Modern Library

NATIONAL BESTSELLER[A]n extraordinary book, a work of staggering virtuosity. With its publication, a giant world of literature has just grown twice as tall.--NewsdayFrom Ralph Ellison--author of the classic novel of African-American experience, Invisible Man--the long-awaited second novel. Here is the master of American vernacular--the rhythms of...

George Eliots Romola, writes Robert Kiely in his Introduction, embodies the authors wrestling with her own best theories of history and human nature as a creative experiment of the highest order. Set in Florence in 1492, a time of great political and religious turmoil, Eliots novel blends vivid fictional characters with historical figures such as...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's perfect comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as...

(A Modern Library E-Book)Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeNeither Edith Wharton nor E. M. Forster admired it, but Louis Auchincloss calls The Wings of the Dove 'perhaps the greatest of Henry James's novels.' Published in 1902, the novel represented something of a comeback for James, whose only...

Drawn from Melvilles own adolescent experience aboard a merchant ship, Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a bereft and damaged soul, who takes...

or, The Transformation: An American Tale and Other StoriesCalled a remarkable story by John Greenleaf Whittier and described by John Keats as very powerful, Wieland, Charles Brockden Browns disturbing 1798 tale of terror, is a masterpiece involving spontaneous combustion, disembodied voices, religious mania, and a gruesome murder based on a...