Modern Library

(A Modern Library E-Book)Our Mutual Friend is a satiric masterpiece about money. The last novel Dickens completed, and perhaps his most angry, it sounds all the great themes of his later work: the innocence and venality of the aspiring poor, the hollow pretensions of the nouveau riche, the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt everyone it touches....

Introduction by Ron PowersIncludes Newly Commissioned EndnotesArguably the first major American novel to satirize the political milieu of Washington, D.C. and the wild speculation schemes that exploded across the nation in the years that followed the Civil War, The Gilded Age gave this remarkable era its name. Co-written by Mark Twain and Charles...

This harrowing tale of a young girl in the slums is a searing portrayal of turn-of-the-century New York, and Stephen Crane's most innovative work. Published in 1893, when the author was just twenty-one, it broke new ground with its vivid characters, its brutal naturalism, and its empathic rendering of the lives of the poor. It remains both...

The Squatter and the Don, like its author, has come out a survivor, notes Ana Castillo in her Introduction. The fact that it has resurfaced after more than a century from its original publication is a testimony to its worthiness. Inviting comparison to Uncle Toms Cabin, Mara Amparo Ruiz de Burtons illuminating political novel is also an engaging...

Lady Chatterley's Lover was inspired by the long-standing affair between Frieda, Lawrence's aristocratic German wife, and an Italian peasant who eventually became her third husband; Lawrence's struggle with sexual impotence; and the circumstances of his and Frieda's courtship and the early years of their marriage. Constance Chatterley, married to...

A Major New TranslationThe Red and the Black, Stendhals masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorels quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an...