AMERICAN CLASSIC – serie

When O-lan, a servant girl, marries the peasant Wang Lung, she toils tirelessly through four pregnancies for their family's survival. Reward at first is meagre, but there is sustenance in the land - until the famine comes. Half-starved, the family joins thousands of peasants to beg on the city streets. It seems that all is lost, until O-lan's desperate will to survive returns them home with undreamt of wealth. But they have betrayed the earth from which true wealth springs, and the family's money breeds only mistrust, deception - and heartbreak for the woman who had saved them. The Good Earthis a riveting family saga and story of female sacrifice - a classic of twentieth-century literature.

Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II. But this time they are fighting not the Germans, but The End. Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America post WWII: the absurdity of their politics, the decline of their society and their great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of their business and culture – with the same ferocious humour as Catch-22.This novel is a stunning achievement; a chilling, darkly funny depiction of the moral collapse of the Western world.

In Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old girl without money or connections, ventures forth from her small town in search of a better life in booming, turn-of-the-century Chicago. The chronicle of Carrie's rise from obscurity to fame - and the effects of her progress on the men who use her and are used in turn - aroused a storm of controversy and debate upon its debut in 1900. The author's non-judgmental portrait of a heroine who violates the contemporary moral code outraged some critics and elated others; in fact, Dreiser had to fight against censorship in order to even get Sister Carriepublished. And it was not until 1981 that a completely unaltered edition was available. Sister Carriewas a movement away from the emphasis on morals of the Victorian era and focused more on realism and the base instincts of humans. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, Dreiser gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing. A century later, Dreiser's compelling plot and realistic characters continue to fascinate a whole different generation of readers.

A bestseller when it was originally published nearly a century ago, Wharton's first literary success was set amid the previously unexplored territory of fashionable, turn-of-the-century New York society, an area with which she was intimately familiar. The tragic love story reveals the destructive effects of wealth and social hypocrisy on Lily Bart, a ravishing beauty. Impoverished but well-born, Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. Her downfall begins with a romantic indiscretion, intensifies with an accumulation of gambling debts, and climaxes in a maelstrom of social disasters. More a tale of social exclusion than of failed love, The House of Mirthreveals Wharton's compelling gifts as a storyteller and her clear-eyed observations of the savagery beneath the well-bred surface of high society.