Literature Classics

The Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O’Connor
Featuring Francis Marion Tarwater, an orphan raised by his great uncle to carry on in the old man’s footsteps as a religious prophet, this novel is a funny, bizarre look at the South (FSG, $14).

Pnin
by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin tries to teach Russian language courses at a college very like Cornell in this highly-literary variation on the absent-minded professor. As he stumbles and bumps his way through American culture, he’s comic, a touch poignant, and thoroughly endearing (Random House, $12.95).

Mrs. Dalloway
by Viriginia Woolf
The life of one Clarissa Dalloway is crystallized into a single day as she prepares for a party. The result is an abyss of memory and psychological illumination (Harcourt, $13).

The Razor’s Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
This floating world of post WWII American expatriates populated by a glittering cast of characters spans a cross-section of society (Penguin, $14).

Giants in the Earth
by O.E. Rolvaag
A great classic of the immigrant experience. This is the story of a family’s efforts to make a life on the unforgiving plains of Nebraska at the end of the 19th century (Harper Collins, $13).

All the King’s Men
by Robert Penn Warren
The greatest of all American political novels. Drawing on Huey Long’s dirt-poor-to-governor life, Warren has fashioned an eloquent and gripping story of the changes in Louisiana as the old landed classes give way to that of the Snopes (Harcourt $15).

Light in August
by William Faulkner
A more straightforward book than many of his others, but still a great introduction to one of America’s greatest writers. The Faulknerian themes of race and class conflict are cast in the richest prose (Random House, $13.95).

Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A love story stretched over fifty-one years, nine months, and four days raises questions of fate and faith (Vintage, $14).

Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
Still vital after all this time, Rabbit’s story is a great way to understand our culture at mid-century. Rabbit Angstrom, the faded athlete and failing husband is an everyman striving to do right but remaining ultimately all too human (Random House, $14.95).

Time Will Darken It
by William Maxwell
When Austin King’s distant Southern relatives visit him in Illinois they set in motion events that will threaten everything he holds dear. This quiet domestic drama is masterfully restrained even in its bitter truths (Random House, $15).

So Long, See You Tomorrow
by William Maxwell
Set in Illinois in the period between the two world wars, this lyrical and carefully constructed novel explores how we understand the past and what we owe to those we have known (Random House, $11).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
In post-Katrina America, being “sold down the river” takes on new meaning. Stowe’s controversial 19th century novel forever changed the lexicon of race in America, but more importantly its political and emotional impact remains relevant (Random House, $8.95).

A Death in the Family
by James Agee
Jay Follett returns home to see his father who he believes is dying. His father does not die, but as Jay travels home to his wife and son he is killed in a car accident. Agee’s beautiful last novel shifts back and forth in time and between the lives of those left behind to create a powerful but tender story (Random House, $13).

The Day of the Locust
by Nathaniel West
West’s grotesque about Hollywood artifice and ambition remains shockingly relevant more than 60 years later. The Day of the Locust is the single great Hollywood novel (Penguin, $6.95).

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Yates’ novel of American ambition as it turns to disillusion follows April and Frank Wheeler as they desperately seek to differentiate themselves from the blasé 1950s suburban world in which they live (Random House, $14.95).

The Reef
by Edith Wharton
A social novel that turns on the triangulations of three characters living in France, The Reef was Wharton’s most personal work (Simon & Schuster, $14).

O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather
Set in 19th century Nebraska, Cather’s classic novel about strong and fiercely independent Alexandra Bergson conveys both the harsh realities of life on the plains and the promise settlers pursued as they pushed west (Random House, $9).