An American Tragedy
10 best books like An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser): The Magnificent Ambersons, Zuleika Dobson, The Adventures of Augie March, Appointment in Samarra, Call It Sleep, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money, The Death of the Heart, The Way of All Flesh, The Old Wives' Tale, Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos
| Author | Booth Tarkington |
| ISBN | 1406935735 |
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson...
One woman's beauty fells the whole of Oxford in this sidesplitting classic campus novel.
Nobody could predict the consequences when ravishing Zuleika Dobson arrives at Oxford, to visit her grandfather, the college warden. Formerly a governess, she has landed on the occupation of prestidigitator,...
| Author | Saul Bellow |
| ISBN | 0143039571 |
Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American...
| Author | John O'Hara |
| ISBN | 0375719202 |
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian...
| Author | Henry Roth |
| ISBN | 0374522928 |
When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the...
| Author | John Dos Passos |
| ISBN | 1883011140 |
In the novels that make up the U.S.A.trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their...
| Author | Elizabeth Bowen |
| ISBN | 0385720173 |
The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human...
| Author | Samuel Butler |
| ISBN | 0486434664 |
Written between 1873 and 1884 and published posthumously in 1903, The Way of All Flesh is regarded by some as the first twentieth-century novel. Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical...
| Author | Arnold Bennett |
| ISBN | 0375754903 |
H.G. Wells described The Old Wives' Tale as "by far the finest long novel written in English and in the English fashion". He was, of course, speaking for his own generation, and a hundred years later the opinion may seem somewhat exaggerated. However, there is no doubt that The Old Wives' Tale is a superb...
| Author | Julia de Burgos |
| ISBN | 1880684241 |
Song of the Simple Truth (Canción de la verdad sencilla) is the first bilingual edition of Julia de Burgos' complete poems. Numbering more than 200, these poems form a literary landmark—the first time her poems have appeared in a complete edition in either English or Spanish. Many of the verses...
| Author | Henry Green |
| ISBN | 0099285096 |
One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe, invading one another's provinces...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 0226677141 |
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill...
| Author | James T. Farrell |
| ISBN | 1931082553 |
An unparalleled example of American naturalism, the Studs Lonigan trilogy follows the hopes and dissipations of its remarkable main character, a would-be "tough guy" and archetypal adolescent, born to Irish-American parents on Chicago's South Side, through the turbulent years of World War I,...
| Author | Dawn Powell |
| ISBN | 1931082014 |
For decades after her death, Dawn Powell's work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been renewed awareness of the novelist who was such a vital presence in literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1960s. With these two volumes, The Library of America...
| Author | Gary Krist |
| ISBN | 0767913310 |
William Tobias Merrick, an energetic young man from the provinces, travels to the big city in a time of great optimism and ferment, hoping to make his mark on a frenzied, money-crazed society obsessed with the promise of new technologies.
The city in question is London in the 1690s; but it is...
| Author | Mary McCarthy |
| ISBN | 1590170105 |
Mary McCarthy was one of the leading literary figures of her time. In addition to the novels and memoirs for which she is best remembered, she was also a tireless literary and social critic. Starting out as a theater reviewer for "Partisan Review" in 1937, she quickly distinguished herself for her witty...
| Author | Donald Kagan |
| ISBN | 0801497140 |
This book, the second volume in Donald Kagan's tetralogy about the Peloponnesian War, is a provocative and tightly argued history of the first ten years of the war. Taking a chronological approach that allows him to present at each stage the choices that were open to both sides in the conflict, Kagan...
| Author | Henry James |
| ISBN | 1172438099 |
“Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance. ”
― Henry James
The short essay Criticism, the focus of my review, is part of this collection which includes...
| Author | John Cheever |
| ISBN | 0679737863 |
Falconer Correctional Facility certainly sounds dreary and no place I’d want to spend any time, but it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as many fictional prisons. In fact, it seems pretty dull. There weren’t any beatings from brutal guards. There’s no racial tension evident. No one gets shivved...
