It is the mid-seventeenth century in Boston. Hester Prynne, dignified and silent, is led through prison doors to her public shaming by members of the Puritan town. Holding her illegitimate child to her breast, and bearing a bright scarlet letter “A” embroidered on her bodice, Hester must now struggle to create a new life for herself and her child within this censorious community. When her missing spouse reappears, reveals himself to her, and takes...

Commonly considered to be Jack London's tour de force, The Call of the Wild tells the story of Buck, a domesticated dog ripped from a comfortable life when he is stolen from his home on a California ranch. Sold to a pair of men in Canada, Buck is trained as a sled dog in cold wilderness of the Klondike region. However, Buck's ordeal has only begun, as he is forced to learn how to overcome both in the brutal conditions and as the primal social facets...

"The Harlem Renaissance writer's innovative and groundbreaking novel depicting African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi Clemmons, Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through...

A New York lawyer remembers his boyhood in Nebraska and his friendship with a pioneer Bohemian girl. A novel set in Nebraska about pioneering Bohemian farmers & of the courageous heroine, Antonia. First published in 1918. In Willa Cather's own estimation, My Antonia, first published in 1918, was "the best thing I've ever done." An enduring paperback bestseller on Houghton Mifflin's literary list, this hauntingly eloquent classic now boasts a new foreword...

Excerpt: "It was in a space in a thicket that he came into the world, in one of those little, hidden places in the wood which seem to be open on every side but which in fact are completely surrounded by foliage. That is why there was so little room there, but just enough for him and his mother. He stood up, he staggered on his thin legs as he wondered what was happening, looked out with eyes which were dull, wondered what was happening but saw nothing,...

Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils...

Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, this new series is a comprehensive...