Medfield - Literary Fiction for Adults - Classics

Mark Twain's tale of a boy's picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work had done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous 'Duke' and 'Dauphin'. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on American politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.

From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century—a novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France.
“Brilliant and fiercely told.”—The New York Times

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and...

"This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world, and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battle not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? You will learn the answers to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in...

Barchester Towers, Trollope's most popular novel, is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire. The Chronicles follow the intrigues of ambition and love in the cathedral town of Barchester. It is the behavior of the individuals within a power structure that interests him. In this novel Trollope continues the story of Mr. Harding and his daughter, Eleanor, adding to his cast of characters that oily symbol of progress, Mr. Slope; the hen-pecked...

"Bleak House" (1853) is one of Dickens' most ambitious works and established his reputation as a mature novelist capable of writing about the most serious issues while maintaining a talent for the blackest humour and comic farce. Narrated in turns by ward of court, Esther Summerson and an unnamed narrator whose outlook both compliments Esther's and challenges it, the stories of Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually depleted under the...

Dostoyevsky was the son of an impoverished nobleman of Lithuanian origin. born in 1821 in Moscow, where his father held the post of resident doctor at a charity hospital. The family had small living quarters on the hospital grounds, and Fyodor became acquainted at an early age with misery, misfortune and death. Doctor Dostoyevsky, authoritarian and morose, believed in old fashioned discipline and strict religious upbringing, and Fyodor's childhood...

Kafka's last novel, The Castle is set in a remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats. The novel breaks new ground in exploring the relation between the individual and power, asking why the villagers so readily submit to an authority which may exist only in their collective imagination. Published only after Kafka's death, The Castle appeared in the same decade...

A handsome gift edition, this volume includes Dickens's immortal Christmas favorite, A Christmas Carol. Complete with original illustrations, a selection of some of Dicken's other Christmas stories, & an Introduction from John Irving, this book will make an ideal present for the holiday season.

A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas's classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d'If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible...