This landmark book is a founding work in the literature of black protest. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) played a key role in developing the strategy and program that dominated early 20th-century black protest in America. In this collection of essays, first published together in 1903, he eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind. He also charges that the strategy...

“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. Born a slave circa 1818 (slaves weren't told when they were born) on a plantation in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write. This book calmly but dramatically recounts...

First performed in 1895, "An Ideal Husband" is Oscar Wilde's classic and much-loved comedic drama. The play tells the story of an up-and-coming politician, Sir Robert Chiltern, who tries to hide his secret past from his judgmental wife and the blackmail scheme he is forced to participate in to keep that secret quiet. Lady Chiltern has a very particular idea of what makes the "ideal husband" which leaves her with little tolerance for Sir Robert's all...

Lysistrata and Other Plays centers a disgruntled woman whose attempt to end a war takes the battle from an open field to the soldier's bedroom. Wives from both camps deny their husbands basic affection in an effort to quell the violence. Set during the Peloponnesian War, the women of Greece, led by Lysistrata, create a plan to stifle the conflict between Athens and Sparta. Together, they agree to stage a sex strike, refusing to sleep with their husbands...

First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...

A Cinderella type of classic romance story told by George Bernard Shaw.

Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, in the London of the late 1300s, a band of men and women from all walks of life have gathered to begin a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. To relieve the tedium of the journey, the host of the inn proposes that each of the pilgrims tell a favorite story, promising that the best storyteller will be treated to a fi ne dinner on the group's return to Southwark.
So begins one of the earliest

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Anthony Patch expects to inherit millions from his grandfather in the 1920s, and when he and his wife spend without restraint, they do not receive the inheritance.

Darkly fascinating short novel depicts the struggles of a doubting, supremely alienated protagonist in a world of relative values. Seminal work introduced moral, religious, political and social themes that dominated Dostoyevsky's later masterworks. Constance Garnett's authoritative translation is reprinted here, with a new introduction. A minor official brutally scrutinizes himself and decides to go "underground, " away from society. This is a strange...