a vividly described San Francisco, captures with harsh realism...

The first of three volumes presenting the writings of Willa Cather includes her early book of stories and first four novels. The troll garden: Cather's first short story collection, originally published in 1905, depicts characters who seek the realm of beauty and imagination, but are confronted by the vulgarity and brutality of American society. O pioneers!: In Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century, Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson leads...

Contents: Wise Blood - A Good Man is Hard to Find - The Violent Bear It Away - Everything That Rises Must Converge - Stories and Occasional Prose - Letters.

Contains three novels by nineteenth-century American author William Dean Howells in which he merges social commentary and comedy in his examination of the contrasts in life.