A Bear Called Paddington tells, in eight self-contained chapters, how a small bear from Darkest Peru comes to live with an ordinary London family. Mr. and Mrs. Brown are at Paddington station to meet their daughter Judy, home from school for the holidays, when Mr. Brown notices a bear in a battered, wide-brimmed hat sitting on a suitcase marked Wanted on Voyage.
Theme
Home Exile
96 works in the library take up home exile, from The Odyssey to The Art of the Commonplace.
Works
A Model of Christian Charity is a lay sermon or discourse that John Winthrop composed in 1630 for the company of Puritan emigrants he was leading from England to Massachusetts Bay. The surviving heading says it was written in his passage across the Atlantic, and it has traditionally been pictured as preached aboard the flagship Arbella, though some historians think it was delivered before the fleet sailed or circulated in manuscript.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter.
A View from the Bridge is set among the Italian-American longshoremen of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and is framed by the commentary of Alfieri, a neighbourhood lawyer who acts as a chorus and who knows from the start that the story will end in blood. Eddie Carbone, a hard-working dock labourer, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine, whom they have raised.
Across Five Aprils follows the Creighton family of Jasper County in southern Illinois through the Civil War, from April 1861 to April 1865, as seen by the youngest son, Jethro, who is nine when the story opens. The family farm is worked by Matt and Ellen Creighton and their grown and growing children: John, a married son with a family of his own nearby; Bill, thoughtful and gentle, the brother Jethro loves best; Tom, eager for adventure; Jenny, close to Jethro in spirit; and their cousin Eb Carron, raised in the household.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel about a real man who was born in Africa around 1710, enslaved in Massachusetts, and died free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Its ten chapters carry dates.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie is the steel manufacturer's own story of his life, written mostly in summers at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands after his retirement and left unfinished when the First World War began in August 1914. His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, contributes a preface, and Professor John C. Van Dyke, who arranged the manuscript, adds an editor's note and footnotes; the book appeared in 1920, the year after Carnegie's death.
Botchan is a comic first-person novel about a hot-tempered, stubbornly honest young man from Tokyo who spends a few months teaching mathematics in a provincial middle school and cannot bear the scheming he finds there. The narrator is never named; the old family servant Kiyo calls him Botchan, roughly 'young master', which this translation renders as Master Darling.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is an anthology of Irish fairy lore, ghost stories, legends and comic tales chosen and introduced by the young W. B. Yeats. Rather than collecting stories himself, Yeats gathered the best versions already printed by nineteenth-century Irish writers and folklorists: Thomas Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Samuel Lover, Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, Letitia Maclintock, Douglas Hyde and others, along with poems by William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Edward Walsh and Yeats himself.
Heidi, in Elisabeth P. Stork’s public-domain English translation, tells of a small orphan brought to live with her reclusive Alm-Uncle high in the Swiss Alps, then carried away to Frankfurt’s closed rooms before homesickness and providence return her to mountain air, goats, and fir trees. Johanna Spyri’s novel joins outdoor joy to serious care for the sick, the lonely, and the hard-hearted.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
I Am Prepared to Die is Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Facing charges that could lead to death, Mandela uses the courtroom not primarily to plead for mercy but to explain the political history and moral logic of resistance to apartheid.
I Will Fight No More Forever is the message of surrender that Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce sent to General Oliver O. Howard and Colonel Nelson A. Miles on 5 October 1877, at the end of the siege at the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana Territory. Since June the non-treaty Nez Perce bands, some 750 people including many women, children, and elderly, had retreated more than a thousand miles from Idaho, through the Bitterroot Mountains, across Yellowstone, and north toward refuge in Canada, fighting a series of engagements with the army along the way.
In Patagonia is an account of Chatwin's journey through the southern tip of South America in the mid-1970s, told in 97 short, numbered chapters that mix travel, history, legend and portraits of people met along the way. The book begins in childhood: in his grandmother's cabinet in England lay a piece of skin with coarse reddish hair, which he was told came from a 'brontosaurus' and had been sent by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, a sailor who settled in Patagonia.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is narrated by Karana, a girl of about twelve who lives in the village of Ghalas-at on a small island off the California coast in the early nineteenth century; her people call it the Island of the Blue Dolphins. A red-sailed ship brings Captain Orlov, a Russian, and a crew of Aleut hunters, who ask Karana's father, Chief Chowig, to let them take sea otter in exchange for goods.
Journey of the Magi is a dramatic monologue in which one of the wise men of Matthew 2, now old, remembers the journey to Bethlehem and asks what it meant. T. S. Eliot wrote it in 1927, the year he was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, and Faber and Gwyer published it that August as the eighth of its Ariel Poems, small illustrated pamphlets sold as Christmas cards, with a drawing by E. McKnight Kauffer.
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, decided on 18 December 1944, upheld the criminal conviction of an American citizen for remaining in his home area after the Army ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry to leave it.
Lassie Come-Home is the story of a tricolour collie who crosses hundreds of miles of Scottish and English country to return to the boy she loves. In the Yorkshire mining village of Greenall Bridge, Lassie belongs to Sam Carraclough, and every man in the village agrees she is the finest collie he has ever seen.
Little Bear is a book of four short stories about a bear cub and his mother, written for children just learning to read. In "What Will Little Bear Wear?"
Little House in the Big Woods follows one year in the life of a pioneer family in a log house in the forests of Wisconsin, seen through the eyes of Laura, who is about five. She lives with Pa, who hunts, traps and farms; Ma, who keeps the house; her older sister Mary; baby Carrie; and Jack, the brindle bulldog.
Little House on the Prairie follows the Ingalls family through roughly a year in Kansas, on land the book calls Indian Territory, around 1869 and 1870. Pa sells the little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin because the woods are filling with people and the game is growing scarce.
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
Make Way for Ducklings is a picture book about a pair of mallards who raise their family in the middle of Boston. Mr. and Mrs. Mallard are looking for a place to live, but Mrs. Mallard rejects every spot Mr. Mallard likes, because there might be foxes in the woods or turtles in the water.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
On 23 May 1957 three Cleveland police officers came to the home of Dollree Mapp looking for a man wanted for questioning about a bombing and for gambling slips. On her lawyer's advice she refused to let them in without a search warrant.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is a picture book about a man and the red steam shovel he names Mary Anne. Mike is proud of her and likes to say that she can dig in one day what a hundred men could dig in a week.
Mouse Soup is a story with four smaller stories inside it. A mouse is sitting under a tree reading a book when a weasel pounces on him, carries him home and puts him into a cooking pot to make mouse soup.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
My Side of the Mountain is the first-person record of Sam Gribley, a boy of about twelve who leaves his family's crowded New York City apartment to live alone for a year in the Catskill Mountains. Sam had told his father he meant to go to the old Gribley farm, land his great-grandfather once worked near the town of Delhi, and his father laughed and let him try, sure he would be back by morning.
The two respondents, identified in the case as L. C. and E. W., were Georgia women with intellectual disabilities who also had psychiatric diagnoses, schizophrenia in one case and a personality disorder in the other. Both were voluntarily admitted to Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Owl at Home is a beginning reader of five short stories about Owl, a round, kindly, rather muddled bird who lives alone in a snug house with a fireplace, a kettle and a staircase. In The Guest, someone knocks loudly on a winter night.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Peter and Wendy, the 1911 novel that grew out of J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, opens in the London nursery of the Darling family: Mr. Darling, a clerk anxious about money and dignity; Mrs. Darling, who tidies her children's minds each night; Wendy, John and Michael; and Nana, a Newfoundland dog who serves as their nurse. Mrs. Darling finds the name Peter in her children's thoughts and later sees a strange boy at the nursery window; Nana snaps the window shut on his shadow.
In May 1975 the Texas Legislature amended Section 21.031 of its Education Code to withhold state funds for educating children who had not been legally admitted to the United States and to allow local districts to deny them enrollment. In 1977 the Tyler Independent School District in Smith County began charging such children tuition.
Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) follows a restless young Englishman who ignores his father’s counsel, goes to sea, and after storms and slavery is cast alone on an island where industry, improvisation, and providence remake his life. The novel invented a lasting modern myth of solitude: journal-keeping, goat pens, canoe failures, fear of footprints, and the arrival of Friday.
Sanshirō follows Ogawa Sanshirō, a young graduate of the higher school in Kumamoto, through his first autumn and winter as a student at Tokyo Imperial University in the late Meiji period. The novel opens on the long train journey from Kyushu.
Sarah, Plain and Tall is a short chapter book narrated by Anna Witting, who lives on a prairie farm in the late nineteenth century with her father, Jacob, and her little brother, Caleb. Their mother died the day after Caleb was born, and since then Papa has stopped singing.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families. The legend tells of an Irish princess whose widowed father, deranged by grief and desire, attempts to marry his daughter because she resembles her dead mother.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice. The Confessio begins with a self-portrait of abasement: Patrick calls himself a sinner, unlearned, rustic, and contemptible to many.
On 12 June 1987 President Ronald Reagan spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, with the Berlin Wall and the closed gate directly behind his platform. The city was marking its 750th anniversary, and Reagan, on his second visit, addressed Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, and a large crowd, while also speaking by broadcast to listeners in East Berlin and Eastern Europe.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Anti-Federalist Papers are not a single coordinated book but a body of pamphlets, essays, speeches, and newspaper pieces opposing or demanding amendments to the proposed Constitution. Their writers differed among themselves, but they shared alarm about the scale and power of the new federal government.
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
The Borrowers is told within a frame. A girl called Kate, about ten, sits crocheting with old Mrs May, who lives in two rooms of Kate's parents' house.
The Boxcar Children follows four orphaned brothers and sisters: Henry, fourteen; Jessie, twelve; Violet, ten; and Benny, six. After their parents die, the children set out on their own rather than go to their grandfather, whom they have never met and believe to be a hard man who disliked their mother.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Courage of Sarah Noble tells, in eleven short chapters, how eight-year-old Sarah Noble went with her father, John Noble, into the Connecticut wilderness in 1707 to build a house for their family. The rest of the Nobles stay behind in Massachusetts.
The Cricket in Times Square is set at a newsstand in the Times Square subway station in New York City at the end of one summer. The stand belongs to the Bellini family: Papa, Mama, and their son Mario, who keeps it open late in the hope of selling a few more papers, because business is poor.
Around AD 117 the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, marched north from Eboracum into Caledonia to put down a rising of the tribes and was never seen again; its bronze eagle standard was lost with it. Some years later Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded the legion's First Cohort and vanished with it, arrives as a young centurion to command a cohort of auxiliaries at the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum in the far southwest of Britain.
The Fall is a short novel in six chapters made up entirely of the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam, who over five days talks to a stranger he meets at a sailors' bar called Mexico City. The listener never speaks in the text; his replies are implied by Clamence's answers.
This record surveys the eyewitness and near-contemporary narratives of the Ottoman siege and capture of Constantinople, from 6 April to 29 May 1453, and the perspectives each brings. The library does not include a full text: the accounts were written in Italian, Greek, Latin and Ottoman Turkish, and the standard English translations (Barbaro by J. R. Melville Jones, 1969; Sphrantzes by Marios Philippides, 1980; Doukas by Harry J. Magoulias, 1975) are under copyright, so no quotations are given.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of Narnia, while the four Pevensie children reign at Cair Paravel, and it happens mostly in Calormen, the hot, crowded empire far to the south. Shasta, a boy of about eleven, lives in a fishing village with Arsheesh, a hard man who works him like a servant.
The House at Pooh Corner (1928) is the second and last book of A. A. Milne's stories about Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the Forest. It opens with a short verse dedication to Milne's wife and a mock-introduction called a Contradiction, in which the narrator explains that Christopher Robin and his friends, already introduced in the first book, are now going to say good-bye.
The Hundred Dresses is a short novel in seven chapters about a girl who is teased at school and the classmate who watched and said nothing. Wanda Petronski, the daughter of a Polish immigrant, Jan Petronski, lives with her father and brother Jake in a shabby house on Boggins Heights, outside a small Connecticut town.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Last Battle tells of the end of Narnia, some two hundred years after the reign of Caspian X. Beside Caldron Pool, under the great waterfall in the far west, lives Shift, a clever, ugly old Ape, with his simple friend Puzzle the Donkey, whom he bullies. When a lion's skin washes down the falls, Shift sews it into a coat for Puzzle and, showing him by firelight in a stable on a hill, announces to the Narnians that Aslan has returned.
The Little House is a picture book about a small pink house built by a man on a little hill far out in the country. He builds her strong and declares that she must never be sold, so that his descendants many generations on can live in her.
The Mayflower Compact is a single paragraph of about two hundred words, signed on 11 November 1620 (Old Style; 21 November by the modern calendar) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor in the hook of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. The ship had left Plymouth, England, in September with about a hundred passengers.
The Moffats follows a year in the life of a family with little money and a great deal of fun in the small Connecticut town of Cranbury, around the time of the First World War. Mama, a widow, earns their living as a dressmaker in the rented yellow house on New Dollar Street, where she lives with her four children: Sylvie, the eldest, gentle and grown-up; Joey, the steady older brother who does the heavy chores; Jane, the imaginative middle girl through whose eyes much of the book is seen; and Rufus, five and a half and always in the middle of something.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's attempt to understand how the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which she treats as a new form of government without precedent, could arise out of European history. It was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951 (in Britain as The Burden of Our Time).
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
The Railway Children tells how Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis lose their comfortable London life and find friends, work and courage beside a country railway line. One evening, just after Peter's birthday, two men call, Father goes away with them, and Mother will say only that he has gone on business and that the children must not ask.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
The Swiss Family Robinson is told by a Swiss pastor who, with his wife and four sons, emigrates by sea toward a new settlement and is shipwrecked after a week-long storm. The crew abandons the ship in the boats, leaving the family alone on a wreck lodged among rocks near an unknown tropical coast.
The Travels of Ibn Battuta is the account of a Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier in June 1325, aged twenty-one, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not settle at home again until 1349. Its Arabic title, given by its editor Ibn Juzayy, means A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling; it is usually called simply the Rihla, the Journey.
Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War retells the whole legend of Troy, from its cause in heaven to the homecomings of the Greek kings, in 33 short chapters that can each be read as a story on its own. It begins with the golden apple thrown among the goddesses, the judgment of Paris, and the beauty of Helen, whom Paris carries off from her husband Menelaus of Sparta.
This volume gathers three Euripides plays about what the Trojan War left behind: The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert Murray's rhyming verse, and Hecuba in Michael Wodhull's blank verse of 1782. The Trojan Women opens on the smoking ruins of Troy.
The Wind in the Willows (1908) follows Mole’s break into the sunlight, Rat’s river manners, Badger’s solid hospitality, and Toad’s reckless motorcar mania among the English riverbank and Wild Wood. Kenneth Grahame writes animal characters who keep human foibles without losing the feel of water, willow, and snow.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a historical novel in twenty-one chapters set in Connecticut Colony in 1687 and 1688. Katherine Tyler, called Kit, is sixteen and has grown up in freedom and comfort on her grandfather's plantation in Barbados.
Dorothy lives on the grey Kansas prairie with her Uncle Henry, her Aunt Em and her little black dog Toto. When a cyclone strikes, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry reach the cellar, but Dorothy runs back for Toto, and the house is carried away with the two of them inside.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents who lived there as merchants and were subjects of the Emperor of China. His parents returned to China in 1890.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.
On 4 June 1940, less than four weeks after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons on the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. German armored columns had broken through the Ardennes in mid-May, driven to the Channel, and cut off British, French, and Belgian armies in a shrinking pocket on the coast.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life. During the luminous northern nights, he wanders the city and feels intimate with streets, houses and imagined lives while remaining isolated from actual human companionship.
In the late 1820s the Cherokee Nation, whose lands lay largely within Georgia's chartered limits, adopted a written constitution. Georgia responded by extending its jurisdiction over Cherokee country, and the discovery of gold in 1829 sharpened the conflict.