McTeague (1899) chronicles the demise of a San Francisco couple at the end of the nineteenth century. Inspired by an actual crime that was sensationalized in the San Francisco papers, it tells the story of charlatan dentist McTeague, his wife Trina, and their spiralling descent into moral corruption. Norris is often considered to be the ‘American Zola’, and this is one of the most purely naturalistic American novels of the nineteenth century. With its compelling portrayal of human nature at its most basic level, McTeague is a gripping and passionate tale of greed, degeneration, and death. It is also one of the first major works of literature to be set in California, and it provided the story for Erich von Stroheim’s classic of the silent screen, Greed..
Category: Fiction Classics
My Antonia
The Pit A Story of Chicago
Lady Chatterley’s Lover Cambridge Lawrence Edition
Mephisto
The Age of Innocence
When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to be married to her cousin May Welland, ‘that terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything’. As the consequent drama unfolds, Edith Wharton’s sharp ironic wit and Jamesian mastery of form create a disturbingly accurate picture of men and women caught in a society that denies humanity while desperately defending ‘civilization’..
Babbitt
George E. Babbitt, a conniving, prosperous real estate man from Zenith, Ohio, revels in his popularity, his success, and, especially, in the material rewards they bring. He bullies his wife, flirts with other women, and patronizes the less successful. But when his best friend is sent to prison for killing his wife, Babbitt’s middle-class complacency is shattered, and he rebels, seeking a more ‘meaningful’ life. His small revolt is quickly defeated, however, by public opinion and his own need for acceptance. Babbitt captures the flavor of America during the economic boom years of the 1920s, and its protagonist has become the symbol of middle-class mediocrity, his name an enduring part of the American lexicon..
If Not Now, When?
Sister Carrie
O Pioneers!
The first of her renowned prairie novels–a story that expresses Cather’s conviction that ‘the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman’. When Alexandra Bergson takes over the family farm after her father’s death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie..