Books in Classic World Novels series

Her Prairie Knight By B. M. Bower Cowboy Classics The American frontier comprises the geography, history, folklore, and cultural expression of life in the forward wave of American westward expansion that began with English colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last mainland territories as states in the early 20th century. Enormous popular attention in the media focuses on the Western United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period sometimes called the Old West, or the Wild West. Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 1900s and Louis L'Amour from the mid 20th century. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the popularity of televised Westerns such as Bonanza. Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and has reached a new low in the 2000s. Most bookstores, outside of a few west American states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books.

Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the woods by their wicked stepmother. Lost, hungry and exhausted, they come across a strange house made of sweets. This is a wonderful sight for two hungry children, but they soon find out the owner is a wicked witch with her own ideas about what is tasty. The artwork combines illustration and collage techniques to bring this spooky, but quirky classic to life.

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch By Alice Caldwell Hegan Complete and New Edition Alice Hegan Rice, also known as Alice Caldwell Hegan, (January 11, 1870 – February 10, 1942) was an American novelist. Born in Shelbyville, Kentucky, she wrote over two dozen books, the most famous of which is Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. The book was a best seller in 1902 and is set in Louisville, Kentucky where she then lived. It was made into a successful play in 1903, and there were three Hollywood movie versions of it. The best known is the 1934 film starring Pauline Lord and W. C. Fields. Hegan was married to poet and dramatist Cale Young Rice. The house they lived in at 1444 St. James Court is still standing. She was a niece of author Frances Little (pseud.). Several of Alice Rice's earlier works were translated into German, French, Danish, and Swedish, and three (Mrs. Wiggs, Mr. Opp, and the Romance of Billy-Goat Hill) were dramatized. Both before and after she became a novelist she was favorably known also for short stories contributed to the magazines.

Lucy Honeychurch is a young adult—adult enough for a foreign adventure but young enough to require a chaperone. The chaperone is Lucy’s beloved but overly proper aunt Miss Charlotte Bartlett; the adventure is a trip to Florence. While the adventure may be foreign, the consequences are very English. The novel’s title is taken from the pair’s experience upon arrival at the Pension Bertolini. Promised a room with a view of the River Arno, they are shown to rooms that face the opposite direction. Offered an opportunity by the Emersons, a father and son of questionable social status, to switch rooms, they decline. Born in the late Victorian Era, Lucy is quite conscious of the social restraints of her class and must not be obligated to social inferiors, especially if one of them is a male of approximately Lucy’s age. Miss Bartlett will assure that does not happen. We find early on, however, that Lucy is inclined to test the boundaries. We see it first in her love of Beethoven and her tendency to interpret the music with a victorious flair in her playing. She is a somewhat accomplished pianist, as listeners note, but her selections and manner of playing some find off-putting. She also finds no need for a chaperone on some occasions. But on one of those occasions, the young Mr. Emerson happens to be nearby when she witnesses a murder—

From: WHY WE SHOULD READ, by S. P. B. Mais, (1921) We read HOWARD'S END for its unexpectedness, its elliptic talk, which so exactly hits off the characters he creates, for its manifestation of the Comic Spirit.... We read HOWARD'S END for the merciless skill which E. M. Forster shows in laying bare the soul of Leonard Bast, the clerk in the insurance office, who reads Ruskin and goes to the Queen's Hall in order to improve himself, who is dragged into the gutter by his loose-living mistress ("she seemed all strings and bell-pulls, ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that chinked and caught—").... We read HOWARD'S END for the equally merciless sketch of the millionaire husband of the heroine ("a man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can't recognise them, because you cannot connect. I've had enough of your unweeded kindness. I've spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled.... No one has ever told what you are—muddled, criminally muddled"). If we demand of modern novels that they should portray human character exactly as it is and that the author should have a definite standpoint for his philosopher of life, one need quote no further to prove that in HOWARD'S END these two desirable factors are to be found in profusion. Mr E. M. Forster is a conscious artist of a very high order and our only quarrel with him is that he writes too little.

The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa - H. Rider Haggard - World Classics. Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE (22 June 1856 – 14 May 1925) was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a founder of the Lost World literary genre. He was also involved in agricultural reform throughout the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential. Haggard's stories are still widely read today. Ayesha, the female protagonist of She, has been cited as a prototype by psychoanalysts as different as Sigmund Freud (in The Interpretation of Dreams) and Carl Jung. Her epithet "She Who Must Be Obeyed" is used by British author John Mortimer in his Rumpole of the Bailey series as the private name which the lead character uses for his wife, Hilda, before whom he trembles at home (despite the fact that he is a barrister with some skill in court). Haggard's Lost World genre influenced popular American pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy, Philip José Farmer, and Abraham Merritt. Allan Quatermain, the adventure hero of King Solomon's Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain, was a template for the American character Indiana Jones, featured in the films Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Quatermain has gained recent popularity thanks to being a main character in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Haggard was praised in 1965 by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill and sheer imaginative power" and a co-originator with Robert Louis Stevenson of the Age of the Story Tellers. The first chapter of his book People of the Mist is credited with inspiring the motto of the Royal Air Force (formerly the Royal Flying Corps), Per ardua ad astra.