Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. The novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and the corrupting power of money.

From the Publisher: Young Major Heyward is assigned to escort Cora and Alice Munro through the dangerous frontier wilderness and deliver them safely to their father at Fort William Henry. But their guide, the evil Magua, leads the two women and their escorts into a trap. The frontiersman Hawkeye and his Mohican companions set out to rescue the kidnapped women, but the sly and clever Magua is the most murderous of enemies. To help students experience...

When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first...

"James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and...

Banished from England for seeking to marry against his father's wishes, Ivanhoe joins Richard the Lion Heart on a crusade in the Holy Land. On his return, his passionate desire is to be reunited with the beautiful but forbidden lady Rowena, but he soon finds himself playing a more dangerous game as he is drawn into a bitter power struggle between the noble King Richard and his evil and scheming brother John. The first of Scott's novels to address...

An orphan girl's progress from the custody of cruel relatives to an oppressive boarding school culminates in a troubled career as a governess. Jane's first assignment at Thornfield, where the proud and cynical master harbors a scandalous secret, draws readers ever deeper into a compelling exploration of the mysteries of the human heart. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative

Stowe's powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Denouncing the institution of slavery in dramatic terms, the incendiary novel quickly draws the reader into the world of slaves and their masters. Stowe's characters are powerfully and humanly realized in Uncle Tom, a majestic and heroic slave whose faith and dignity are never corrupted; Eliza and her husband, George, who elude slave catchers and eventually flee...

From the Publisher: Against the wishes of his widowed mother, young Henry Fleming enlists to fight for the Union in the Civil War. As he first travels from his New York farm to Washington, D.C. and then to a winter campsite in Virginia, he romanticizes battle and anticipates gaining glory. However, when Henry finally sees combat, he is terrified and horrified. He reacts in varying ways to war's intense psychological and physical stress. Largely, he...

Walter, a mild-mannered mouse, imagines himself as a number of daredevil heroes. One of Walter's dreams becomes a reality when he gets involved with a beautiful blonde and becomes the target of a gang of jewel thieves who believe he has their loot.

From the Back Cover: When orphaned, ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska to live on his grandparents' farm, he doesn't know what to expect. The Great Plains are so vast that he feels overwhelmed-marooned-blotted out. And what should he make of his new neighbors, the Shimerdas? They don't speak English, and their ways are foreign to him. Yet their fourteen-year-old daughter, Antonia, is pretty, high-spirited-and eager for Jim to teach her English....