Wyoming State Law Library

A memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. The first half details a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541 and describes Twain's career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from...

'I hate to be thought men's property in that way'. Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her confident presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and when tragedy ensues,...

Jane Austen's first published novel, sparkling with wit and artistry, captures the inequities of birth, class, and marriage faced by the sisters Dashwood. Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support....

Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. When it appeared in 1913, it was immediately recognized as the first great modern restatement of the oedipal drama, and it is now widely considered the major work of D. H. Lawrence's early period. This intensely autobiographical novel recounts the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict. The author's vivid evocation...

Tom Canty and Edward Tudor look alike, but their lives couldn't be more different. For Edward is a royal prince, heir to the throne, and Tom is a miserable pauper. Until one day, fate intervenes, and for a while each has to live the other's life.

"The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America."--Cover.

"A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present--considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece. Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers. A Fantastic racy narrative, full of much excellent satire and literary horseplay. It is as sparkling, provocative, as brilliant, in...

You Can't Go Home Again is a novel by Thomas Wolfe published posthumously in 1940. The novel tells the story of George Webber, a fledgling author, who writes a book that makes frequent references to his home town of Libya Hill. The book is a national success but the residents of the town, unhappy with what they view as Webber's distorted depiction of them, send the author menacing letters and death threats.

In 1845 Thoreau, disdainful of America's commercialism and industrialism, left his home town in Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a hut on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. This is his account of this experiment in solitary living.