These autobiographies of Afro-American ex-slaves comprise the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history. The book consists of three sections: selected reviews of slave narratives, dating from 1750 to 1861; essays examining how such narratives serve as historical material; and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.
Henry David Thoreau's classic account of his time spent in solitude in the woods by Walden Pond having left Concord, Massachusetts in 1845, disdainful of America's growing commercialism and industrialism. It is full of Transcendentalist yearning for spiritual truth and self-reliance as well as observation of nature.
A classic tale of the young Englishman who gives up his life during the French Revolution to save the husband of the woman he loves.
'The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening' To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode, the use of memory, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.