Melville's classic story of whaling, romance of unusual adventure and eccentric characters, and a drama of heroic conflict. In New Bedford, Connecticut in the 1800s, a group of seamen board the whaling ship Pequod, captained by Ahab. They know they're out to harpoon whales; what they don't realize is that Ahab once lost a leg to the magnificent white whale Moby Dick, and that he'll risk anything, including himself and every member of his crew, to...

A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

This is the story of the savage, tormented foundling Heathcliff, who falls wildly in love with Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of his benefactor, and the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other. A book of great power and strength, it is filled with the raw beauty of the moors and an uncanny understanding of the terrible truths about men and women. It is an understanding made even more extraordinary by the fact that...

"Allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind"--P. [4] of cover.

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

An abridgement of Dickens's beloved tale of a miser who learns the true meaning of Christmas when three ghostly visitors review his past and foretell his future.

The play centers on the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century and the problem of guilt by association.

"William Golding's unforgettable classic of boyhood adventure and the savagery of humanity comes to this Classics Deluxe Edition with a new foreword by Lois Lowry. As provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, Lord of the Flies continues to ignite passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary boys marooned on a coral island has been labeled a...

The powerful drama of Willy Loman & his tragic end. Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has...

Young David is orphaned as a child, abandoned by a vicious stepfather and must learn to make a life for himself in Victorian England.