Herman Finkelstein Collection (Library of Congress)

An unsuccessful traveling salesman finally confronts, in his early sixties, his shattered dreams.

A Black man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.

"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history," Arthur Miller wrote in an introduction to The Crucible, his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women...

Set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, this story of revolution, deception, and self-betrayal centers on Nostromo, a handsome Italian sailor, who, like Costaguana, is being consumed by secret guilt and corruption.

An imaginative twelve-year-old Georgia tomboy is jealous of her brother's upcoming wedding in this classic Southern novel.
Carson McCullers's classic The Member of the Wedding charmed generations of readers and became an award-winning play and a major motion picture. It tells the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's upcoming marriage....

Eighteen sketches of the island-hopping warfare in the South Pacific during World War II.

This drawing-room comedy is a modern verse play about the search for meaning, in which a psychiatrist is the catalyst for the action. "Eliot really does portray real-seeming characters. He cuts down his poetic effects to the minimum, and then finally rewards us with most beautiful poetry" (Stephen Spender).

Saratoga trunk unfolds the story of Clio Dulaine, an ambitious Creole beauty who more than meets her match in Clint Maroon, a handsome Texan with a head for business and an eye for beautiful young women. Together they do battle with Southern gentry and Eastern society, but in their obsession to acquire all they've ever wanted, they fail to realize they already have all they'll ever need ... each other.

A hundred-odd men, women, and children gathered at the rendezvous a few miles outside of Independence. They were solid, established folk, most of them, and they were leaving behind prosperous farms and businesses because they shared a dream about the rich lands in the West, where a man, his wife, and their young ones might make a better life and a new world more desirable than any Americans before them had ever known.

Joey Robinson is a thirty-five-year-old advertising consultant working in the urban jungle of Manhattan. One day, Joey decides to return to the farm where he grew up, and where his mother still lives. Accompanied by his newly acquired second wife and an eleven-year-old stepson, he begins to reassess and evaluate the course his life has taken. For three days, a quartet of voices explores the country air, relates stories, makes confessions, seeks solace,...