The moving abolitionist novel that fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852 and melodramatically condemned the institution of slavery through such powerfully realized characters as Tom, Eliza, Topsy, Eva, and Simon Legree.

This collection of Emerson's essays covers the contents of two volumes originally published in 1841 and 1844. Annotation. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called "the great and crescive self," he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Here is a collection of his classic essays, including the exhortation to "Self-Reliance"...

Lucy Larcom (1824 – 1893) was an American teacher, poet, and author. She was one of the first teachers at Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in Norton, Massachusetts, teaching there from 1854 to 1862. During that time, she co-founded Rushlight Literary Magazine, a submission-based student literary magazine which is still published. From 1865 to 1873, she was the editor of the Boston-based Our Young Folks, which merged with St. Nicholas...

Henry Adams (great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams) asserts that his conventional education was defective because it did not prepare him to live in a world transformed by the new science and technology. This autobiography provides an insightful exploration of the tumultuous age in which he lived.

Like few novels before it, The Woman in White thrilled readers across England when it debuted in 1860. It famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit road. Engaged as a drawing-master to beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his charming friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the...

The story of a gentleman in 18th century England marrying a servant girl, a challenge to the social hierarchy. This shows a typical representative of the middle class which had already challenged the aristocracy and was beginning to impose its ideal of Protestant respectability and hard work on England and the world.