Catalog Search Results
Author
Summary
A classic early example of "muck-racking" journalism, or reporting by reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt, "How the Other Half Lives" is a chronicle of the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York endured at the end of the 19th century. Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis saw first-hand the horrible conditions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan following his immigration...
23) The octopus
Author
Summary
Inspired by The Mussel Slough Tragedy, an 1880 dispute over land titles between California settlers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, Frank Norris' 1901 novel, "The Octopus: A California Story", is the first part in the unfinished trilogy, "The Epic of Wheat". The novel depicts the conflict between wheat farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and the Pacific and Southwestern railroad. When the railroad attempts to take possession of land leased to and...
Author
Series
Summary
This novel from popular nineteenth-century American author William Dean Howells features a visitor from a mysterious distant island known as Altruria. The contrast between the utopian island community and conditions in 1890s America provides remarkable insight into the social and cultural issues facing the country then -- and now. A must-read for fans of utopian fantasy and science fiction. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary...
27) Short stories
Author
Series
American century volume AC33
Formats
Summary
Collects two stories by Jack London, including "To Build a Fire" in which a tenderfoot attempts to hike through the Yukon snows with his dog in order to reach a mining claim, and "The Whale Tooth, " a tale of the South Seas.
Author
Series
Summary
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.
Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."
Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction...
