John Steinbeck's cult novel The Grapes of Wrath was first published in America in 1939, received the Pulitzer Prize, and the author himself was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. To date, Grapes of Anger are included in many of the curricula of schools and colleges in the United States. During the Great Depression, a family of ruined farmers is forced to leave their home in Oklahoma....

The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and eventually comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness. A classic piece filled with comedy, its humour lies in its honest depiction of manners, education, marriage and money during the Regency era...

Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the Byronic master of fictitious Thornfield Hall. In its internalisation of the action—the focus is on the gradual unfolding of Jane's moral and spiritual sensibility, and all the events are coloured by a heightened intensity that was previously the domain...

Francis Scott Fitzgerald became the mouthpiece of ideas and the spokesman of the mental mood of youth of the 1920s. Through the lips of the hero of the novel published here - 'On This Side of Paradise' (1920) - he announced that a generation had come for whom 'all the gods died, all wars died out, all faith was undermined.' Fitzgerald was the first to inform the world about the beginning of the...

Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece of the German experience during World War I. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. This is the testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the...

Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to...

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life...

German troops triumphantly enter Paris. Ordinary Germans rejoice in unison with the top of the Reich, anticipating the imminent defeat of England and the establishment of German world domination. In such an atmosphere, either a hero or a madman can challenge the regime. Or someone who has nothing to lose. Having received a funeral for his only son, carpenter Otto Kwangel declares war on Nazism....

Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with...

Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon’s last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica-an unlucky creature who deeply loves him....

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. When...

The first volume of the most famous French novel of the 20th century was published over a hundred years ago, in November 1913. The novel was called 'Towards Swann', and its author Marcel Proust did not yet suspect that his offspring would grow into a cycle 'In Search of Lost Time', on which the writer would work until the last hours of his life. The reader will have to evaluate the second novel...