Considered one of the greatest works of Chinese literature, this five-part story charts the changing fortunes of the Jia family. It sets worldly events - love affairs, sibling rivalries, even murder - within the context of the Buddhis...

Hemingway's Classic Novel About Smuggling, Intrigue, and LoveTo Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling...

The first historical novel and an international bestseller. Sir Walter Scott was one of the bestselling novelists of the nineteenth century and is credited with establishing the historical novel. His first novel, Waverley (1814), te...

As his father lies dying, Joseph Wayne decides to trade his Vermont farm for a new life in California. Once established on his ranch, he comes to revere a huge tree as the embodiment of his father's spirit. Joseph's brothers and thei...

Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a powerful indictment of slavery in America. Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show how Ch...

Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling the author's ambitious claim that the work 'was done to last ...

With an Introduction by Randall Jarrell. Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak d...

A young boy in Hollywood struggles to comprehend his parents, sadly aging ex-movie stars who haven't a clue about bringing up children, and to make his own way in a bizarre world. Originally published in 1977, the novel takes place in...

First published in 1931, this classic psychological melodrama has been viewed as more of a social document in his tragic legend of the South than mere story. From Popeye, a moonshining racketeer with no conscience and Temple Drake, b...

A new edition of the classic selection of entertaining, poetic, and erotic stories ranges from lyrical love to high comedy and deals with such subjects as the exotic pleasures of Paris in the 1930s and a woman's awakening to her sexua...

An intense, psychologically charged domestic drama, The Return is a brilliant and haunting exploration of the insecurities that lie at the heart of human relationships. With a Foreword by Colm Tóibín. When successful businessman Al...

Pulitzer Prize winner and American master Anne Tyler brings us an inspired, witty and irresistible contemporary take on one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home...

One of the most enduringly popular of the Romantic poets, William Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and his belief in the importance of feeling. This volume brings together a rich se...

Djuna Barnes balked at tradition and revolted against the conventional linear development of plot with this slim volume, which has long been considered her masterpiece. The work is an investigation into fin de si'cle decadence and ali...

A classic work left unfinished by Edith Wharton has been brought to a successful completion using Wharton's own synopsis, as it chronicles the fortunes of five rich New York girls who travel to England in search of titled husban...

THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE takes place in St. Botolph's, Massachusetts, a fishing village in which a storm causes ferry pilot Leander Wapshot's boat to be damaged. His wife Sarah turns the ferry into a Floating Gift Shoppe, to Leander's di...

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, in a new edition commemorating its 75th anniversary  Seventy-five years ago, Graham Greene published The Power and the Glory, a moralist thriller that traces a line of influence ...

Robust tales of perilous adventure and animal cunning Includes Diable: A Dog, An Odyssey of the North, To the Man on the Trail, To Build a Fire, and Love of Life Out of the white wilderness, out of the Far North, Jack London, one of A...

In THE WINGS OF THE DOVE, Kate Croy, a penniless young Englishwoman, tries to arrange a marriage between her fiancT Merton Densher and the American heiress she has befriended, knowing that Millie, the heiress, has a fatal illness and ...

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into th...

Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, retur...

A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose wil...

After King Shahryar had his wife killed for cheating, he began to corrupt-then kill-one virgin a night, as revenge on womankind. Then he meets Scheherazade, who, night after night, saves her own life by telling him fantastical tales o...

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women. In the mid-1860s, Alcott wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories. She also produced wholesome stories for children, and after th...

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - 'Ragged Dick' was contributed as a serial story to the pages of ...

This volume presents three of Jane Austen's smaller works, treating readers to the author's timeless observations on life and love in nineteenth-century England. In Lady Susan, a beautiful and flirtatious widow seeks an advantageous s...

Elizabeth Bennet is Austen's most liberated and appealing heroine, and Pride and Prejudice has remained over most of the past two centuries Austen's most popular novel. The story turns on the marriage prospects of the five daughters o...

Three imaginative and innovative novels that reveal the true land of Oz Most people are familiar with the land of Oz by way of the classic 1939 film. But the film's basis was only the first of fourteen books about Oz in which Baum dev...

Few works of contemporary literature are so universally acclaimed as central to our understanding of the human experience as Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's famous trilogy. Molloy, the first of these masterpieces, appeared in Fren...

Saul Bellow evokes all the rich colors and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this acclaimed comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Hen...