The first novel of Conrad's impressive list of works, «Almayer's Folly» revolves around the Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer and his life in the Borneo jungles in the late 19th century. Spurred by his desire for riches, he marries the adopted Malayan daughter of Captain Lingard, an affluent man who then requires Almayer to run his trading post in Sambir, in the Borneo jungles. While his chances of inheriting Lingard's wealth have incre ...
"The Lost World" is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of fantasy. Two scientists, a big-game hunter and a journalist set off to the wilds of South America and the Amazon in search of prehistoric beasts. There, high atop an Amazonian plateau they find an amazing land of strange and dangerous ancient creatures. «The Lost World» is a classic tale of science-fiction adventure that has inspired many successive works and is considered by ...
The first novel written by the author of «Jane Eyre,» «The Professor» is a story about the life of the resilient William Crimsworth. An English orphan raised by coldly aristocratic uncles, he rejects a life as a clergyman to work in his brother's mill in Yorkshire. Treated abominably in his tedious clerkship, Crimsworth escapes to Belgium and begins teaching in a boys' school. There he eventually meets the headmistress of a neighboring ...
"Betty Zane" is the biographical story of Elizabeth «Betty» Zane, a hero of the American Revolutionary War and a direct Aunt of the author Zane Grey. While under siege at Fort Henry by American Indian Allies of the British, Betty volunteers to venture out of the fort to retrieve supplies for the battle. Because she is a woman the opposing forces let her pass out, and unaware of what she is carrying, back into the fort. «Betty Zane» is a cla ...
Despite a decreasing popularity throughout his career, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) has become one of the most notable and respected English novelists of the Victorian Era. His penetrating novels on political, social and gender issues of his day have placed him among such nineteenth century literary icons as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Trollope penned 47 novels in his career, in addition to various short stories, travel books ...
Jean Webster (1876-1916) was an American novelist, playwright, and social activist. During the start of the twentieth century (1912), Webster wrote «Daddy-Long-Legs», an epistolary, best-selling novel that she developed into a play. It met with much success, and the characters were sold as dolls, the money from which going to charities to help fund orphan adoptions. In 1915, Webster published the sequel, «Dear Enemy». Written in the same epistol ...
First published in 1865, «Hans Brinker» is a beautiful children's story about a hard-working, honorable Dutch boy who faces serious challenges in his family's poverty. While he greatly desires to enter a big ice-skating race with his sister Gretel, Hans is much more concerned about his father, a man injured from a fall off of a dike and in need of surgery. When Hans learns of a very brusque, expensive doctor who may be able to treat hi ...
The second work of the Tarzan series, «The Return of Tarzan» follows the Lord of the Jungle from one continent to the next as he goes from America to Europe to Africa, encountering personalities of varying morality. Tarzan becomes entangled with Russian spies and French counts, blackmail and murder, kidnapping and intrigue, all the while in love with Jane Porter, who is engaged to marry another man. This 1915 work follows the aristocratic jungle ...