"The Hound of the Baskervilles" is considered to be one of the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes stories and one of the greatest mystery novels ever written. While most of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories take the form of shorter narratives, readers will delight in the fact that «The Hound of the Baskervilles» is a full-length novel instead. At the center of this novel is the investigation of the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville. Could t ...
"Taras Bulba" is the story of its title character, Taras Bulba, an old Ukrainian Cossack and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap, who journey to Zaporizhian Sich located in Ukraine to fight Polish nobles with fellow Cossacks. A romanticized historical novel, «Taras Bulba» is a story of great adventure and battle. ...
The fourth and last work chronologically in Cooper's Leather-stocking Tales, «Pioneers» is a historical novel that follows the later life of Natty Bumppo. Already introduced by the previous novels as the archetypal American frontiersman and friend to Indians, Natty now struggles with hunting and new societal laws that restrict the freedom of the wilderness he has always known. He finds allies of his rebellion in a local landowner's dau ...
The first novel of English magistrate Henry Fielding, «Joseph Andrews» was written in 1742 as a complete extension of the author's pamphlet «Shamela.» The latter contains an impressively coarse parody of «Pamela,» the Samuel Richardson novel that rewards a servant girl with marriage for protecting her virtue. Shamela, however, utilizes a coy and artificial modesty to procure for herself a husband of wealth. Fielding went on to write «Joseph ...
"Martin Eden" is Jack London's classic and tragic tale of its title character. Martin is in love with Ruth Morse, however as a common sailor from a working-class background, he feels that he is not good enough to win the hand of Ruth, who comes from a bourgeois family. Martin seeks to educate himself as a writer and lift up his status so that he may one day have his true love. Rich with the social theme of class struggle, «Martin Eden» ...
In the title of «Struggling Upward» the reader gains a sense of the type of story that he is in store for. As is common with the work of Horatio Alger Jr., «Struggling Upward» is the story of a young man's attempts to rise himself up from his bootstraps and make something of himself in this world. In this case, Luke Larkin, who through hard work, honesty, determination, and concern for others (the qualities consistently praised in Alger&apo ...
"Dead Souls" is the story of Chichikov, a young middle-class gentleman who comes to a small town with a dubious plan to improve his wealth and position in life. He begins by spending beyond his means on the premise that he can impress the local officials and gain standing and connections in the community that will give him the capacity to live easily into the future. At the heart of his plan is the idea of acquiring «dead souls» or more exp ...
Willa Cather's classic «My Antonia» is the story of the daughter of an immigrant family that sets out to farm the untamed prairie land of Nebraska in the late 19th century. Told to us from the perspective of the adoring Jim Burden, an orphan who comes to live at his grandparent's neighboring farm. «My Antonia» is an enduring American classic rich with the spirit that brought so many immigrants to this land in search of a better life an ...
"Crime and Punishment" is one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's most famous novels. First published in 1866, it is the story of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an impoverished St. Petersburg ex-student who plots to kill an elderly money-lender, Alena, and profit from her wealth. The murder however does not go as planned and Raskolnikov must suffer the disastrous moral and psychic consequences of his actions. As is common with Dostoyevsky's w ...
