A young boy in 19th-century London runs away from an unhappy home, finds employment in a wine factory, and becomes acquainted with a wide variety of characters in the city streets.

He was Sam Clemens, steamboat pilot, before he was Mark Twain, famous author. His better-known name originated with the lingo of navigation, and much of his writing was informed by his shipboard adventures on one of the world's great rivers. In this classic of American literature, Twain offers lively recollections ranging from his salad days as a novice pilot to views from the passenger deck in the twilight of the river culture's heyday. Under the...

A thrilling epic of a sea voyage and a complex novel of ideas. The Sea Wolf is a standard-bearer of its genre. The vivid story of a gentleman scholar's rescue and subsequent ordeal at the hands of a hunting schooner's brutal captain and devious crew. It remains one of Jack London's finest achievements.

Presents Stephen Crane's classic novel about Henry Flemming, a young Civil War Union soldier who experiences his first battle and then has to come to terms with his own fears and feelings of cowardice.

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

"Orphaned Jane Eyre endures an unhappy childhood, hated by her aunt and cousins and then sent to comfortless Lowood School. But life there improves and Jane stays on as a teacher, though she still longs for love and friendship. At Mr. Rochester's house, where she goes to work as a governess, she hopes she might have found them"--Publisher.

"A stranger with a troubled past, Silas Marner is new to the town of Raveloe. He cares only for money, which he make by weaving cloth. Totally alone, shunned by everyone in town, Silas's only comfort is his pile of gold. But when the gold is stolen. Silas's world turns upside down. And little does he know that the crime is only one in a chain of events that will change is life forever."