Books in Penguin Twentieth-century Classics series

A witty, psychedelic, and telling novel of the 1960sRichard Fariña evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering-among other things-mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

In stories that draw heavily on her own life, Anzia Yezierska portrays the immigrant's struggle to become a "real" American, in such stories as "Yekl," "Hunger," "The Fat of the Land," and "How I Found America." Set mostly in New York's Lower East Side, the stories brilliantly evoke the oppressive atmosphere of crowded streets and shabby tenements and lay bare the despair of families trapped in unspeakable poverty, working at demeaning jobs, and coping with the barely hidden prejudices of their new land.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

An immaculately-observed social comedy that explores the boundaries between personal freedom and the demands of love Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women—women's rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine's mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father's life into a biography—impinge on hers with unexpected and intriguing consequences. Virginia Woolf's delicate second novel is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman's role and the very nature of experience. This edition of Night and Day includes a detailed introduction by Julia Briggs, which considers the key themes of the novel and its place in the tradition of social comedy, a map of central London of the period and notes.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Originally published in 1912, this novel was one of the first to present a frank picture of being black in AmericaMasked in the tradition of the literary confession practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this "autobiography" purports to be a candid account of its narrator's private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgement of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience, an African-American. Written by the first black executive secretary of the NAACP, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in its depiction of turn-of-the-century New York, anticipates the social realism of the Harlem Renaissance writers. In its unprecedented analysis of the social causes of a black man's denial of the best within himself, it is perhaps James Weldon Johnson's greatest service to his race.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A bold mix of realism, allegory, adventure, and progressive politics, this collection features Jack London’s most profound and moving literary works The Call of the Wild, London’s elemental masterpiece about a dog learning to survive in the wilderness, sees pampered pet Buck snatched from his home and set to work as a sled-dog during the Klondike Gold Rush. White Fang, set in the frozen tundra and boreal forests of Canada’s Yukon territory, is the story of a wolf-dog hybrid struggling to survive in a human society every bit as brutal as the natural world. This volume of London’s famed Northland novels also includes an early feminist story “The Night-Born,” and a pro-labor story “South of the Slot.” These works echo and enrich the themes of The Call of the Wild and White Fang with their unique emphases on the primordial, the instinctual, and the quest for social justice. London’s narratives in this volume focus on issues of continuing relevance to contemporary readers, including the value of the wilderness, animal rights, socioeconomic oppression, and gender inequity. This edition also includes an introduction by preeminent London scholar, Earle Labor, as well as a comprehensive biographical note on London's life and works by scholar and executive coordinator of the Jack London Society, Kenneth K. Brandt.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A master of narrative momentum and suspense, Zane Grey sweeps readers into his stories and makes them feel that things are out of control, that boundaries are being burst. In Riders of the Purple Sage, the most famous novel of the American West, Grey creates a hero of epic proportions, a villain of legendary evil and a world in which the landscape is rendered with such force that it seems to express thoughts and feelings, to become a character in its own right. Indeed, Riders of the Purple Sage derives much of its depth and power from passions whose forbidden and overwhelming nature cannot be expressed by human beings and are therefore embodied in the natural world. In his depiction of the relationship between Lassiter, the hero, and Jane Withersteen, Grey breaks other literary barriers: Jane, modelled on the heroines of the nineteenth-century novel, must come to terms with the values expressed by Lassiter - the harsh, "masculine" values of the twentieth century. Their struggles together represent the tumultuous changes society itself was confronting.

Based on historical people and real events, Miller's classic play about the witch hunts and trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror which Miller uses to reflect the anti-Communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the U.S. Reissue.