Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully written Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his parents, all but rejected by his wife, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It's only when America enters the First World War that Claude finds...

Originally published in hardcover in 1972, A Day No Pigs Would Die was one of the first young adult books, along with titles like The Outsiders and The Chocolate War. In it, author Robert Newton Peck weaves a story of
a Vermont boyhood that is part fiction, part memoir. The result is a moving coming-of-age story that still resonates with teens today.

MY ANTONIA is the wistful tale of an immigrant girl from Bohemia, who has settled in Nebraska. Narrated by Antonia's childhood friend Jim Burden, the novel draws heavily upon Willa Cather's own formative years, as well as, through the persona of Jim, Cather's experience of New York, where she worked as Editor of the MCCLURE magazine. MY ANTONIA is the third in a sequence of Cather's works which deal with immigrant settlers in the USA. Writing as a...

Author of 27 novels, Joyce Carol Oates has won a National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Readers around the world marvel at her ability to trace the subtle dynamics at work in the modern American family. Judd is the youngest of the four Mulvaney children--three boys and a girl--who grow up on their parents' lush farm in upstate New York. In his childhood, Judd is swept...

Proud of Their Heritage and Sustained by Their Faith, They Came to Tame a New Land She had promised herself that once they left the fjords of Norway, she would not look back. After three long years of scrimping and saving to buy tickets for their passage to America, Roald and Ingeborg Bjorklund, along with their son, Thorliff, finally arrive at the docks of New York City. It was the promise of free land that fed their dream and lured them from their...

Upon encountering the limping Ethan Frome, a visitor becomes curious about the striking man's back story. Using extended flashbacks, author Edith Wharton paints a picture of a man who continually sacrifices his aspirations in order to care for the needy people in his life. After abandoning his goal of higher education to assist his ailing parents on their farm, Ethan's return to Starkfield results in a loveless marriage of service to Zeena, an older...

The spirited daughter of Bohemian immigrants, Antonia must adapt to a hard existence on the desolate prairies of the Midwest. Enduring childhood poverty, teenage seduction, andfamily tragedy, she eventually becomes a wife and mother on a Nebraska farm. A fictional record of how women helped forge the communities that formed a nation.

During her junior year basketball season, D.J. faces the dual challenges of college recruiting and romance.

Young newlywed Alice Bullock, left on an Iowa farm with only her mother-in-law for company after her husband joins the Union Army, discovers her own hidden strengths and finds unlikely sources of support after she is accused of murder.