Baree is born in a hollow log, half wolf and half dog, and grows up between the two - a trapper's daughter on one side, the pack on the other, and a wilderness that does not care which he chooses. Curwood was expelled from school, sold his first story at sixteen, and was paid by the Canadian government to travel the far north; he later gave up hunting entirely and campaigned for the animals he had shot.

A governess takes charge of two children in a country house and becomes convinced that two dead servants are still there and mean to have them. James gives you no way to settle whether she is right, and a century of readers has been unable to agree - the argument is the book. He dictated it aloud to a typist, which may explain the pressure of the voice.

A minor poet joins a farming commune of high-minded reformers and finds himself watching, rather than living - a magnetic agitator, a woman who worships him, and a girl with a secret nobody will discuss. Hawthorne had spent seven months at Brook Farm shoveling manure and losing his investment; he insisted the book was not about it, which convinced nobody. The narrator's coldness is the real subject.

Professor Challenger announces that dinosaurs survive on a plateau in South America and dares the Royal Society to prove otherwise; a reporter, a sportsman and a rival scientist go with him to find out. Doyle wrote it the year after he tired of Holmes, and gave the world its first lost-world expedition - every jungle-plateau story since is descended from this one.

Two hundred years after the Great War of 1914 severed the hemispheres, an officer of the Pan-American navy drifts across the forbidden thirtieth meridian and finds out what became of Europe. Burroughs failed at ranching, gold dredging and pencil sharpeners before deciding at thirty-five that he could write better than the magazines he was reading; this one, published in 1916, imagines the war going on for a century.

A house built on stolen ground, cursed by the man hanged for witchcraft to make the theft legal, and inhabited two centuries later by an impoverished spinster who must open a cent-shop in the front room. Hawthorne descended from a judge at the Salem trials and wrote this within a year of The Scarlet Letter, in the one happy stretch of his life. The curse works slowly, through property law.

Twenty-odd tales written in a damp parsonage where Emerson had lived before him - a scientist who erases his wife's birthmark, a man who steps out of his life for twenty years to watch it from across the street, a garden whose beauty is fatal. Hawthorne descended from a judge at the Salem witch trials and never got over it; the allegories here are his laboratory.

Fanny Price is sent at ten to live with rich relations who never let her forget the favor, and grows into the only person in the house with a working conscience. Austen gave her heroine no wit and no charm and dared the reader to prefer her anyway; the theatricals, the ha-ha and the estate in Antigua have kept scholars arguing for a century.

A painter, his friend, and a girl at Baden-Baden - one man asks the other to inspect her and report whether she will do as a wife, and the report changes both their lives. James wrote this in 1879 between the early tales and the great novels; it is his lightest study of the thing he never stopped examining, which is what happens when a man delegates his own judgment to somebody else.

Baree is born in a hollow log, half wolf and half dog, and grows up between the two - a trapper's daughter on one side, the pack on the other, and a wilderness that does not care which he chooses. Curwood was expelled from school, sold his first story at sixteen, and was paid by the Canadian government to travel the far north; he later gave up hunting entirely and campaigned for the animals he had shot.

A governess takes charge of two children in a country house and becomes convinced that two dead servants are still there and mean to have them. James gives you no way to settle whether she is right, and a century of readers has been unable to agree - the argument is the book. He dictated it aloud to a typist, which may explain the pressure of the voice.

A minor poet joins a farming commune of high-minded reformers and finds himself watching, rather than living - a magnetic agitator, a woman who worships him, and a girl with a secret nobody will discuss. Hawthorne had spent seven months at Brook Farm shoveling manure and losing his investment; he insisted the book was not about it, which convinced nobody. The narrator's coldness is the real subject.

Professor Challenger announces that dinosaurs survive on a plateau in South America and dares the Royal Society to prove otherwise; a reporter, a sportsman and a rival scientist go with him to find out. Doyle wrote it the year after he tired of Holmes, and gave the world its first lost-world expedition - every jungle-plateau story since is descended from this one.

Two hundred years after the Great War of 1914 severed the hemispheres, an officer of the Pan-American navy drifts across the forbidden thirtieth meridian and finds out what became of Europe. Burroughs failed at ranching, gold dredging and pencil sharpeners before deciding at thirty-five that he could write better than the magazines he was reading; this one, published in 1916, imagines the war going on for a century.

A house built on stolen ground, cursed by the man hanged for witchcraft to make the theft legal, and inhabited two centuries later by an impoverished spinster who must open a cent-shop in the front room. Hawthorne descended from a judge at the Salem trials and wrote this within a year of The Scarlet Letter, in the one happy stretch of his life. The curse works slowly, through property law.

Twenty-odd tales written in a damp parsonage where Emerson had lived before him - a scientist who erases his wife's birthmark, a man who steps out of his life for twenty years to watch it from across the street, a garden whose beauty is fatal. Hawthorne descended from a judge at the Salem witch trials and never got over it; the allegories here are his laboratory.

Fanny Price is sent at ten to live with rich relations who never let her forget the favor, and grows into the only person in the house with a working conscience. Austen gave her heroine no wit and no charm and dared the reader to prefer her anyway; the theatricals, the ha-ha and the estate in Antigua have kept scholars arguing for a century.

A painter, his friend, and a girl at Baden-Baden - one man asks the other to inspect her and report whether she will do as a wife, and the report changes both their lives. James wrote this in 1879 between the early tales and the great novels; it is his lightest study of the thing he never stopped examining, which is what happens when a man delegates his own judgment to somebody else.