A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fanatical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul. Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel,...

When the starving French masses rise in hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent government, both the guilty and innocent become victims of their frenzied anger. Soon nothing stands in the way of the chilling figure they enlist for their cause - La Guillotine - the new invention for efficiently chopping off heads. Charles Dickens' compelling portrait of the results of terror and treason, love and supreme sacrifice continues to captivate readers around...

A remarkably handsome youth, Dorian Gray, meets Lord Henry Wotton and is corrupted into a life of terrible evil. Granted eternal youth, Dorian Gray lives a wild, dissipated life while his portrait grows old and haggard. Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations,...

Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play is a fictionalization of his life that follows the broad outlines of it. The play has been translated and performed many times, and is responsible for introducing the word "panache" into the English language. Cyrano (the character) is in fact famed for his panache, and the play ends with him saying "MY PANACHE." just before his death....

William Crimsworth escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school. Also included in this edition is Emma, Charlotte Bronte's last, unfinished novel. Both works are drawn from the original Clarendon texts.

Called the most widely read English novel of the twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence's largely auto-biographical "Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise...

Set in late-nineteenth-century London, this literary precursor to today's espionage thriller follows an anarchist's desolation, which leads to his attempt to dynamite the Greenwich Observatory.

David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr. Murdstone; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora; and the magnificently impecunious Micawber, one of literature's...

The dramatic, brutal story of Harry Morgan, an honest boat owner who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who swarm the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

Set within the richly imagined confines of Puritan Boston, The Scarlet Letter is Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a strict religious community.