20TH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION
Sehome High School Library
Date:
9/22/2005
F Anderson
Anderson,
Sherwood, 1876-1941. Winesburg,
Ohio. [New ed.]. New
York, :
Viking Press, 1960 [1919]. A unified
collection of
short
stories about a young reporter George Willare, who is
in revolt
about the barren narrowness of small town life in
the
American Midwest.
F Baldwin
Baldwin, James,
1924-. If Beale Street could talk. New York, :
Dial Press,
1974. An elemental love story of great
power:
about Tish,
19 and pregnant, and Fonny, 22 and innocently
jailed.
F Baldwin
Baldwin, James, 1924-. Go tell it on the mountain. New York :
Modern
Library, 1995. A fourteen-year old boy
discovers the
terms of
his identity as the stepson of the minister of a
store-front
Pentecostal church in Harlem on a Saturday in
March of
1935.
F Ball
Ball, John
Dudley, 1911-. Johnny get your gun;
: a novel,. [1st
ed.]. Boston, : Little, Brown, [1969]. Story of Johnny, a
9-year old
boy with a gun, obsessed with the desire to
revenge the
"murder" of his transistor radio, a crime
perpetrated
by a schoolmate. Virgil Tibbs is the detective
in this
story.
F Beatty
Beatty, John
Louis, 1922-1975. Who comes to
King's Mountain?
New York :
Morrow, 1975. Living in the South
Carolina hills
in 1780, a
young Scottish boy, whose own family is divided
between Loyalist and rebel, must
decide for himself which
side he
will follow.
F Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. Dangling man. New York, : The Vanguard press,
[1944]. Joseph gives up his job
expecting to be inducted
into the
army, but due to technicalities, he is left
dangling
for almost a year.
F Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. Herzog. New York, : Viking Press, [1964]. Moses
Herzog sees himself as a survivor of
private disasters, but
also those
of the age, and asks himself piercing questions.
F Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. Seize the day, : with three
short stories and a
one-act play. New York, : Viking Press, 1956. Tommy
Wilhelm, a
city man, constantly feels the sky is coming down
on him. He
seeks his greatest need; the reason of things.
F Bellow
Bellow, Saul. The Victim. New
York : Vanguard Press, 1947. Asa
Leventhal
held a position at a New York trade journal and
had become
successful and secure, until his Gentile friend
accuses him
of ruining him and his career.
F Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. The dean's December : a novel. 1st Harper & Row
ed. New York : Harper & Row, c1982. Albert Corde, a
newspaperman turned academic, leaves the country to visit
his dying
mother-in-law, and while he is gone from Chicago,
his
magazine articles and involvement in a student murder
scandal
place him in the middle of a raging controversy.
F Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. The adventures of Augie March,
: a novel. New
York, :
Mod. Lib., 1949. Describes the life of
Augie March,
a poor
Chicago boy growing up during the Depression, and his
search for a career.
F Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. Humboldt's gift. New York : Viking Press, 1975.
Two
characters force Charlie to re-examine his life. One is
Humboldt, a
poet he knew in the 1930's, the other is a
small-time
gangster.
F Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. Mr. Sammler's planet. New York, : Viking Press,
[1970]. A survivor of the death
camps in World War II, Mr.
Sammler is attentive to everything and
appalled by nothing,
in his
study of New York life and the future of life.
F Bjorn
Bjorn, Thyra
Ferre. Papa's wife. New York : Bantam, 1966,
c1955. A beautiful young Swedish girl captures the
heart of
a reluctant
bachelor minister by becoming his housemaid.
F Buck
Buck, Pearl S.
(Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. Mandala. New
York, :
John Day Co., [1970]. Prince Jagat has
lost most of
his wealth
and royal titles, and sets out with an American
girl to
find out if his son is actually dead. A delicate
romance
ensues.
F Buck
Buck, Pearl S.
(Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. The
three
daughters
of Madame Liang; : a novel,.
New York, : John Day
Co.,
[1969]. Madam Liang is the owner of the
most exclusive
and
fashionable restaurant in Shanghai. Her daughters, all
educated in
America, show the conflict between old China and
the new.
F Buck
Buck, Pearl S.
(Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. The
Big wave.
New York, :
J. Day Co., [1973, c1948]. His family
and
village
swept away by a tidal wave, Jiya learns to live with
the
ever-present dangers from the sea and volcano.
F Buck
Buck, Pearl S.
(Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. Imperial
woman;
: a
novel. New York, : J.
Day Co., [c1956]. Tzu-hsi
receives an
imperial summons to appear before the Empress of
China who
has always been opposed to the western powers and
in favor of
China's seclusion.
F Buck
Buck, Pearl S.
(Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. The
time is
noon; : a
novel,. New York, : John Day Co., [1967, c1966].
Joan
Richards returns to Middlehope after college to nurse
her mother,
and discovers things about her family she
doesn't
like.
F Cather
Cather, Willa,
1873-1947. O pioneers! Boston, New York, :
Houghton
Mifflin company, 1913. When her father
dies,
Alexandra
takes over the care of her family and the
management
of the farm, showing her energy and courage.
F Cather
Cather, Willa,
1873-1947. Obscure destinies. New York, :
Vintage
Books, 1974,[1932]. Three stories of
the West:
Neighbour
Rosicky.--Old Mrs. Harris.--Two friends.
Neighbor
Rosicky is a Bohemian immigrant whose
hunger for the earth
drove him
from New York to a Nebraska prairie farm. Old Mrs.
Harris is a
fine old woman who tried to keep up the
traditions
of her comfortable life in Tennessee when she was
transplanted to a Colorado town. Two Friends, two well-to-do
businessmen
in a small Kansas town break up their long
friendship
in a disagreement over politics.
F Cather
Cather, Willa,
1873-1947. Death comes for the
archbishop ...
New York, :
A. A. Knopf, 1927. The novel describes
the
missionary
efforts of the French bishop Jean latour and his
vicar,
Father Joseph Vaillant, to establish a diocese in the
territory
of New Mexico. The novel is based on the lives of
French
clerics, Bish Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888) and
Father
Joseph Machebeuf. They prevail over all adversities
to build a
cathedral in the wilderness.
F Cather
Cather, Willa,
1873-1947. Shadows on the rock. New York, : A.
A. Knopf,
1931. Cecile Auclair and her father
Euclide watch
as thier
old world traditions and values in Quebec are being
replaced by
new ideas and men with less influence from
Europe.
Takes place during the last days of the French
Canadian
leader Frontenac (1697-1698).
F Cormier
Cormier,
Robert. The chocolate war; : a
novel. [New York] :
Pantheon
Books, [1974]. A high school freshman
discovers
the
devastating consequences of refusing to join in the
school's
annual fund raising drive and arousing the wrath of
the school
bullies.
F Cormier
Cormier, Robert. After the first death. New York : Pantheon
Books,
c1979. Events of the hijacking of a bus
of children
by
terrorists seeking the return of their homeland are
described
from the perspectives of a hostage, a terrorist,
an Army
general involved in the rescue operation, and his
son, chosen
as the go-between.
F Cormier
Cormier,
Robert. Beyond the chocolate war : a
novel. 1st ed.
New York :
Knopf : Distributed by Random House, c1985.
Dark
deeds continue at Trinity High School, climaxing in
a public
demonstration of one student's homemade guillotine. Sequel
to
"The Chocolate War.".
F Cormier
Cormier,
Robert. The bumblebee flies anyway. 1st ed.
New York
: Pantheon
Books, c1983. Sixteen-year-old Barney
has only
fleeting
memories about his past but, as a voluntary patient
at the
institute for experimental medicine, he knows he is
different
from the terminally ill patients surrounding him.
His
involvement with the bitter, slowly dying, Mazzo brings
Barney
hope, pain, and a moment of heroic glory.
F Cormier
Cormier,
Robert. I am the cheese : a novel. [New York] :
Pantheon
Books, c1977. A young boy desperately
tries to
unlock his
past yet knows he must hide those memories if he
is to
remain alive.
F Craven
Craven,
Margaret. Walk gently this good
Earth. New York :
Putnam,
c1977. Follows the lives of the four
Westcott
children
and their adopted brother from the 1930's to the
present, as they maintain their close family ties
and
old-fashioned values while living on their vast Montana
ranch.
F Davis
Davis,
Terry. Vision quest : a novel. New York : Viking Press,
1979. An eighteen-year-old wrestler, Louden Swain
pursues
many
interests, including a love affair, hiking in the
Cascades
and reading American novels, as he strives to
achieve his
quest for "vision.".
F DeLillo
DeLillo,
Don. Libra. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking, 1988. A
fictional
speculation of the events leading up to the
assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.
F DeLillo
DeLillo,
Don. White noise. New York : Penguin Books, 1986. The
Gladney's
family life is disrupted and threatened when an
industrial
accident sends a lethal cloud over their
community.
Jack Gladney struggles with the ensuing
complications which include murder.
F Dexter
Dexter, Pete,
1943-. Paris Trout. 1st ed.
New York : Random
House,
c1988. A white man named Paris Trout
murders a
fourteen-year-old black girl in a small Georgia town just
after World
War II. He feels he has done absolutely nothing
wrong. The
effects of this brutal killing on the small
southern
town, its civility, manners, and social fabric is
the story
of this book.
F Dexter
Dexter, Pete,
1943-. Brotherly love. New York : Random House,
1991.
Peter, son of a powerful Philadelphia union boss who
had
connections with the mob, was orphaned at the age of 8
and fell
into a different world of bad blood and shifting
loyalties,
a world where violence was everywhere and
inescapable.
F Dillard
Dillard,
Annie. The Living. New York, NY : HarperCollins
Publishers,
c1992. Historical novel of Bellingham,
Washington
during the late 1800's and early part of the 20th
century.
F Doctorow
Doctorow, E. L.,
1931-. Loon lake. 1st trade ed. New York :
Random
House, c1979. During the Great
Depression of the
thirties, Warren follows a private
train to Loon Lake, the
hidden
wilderness estate of one of the country's richest
men. There
he studies conflicting values and demands, and
plunges
into a life that he little expected.
F Doctorow
Doctorow, E. L.,
1931-. World's fair. 1st ed.
New York :
Random
House, c1985. When the New York World's
Fair comes
in 1939, Ed
crosses over into a future of his own, in a time
when life
was simpler.
F Doig
Doig, Ivan. The sea runners. 1st ed. New York :
Atheneum,
1982. In 1853 four indentured servants escape from
Russian
Alaska and
make their way by canoe down the Pacific
Northwest
coast toward Oregon.
F Doig
Doig, Ivan. English creek. 1st ed.
New York : Atheneum, 1984.
Jick
McCaskill and his family live in northern Montana,
where his
father is a forest ranger and range rider. His
older
brother at 18 is set on marriage to a town girl and
livelihood
as a cowboy, which throws the family into
conflict.
F Dorris
Dorris, Michael. The window. 1st ed. New York :
Hyperion
Books,
c1997. When ten-year-old Rayona's
Native American
mother
enters a treatment facility, her estranged father, a
Black man,
finally introduces her to his side of the family,
who are not
at all what she expected.
F Dos Passos
Dos Passos,
John, 1896-1970. U.S.A. Boston, : Houghton Mifflin,
1963 [1938]. The 42nd parallel.--Nineteen nineteen.--The
big
money. Three novels of pre WWI and the
boom era of the
Twenties.
F Dubus
Dubus, Andre,
1936-. Selected stories. 1st ed.
Boston : D.R.
Godine,
1988. 23 stories by Andre Dubus show
people who
come to
accept pain as a fair price for pleasure, and to
view right
and wrong as a matter of degree. He suggests that
their
self-inflicted punishments are often worse than what a
just court,
or a just God, would decree.
F Edmonds
Edmonds, Walter
Dumaux, 1903-. The night raider and
other
stories. Boston : Little, Brown, c1980. Perfection of
Orchard
View.--Raging canal.--Charlie Phister's famous bee
shot.--The
night raider. Four short stories set in
New York
State
during the early years of this century: Raging Canal
shows the
dark, savage side of what life was often like for
the boys
who worked on the Erie Canal. In Perfection of
Orchard
View, a gentleman farmer has a truly funny
disagreement with his hired hand. Charlie is an example of
the
brashness of youth and Night Raider is the story of a
wild animal
who ventures too close to civilization.
F Edwards
Edwards,
Louis. Ten seconds. St. Paul : Graywolf Press, 1991.
Darrell
McDaniel relives the main periods in his life in
10-seconds
of a 100 meter race. Darrell, a young
African-American man, attempts to ground his identity in the
south.
F Ellison
Ellison,
Ralph. Invisible man. 2nd Vintage International ed.
New York :
Vintage International, 1995. Tells the
story of
a black man
who goes through progressive states from
youthful
affirmation in a small southern town, to total
rejection
after a Harlem race riot. Stiving to be himself,
he finds
that he must not only contend with the whites but
with the
powerful members of his own race.
F Erdrich
Erdrich,
Louise. Tracks : a novel. 1st ed.
New York : Henry
Holt,
c1988. Told in the alternating voices
of a wise
Chippewa
Indian leader, and a young, embittered mixed-blood
woman, the
novel chronicles the drama of daily lives
overshadowed by the clash of cultures and mythologies.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. Intruder in the
dust. New York, :
Random
House, [1948]. Lucas Beauchamp, a Negro
who refuses
to accept a
servileattitude, is accused, wrongfully, of
murdering a
white man and is threatened by a lynch
mob.Sixteen-year-old
Chick and his friends prove his
innocence
and help capture the real murderer.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. The sound and
the fury. Modern,
1946
[1929]. A degenerate Southern family,
the Compsons,
are
described by Benjy, a 33-year-old idiot.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. Big woods. New York, : Random
House,
[1955]. The bear.--The old people.--A
bear
hunt.--Race
at morning. A collection of Faulkner's
hunting
stories.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. Light in
August;. New York, :
Modern
Library, [1950] [1932]. Joe Christmas,
part black,
part white,
has an affair with Joanna Burden, whom he kills,
and sets
fire to her house. The enraged townspeople capture,
castrate
and kill him.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. The reivers, : a
reminiscence.
New York, :
Random House, [1962]. On a summer day
in 1905,
Lucius
Priest age 11 is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck to
"borrow" his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis.
Ned
McCaslin, Negro, stows away and the three are off on a
heroic
odyssey which ends at Miss Reba's bordello,
effectively
destroying Lucius' innocence.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. The sound and
the fury. New York,
: Random
House, [1946] [1929]. Three brothers of
the
Compson
family each tell their thoughts about their decaying
aristocratic family of
Mississippi. The idiot Benjy, the
Harvard
student Quentin and the petty-minded Jason each
expose the
family problems and weaknesses.
F Faulkner
Faulkner, William,
1897-1962. Go down, Moses. New York, :
Modern
Library, 1955, [1942]. Was.--The Fire
and the
hearth.--Pantaloon in black.--The old people.--The
bear.--Delta Autumn.--Go down, Moses.
A collection of short
stories set
in Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County. The
stories are
unified by a common theme of the rituals of
hunting.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. Absalom,
Absalom! New York, :
Random
house, 1964 [1936]. Thomas Sutpen, son
of a poor
white
planter, attempts to be accepted as a Southern
aristocrat
and founder of a wealthy family. Returning from
battle in the Civil War, he finds his
plantation and dreams
in ruins.
F Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. The hamlet. [3d ed.].
New York,
: Random
House, [1964], [1940]. Flem Snopes
begins as a
clerk in a
store in Yoknapatawpha County early in the 20th
century.
Through usury, connivance and thrift he becomes
part-owner
of the store and husband of his employer's
daughter.
He later works his way up to vice president in a
bank,
driving the president from town.
F Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald, F.
Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940. The
great
Gatsby. 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction ed. New York :
Scribner
Paperback Fiction, 1995. The tragic
story of the
wealthy Jay
Gatsby and his attempt to win back the love of
Daisy
Buchanan.
F Fleischman
Fleischman,
Paul. Mind's eye. 1st ed.
New York : Holt, 1999.
A novel in
play form in which sixteen-year-old Courtney,
paralyzed
in an accident, learns about the power of the mind
from an
elderly blind woman who takes Courtney on an
imaginary
journey to Italy using some handwritten notes in a
1910
Baedeker's guidebook.
F Guthrie
Guthrie, A. B.
(Alfred Bertram), 1901-. No second
wind. Boston
: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. In the midst of the tension and
threatened
violence of the conflict between ranchers and
strip-miners, the sheriff of a small town in Montana tries
to solve a
baffling murder.
F He
Hemingway,
Ernest, 1899-1961. For whom the bell
tolls. 1st
Scribner
trade pbk. ed. New York : Scribner,
2003. The
story of an
American, Robert Jordan, and his adventures
during the
Civil War in Spain with the anti-fascist
guerrillas
in the mountains.
F Heller
Heller,
Joseph. Catch-22 : a novel. New York : Simon &
Schuster,
1999. A bombardier, based in Italy
during World
War II,
repeatedly tries to avoid flying bombing missions
while his
colonel tries to get him killed by demanding that
he fly more
and more missions.
F Hemingway
Hemingway,
Ernest, 1899-1961. To have and have
not. New York, :
Scribner,
1937.
F Hersey
Hersey, John,
1914-. Under the eye of the storm. Knopf, 1967.
Tom Medlar
and his three passengers aboard the Harmony (his
wife and a
couple named Harnden) are swept out to sea in the
path of a
hurricane.
F Hersey
Hersey, John,
1914-. A single pebble. [1st ed.].
New York, :
Knopf,
1956. While in China on business in the
1920's, a
young
American engineer becomes involved in the lives of
people who
live on a junk on the Yangtze River.
F Ignatius
Ignatius, David, 1950-. The sun king : a novel. 1st ed.
New
York :
Random House, c1999. Sandy Galvin, a
billionaire
with a rare
talent for taking risks and making people happy,
buys the
most powerful newspaper in Washington D.C. and
wields it
like a sword. But in his path, is his old Harvard
flame,
Candace Ridgway, a beautiful and icy journalist known
to her
colleagues as the Mistresss of Fact. A love story.
F Irving
Irving, John,
1942-. The Hotel New Hampshire. 1st ed.
New York
: Dutton,
c1981. The novel takes place in two
different
countries,
in the U.S. (Maine) and in Vienna during the
1950's. The
main character John Berry, middle child in a
family of 8
that includes a bear and a dog named Sorrow,
tells about
his family, which he describes as a hotel
family.
They own a series of hotels, the last of which is in
New
Hampshire where his father's dreams guide the unique
family.
F Irving
Irving, John,
1942-. A widow for one year : a
novel. 1st ed.
New York : Random House, 1998. A multilayered love story of
astonishing
emotional force.
F Jones
Jones, Douglas
C. Elkhorn Tavern. 1st ed.
New York : Holt,
Rinehart
and Winston, c1980. While Martin
Hasford is away
fighting in
the Confederate army, his wife Ora and two
children
Roman and Calpurnia, fight off civilian and
military
marauders near the tavern called The Elkhorn in
western Arkansas.
F Kantor
Kantor,
MacKinlay 1904-. Voice of Bugle Ann. Coward-McCann,
1935. Bugle Ann, a fox-hound whose hunting days
and nights
were spent
in the Missouri hills, was so well loved by her
master
Springfield Davis, that he shot the man who was
suspected
of killing her.
F Kerouac
Kerouac, Jack,
1922-1969. On the road. 40th Annivesary ed. New
York : Viking, 1997, 1957. Chronicles Kerouac's years
traveling
the North American continent, from East Coast to
West Coast
to Mexico with his friend Neal Cassady. The two
roam the
country in a quest for self-knowledge and
experience.
F Knowles
Knowles, John,
1926-. Peace breaks out. 1st ed.
New York :
Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, c1981. An
ex-infantryman and
P.O.W. comes
to Devon School in New Hampshire, a boys prep
school, to
teach American history and coach athletics,
thinking it
would be a respite from war. Instead, among his
students he
finds the violence and evil of war repeating
itself.
F Lamott
Lamott,
Anne. Crooked little heart. 1st ed.
New York :
Pantheon
Books, c1997. Thirteen-year-old tennis
champion
Rosie
Ferguson, her mother Elizabeth, and her stepfather
James, all
struggle with their own heartbreaks along the
road to
becoming a united family.
F Lester
Lester,
Julius. Two love stories. New York, : Dial Press,
[1972].
Basketball game.--Catskill morning.
In Basketball
Game, the
author explores the tentative relationship between
a black boy
and a white girl in a Southern city, a
relationship ultimately destroyed by the barriers of color.
In Catskill
Morning, he writes of sexual awakening in an
idyllic
love affair which ends shatteringly.
F Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Babbitt. New York : Harcourt, Brace
&
World, c1950 [1922]. Babbitt is a
middle-class realtor
who tries
to alter his dull life with a little excitement
only to
find that his fear of ostracism is greater than his
desire for escape.
F Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Arrowsmith. New York, : Harcourt,
Brace &
World, [1952? c1925]. A young doctor,
Martin
Arrowsmith,
begins medical practice in a small town, moving
on to a
city health department, and eventually becomes the
doctor at
an "institute" sponsored by a rich man and his
wife. In
his quest for pure science, Arrowsmith encounters
meanness, corruption and
misunderstanding, and he finds
himself
oftern frustrated with the practice. The novel is
frequently
satiric and caused much controversy when it was
first
published in 1925.
F Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Free air. St. Clair Shores, Mich.,
: Scholarly
Press, 1970 [1919]. A story which
catches the
exhiliaration of the great open country as the reader is
taken by automobile in search of the open American
West that
was
brimming with possibilities for suddenly-mobile
Americans
at the end of a world war.
F Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Main Street. New York : Signet
Classic,
c1998. Carol Kennicott struggles to
find happiness
as a wife
and mother in the hypocritical Midwestern town of
Gopher
Prairie.
F London
London, Jack,
1876-1916. White Fang. New York : Scholastic,
c2001. The adventures in the northern wilderness of
a dog
who is part
wolf and how he comes to make his peace with
man.
F Mason
Mason, Bobbie
Ann. In country : a novel. 1st ed.
New York :
Harper
& Row, c1985. Sam Hughes lives in
Hopewell, Kentucky
with her
Uncle Emmett who is a Vietnam veteran. Sam's father
was killed in Vietnam and she
wants to understand about the
war, but
Emmett and other vets refuse to tell her much.
F Maupin
Maupin,
Armistead. More tales of the city. 1st ed.
New York :
Harper Perennial, c1980. The calamity-prone residents of 28
Barbary
Lane, San Francisco are part of a human comedy that
began in
"Tales of the City." Michael Tolliver pursues his
favorite
gynecologist, Mona Ramsey and uncovers her roots in
a desert
whorehouse. Mary Anne Singleton finds love at sea
with the
amnesiac of her dreams. The tales may surprise and
shock you,
but will make you laugh.
F McCarthy
McCarthy,
Cormac, 1933-. All the pretty
horses. New York :
Knopf,
1992. Sixteen year-old John Grady Cole
leaves his
home in
Texas, riding into Mexico on horseback with his
friend Lacey Rawlins, where they acquire a
younger boy as a
companion.
Within two months, one of them is dead and the
other two
aged beyond any normal reckoning.
F McCullers
McCullers,
Carson, 1917-1967. The member of the
wedding.
Boston, :
Houghton Mifflin company, 1946. A
motherless girl
of 13 wants
to accompany her brother and his wife on their
honeymoon.
F McCullers
McCullers, Carson, 1917-1967. The heart is a lonely hunter,.
Boston, :
Houghton Mifflin company, 1940. A
quiet,
sensitive
girl searches for beauty in a small, but damned
Southern
town.
F McMurtry
McMurtry,
Larry. Lonesome dove : a novel. New York : Simon and
Schuster,
c1985. A wonderful book with great
characters.
Augustus
and W.F. McCall lead a cattle drive to Montana
facing the cruel winter and notorious Blue
Duck who has
always
hated white men and particularly them.
F Michener
Michener, James
A. (James Albert), 1907-. The
covenant. New
York :
Random House, c1980. A historical novel
covering
over 15,000
years of history in South Africa and which
focuses on
three principal families who settled in the
region
throughout the centuries. The family of Nxumalo; the
van Doorns,
a Dutch family; and the Saltwoods of England.
F Michener
Michener, James
A. (James Albert) 1907-. Poland. 1st ed.
New
York :
Random House, c1983. A militant group
of Polish
farmers
presents grievances and demands to Szymon Bukowski,
the
Communist Minister of Agriculture, and this introduces
the reader
to a 700-year sweep of Polish history. It follows
three families
whose descendants dominate the story.
F Michener
Michener, James
A. (James Albert), 1907-. Space. 1st ed.
New
York :
Random House, c1982. Dramatically
portrays the
heroics,
exploitation, ingenuity, political maneuverings and
brilliance
that lay behind the American explorations and
discoveries
in space of the past forty years.
F Michener
Michener, James
A. (James Albert), 1907-. Texas. 1st ed.
New
York :
Random House, c1985. This saga of Texas
history
spans four
and a half centuries, beginning in the early
1500s and
ending in the present.
F Michener
Michener, James A. (James Albert),
1907-. Hawaii. New York, :
Random
House, [1959].
F Mitchell
Mitchell,
Margaret, 1900-1949. Gone with the
wind. New York, :
Macmillan,
1936. After the Civil War sweeps away
the
genteel
life to which she has been accustomed, Scarlett
O'Hara sets
about to salvage her plantation home.
F Mohr
Mohr,
Nicholasa. El Bronx remembered : a
novella and stories.
1st
ed. New York : Harper & Row,
c1975. A very special
pet.--A new
window display.--"Tell the truth....".--Shoes
for
Hector.--"Once upon a time...".--Mr. Mendelsohn.--The
wrong lunch line.--A lesson in
fortune-telling.--Uncle
Claudio.--Princess.--Herman and Alice, a novella.--Love with
Aleluya. Twelve absorbing
stories about tenement living in
a Puerto
Rican ghetto of New York City.
F Momaday
Momaday, N.
Scott, 1934-. The man made of words
: essays,
stories,
passages. 1st ed.
New York : St. Martin's Press,
1997. The arrowmaker -- The Native voice in
American
literature
-- To save a great vision -- A First American
views his
land -- An American Land ethic -- On Indian-White
relations
-- The morality of Indian-hating -- The centaur
complex --
A divine blindness: the place of words in a state
of grace --
The American West and the Burden of Belief --
Essays in
Place -- The Storyteller and his art.
Collection
of essays
and articles in which the author explores such
themes as
Indian-white relations, land, language, and
identity.
F Morrison
Morrison,
Toni. Tar baby. New York : Knopf : distributed by
Random
House, 1981. A beautiful
African-American woman of
privilege
finds herself attracted to the kind of man she has
dreaded
since childhood: uneducated, violent, and
contemptuous of her.
F Morrison
Morrison,
Toni. Paradise. 1st ed.
New York : Alfred A. Knopf,
1998. Four young women are brutally attacked in a
convent
near an
all-black town in America in the 1970's. Each young
woman
suggests the vicissitudes of the era: the Civil Rights
Movement,
The War in Vietnam, the counter-culture, and
generational conflict.
F Morrison
Morrison,
Toni. Jazz. New York : Plume Books, 1993, c1992. A
mysterious voice weaves the story
of a black door-to-door
salesman of
beauty products who shoots his young lover. His
wife tries
to disfigure the corpse with a knife during the
nineteen-
twenties.
F Morrison
Morrison,
Toni. Song of Solomon. New York : A Plume Book, 1977.
Follows the
life of Macon Dead, Jr., the son of the richest
black
family in a midwestern town, as he leaves home on a
quest for
personal freedom.
F Mukherje
Mukherjee,
Bharati. The middleman and other
stories. 1st ed.
New York :
Grove Press, 1988. The middleman -- A
wife's
story -- Loose
ends -- Orbiting -- Fighting for the rebound
-- The
tenant -- Fathering -- Jasmine -- Danny's girls --
Buried
lives -- The management of grief.
F Nabokov
Nabokov,
Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977.
Ada : or, Ardor, a
family
chronicle. New York : McGraw-Hill,
c1969. Van falls
in love
with his half-sister, Ada, and over their lives,
they
alternately separate and rejoin until Van's 97th
birthday.
F Norris
Norris, Frank,
1870-1902. The Octopus : a story of
California.
Cambridge,
Mass., : R. Bentley, 1971 [1901]. The
novel
depicts the
struggle for power between California wheat
ranchers
and the railroad, "the octopus" that encircles and
strangles
them. With its epic sweep, the story includes two
love
affairs, one involving the mystical Vanamee, and comes
to a climax with a pitched battle between
farmers and
railroad
men ensues.
F Norris
Norris, Frank,
1870-1902. The pit; : a story of
Chicago.
Cambridge,
Mass., : R. Bentley, 1971 [c1903].
Sequel to
"The
Octopus" in which Curtis Jadwin attempts to corner the
Chicago
wheat market in "the pit" of the stock exchange.
F O'Conner
O'Connor,
Flannery. Wise blood. New York : Noonday Press,
c1990. After his release from the army at age
twenty-two,
Hazel Motes
of Eastrod, Tennessee comes to a Southern city
where he
falls under the spell of Asa Hawks, a blind street
preacher
who is led around by his daughter, Sabbath Lily.
F O'Connor
O'Connor,
Edwin. The last hurrah. [1st ed.].
Boston, : Little,
Brown,
[c1956]. A story of Irish-American
politics in an
unnamed
Eastern city. The chief character is Frank
Skeffington
who has climbed high on the political ladder, bu
finally
faces defeat when his enemies form a coalition
against
him.
F Panger
Panger,
Daniel. Ol' prophet Nat. Winston-Salem, : J. F. Blair,
[1967]. Nat Turner led a bloody
uprising of his fellow
slaves
which spread terror throughout the South prior to the
Civil War.
He was a preacher-slave, led by "visions" of the
role he was
to play, and gathered about himself a band of
Negroes
determined to win their freedom at any cost.
F Pinkwater
Pinkwater,
Daniel Manus, 1941-. Fish whistle :
commentaries,
uncommontaries, and vulgar excesses.
Reading, Mass. :
Addison-Wesley, c1989. A
collection of seventy-two short
humor
pieces with commentaries, by a well-know National
Public
Radio commentator and author. The pieces are
wide-ranging, from the folly of airline travel, the
pleasures
of food, the correct way to look at art, the
experience
of being a fat person, the weirder aspects of
Chicago
folklore, the quality of life as an animal trainer,
and more.
F Porter
Porter,
Katherine Anne, 1890-1980. Pale
horse, pale rider :
three short
novels. New York : Harcourt, Brace & World,
c1964,
[1939]. Old mortality.--Noon
wine.--Pale horse, pale
rider. In Old Mortality, Miranda has heard for many
years
her family
speaking with nostalgia for her now dead aunt who
had been
known for her grace and beauty. Now that she is
older, she
comes to realize that her aunt was actually a
totally
self-centered woman to whose whims other people had
been sacrificed. In Noon Wine, Mr. Thompson,
an ineffectual
farmer
kills a disagreeable stranger who he imagines is
attacking
his eccentric but valuable hired man. In Pale
Horse, Pale
Rider, a brief love affair between a young
Southern
newspaperwoman and a soldier during WWI suggests
far more
than it says.
F Powell
Powell,Dawn. A Time to be
born. New York : Yarrow Press,
1991.
A wealthy, self-centered New York newspaper
publisher and
his
scheming, novelist wife in the months show cynical New
Yorkers
stalking each other for various selfish ends, in
America
just before World War II. Funny and intelligent
portrayal
of New Yorkers.
F Powers
Powers, J. F.
(James Farl), 1917-. Wheat that
springeth green.
1st
ed. New York : A.A. Knopf, 1988. Joe Hackett, a
midwestern Catholic docesan priest, is
pastor of the parish
at
Inglenook, Minnesota, for which he has built a school,
convent,
and rectory. He pays for these achievements in
loneliness
and drink and seems to be headed for spiritual
drought.
The arrival of his curate, Father Bill, helps him
return to
contact with his vocation and his fellow man.
F Purdy
Purdy,
James. In the hollow of his hand. 1st ed.
New York :
Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, c1986. Describes the
crisis in a
small town
in the 1920s when Decatur, an Ojibwa Indian
claims that
Chad, the only son of the town's prominent
family, is his son. The eruption of scandal
and family
tragedy
threatens to tear apart the tight-knit community.
F Pynchon
Pynchon,
Thomas. Mason & Dixon. 1st Owl Books ed. New York :
Henry Holt,
1998, c1997. The story follows the
lifelong
partnership
and adventures of the English surveyors Charles
Mason and
Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they
map and
measure through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary
America of
Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and
bawdy
establishments of ill-repute. Almost all the book's
subversive
humor is balanced on the razor edge of
anachronism,
creating a rich stew of accepted and invented
history,
anecdote, myth and hyperbole.
F Richter
Richter, Conrad,
1890-1969. A country of strangers. [1st ed.].
New York, :
Knopf, 1966. A companion novel to
"The Light in
the
Forest." A white girl searches for her identity after
having been
taken prisoner as a child, adopted into an
Indian
family, married to an Indian, then forcibly returned
to her
white family.
F Russo
Russo, Richard,
1949-. The straight man. 1st ed.
New York :
Random
House, c1997. Writing professor William
Henry
Devereaux
Jr. tries not to let the absurdities of academia
get him
down, but life becomes a bit hard to handle when he
has his
nose slashed by a feminist colleague, he is accused
of
murdering a goose, he suspects his wife of having an
affair, and
he confronts his long-lost father.
F Salinger
Salinger, J. D.
(Jerome David), 1919-. The catcher
in the rye.
[1st
ed.]. Boston, : Little, Brown,
1951. Holden Caulfield
has run away from his prep school
just before Christmas
vacation
and, unwilling to go home, drifts around New York
getting
into wryly humorous adventures. Conveys contemporary
youth's
dissatisfaction with adult society.
F See
See,
Carolyn. Making history. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1991. One family who has achieved the L.A. dream
of
affluent
happiness has their sunny world shattered by a
series of
random accidents and the chaos of living. This
book
examines the fragility of families and life itself--and
also about
extraordinary resilience and the capacity for
renewal.
F Singer
Singer, Isaac
Bashevis, 1904-. Magician of Lublin. Farrar,
1960. Yasha Mazur makes his living in the circuses
and
theatres of
19th century Poland. He can skate on the high
wire, eat
fire, and charm any woman.
F Singer
Singer, Isaac
Bashevis, 1904-. The penitent. New York : Farrar,
Straus,
Giroux, c1983. Joseph Shapiro, a
wealthy
businessman,
stretched thin between the demands of wife,
mistress
and job, one day feels such total disgust for his
lifestyle
that he abandons everything and flies to Israel,
where he
assumes the role of the penitent. He divorces "the
wanton" and marries the rabbi's daughter and devotes himself
to prayer
and study.
F Singer
Singer, Isaac
Bashevis, 1904-. The family Moskat. [1st ed.].
New York, :
Knopf, 1950. A novel of a Jewish family
in
Warsaw from
the end of the nineteenth century to the
beginning
of World War II. The relatives, friends, and
hangerson
with their customs and religion form a rich
tapestry of
Jewish life and customs.
F Singer
Singer, Isaac
Bashevis, 1904-. Shosha. New York : Farrar,
Straus and
Giroux, c1978. In Russia in the 1930s,
a group
of friends
try to achieve their ambitions despite the
increasing
threat from Hitler's Germany.
F Smith
Smith, Lee,
1944-. Fair and tender ladies. New York : Putnam,
c1988. Tells the story of Ivy Rowe, from her
childhood
through old
age, through the letters she writes. The reader
gets a good
picture of life in the back-hills of rural
Virginia.
F Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. Red pony. Viking, 1945. Jody and
his family
live on a California ranch and experience
poignant
feelings for their animals and life.
F Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. The wayward bus. New York, : The
Viking
Press, 1947. A group of people become
stranded
overnight
at a roadside gas station and their relationships
to each
other and the proprietors is studied.
F Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. Cannery row. New York, : The Viking
press,
1945. An account of the misadventures
of workers in
a
California cannery and their friends.
F Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. Travels with Charley; :
in search of
America. New York, : Viking Press, [1962]. With his dog
Charley,
John Steinbeck set out in his truck to explore and
experience
America in the 1960s. As he talked with all kinds
of people,
he sadly noted the passing of region speech, fell
in love
with Montana, and was appalled by racism in New
Orleans.
F Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. Tortilla flat. New York, N.Y. :
Viking,
1962, c1935. A humorous tale about the
adventures
of a group
of pleasure-loving Mexican-Americans in
California,
who are some of Steinbeck's most interesting
characters.
The men drink, steal, chase women, make music,
and dance
until they are eventually undone by a climactic
fire.
F Styron
Styron, William,
1925-. The confessions of Nat
Turner. New York
: Random
House, [1967]. Tells the story of the
short-lived,
bloody
rebellion of slaves in Southhampton, Virginia, in
August,
1831, as seen through the eyes of the instigator,
Nat Turner.
F Swanson
Swanson, Walter
S. J. Deepwood : a novel. 1st ed.
Boston :
Little,
Brown, c1981. Young Jay marries an
older woman who
took him in
when he was orphaned, but eventually he becomes
restless.
F Tan
Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God's wife. New York : G.P. Putnam's
Sons,
1991. The story of a family's secrets
that takes
mother and
daughter back to a small island outside Shanghai
in the
1920s and into China during World War Two.
F Taylor
Taylor, Mildred
D. Let the circle be unbroken. New York : Dial
Press, c1981. Four black children growing up in rural
Mississippi
during the Depression experience racial
antagonisms
and hard times, but learn from their parents the
pride and
self-respect they need to survive.
F Toole
Toole, John
Kennedy, 1937-1969. A confederacy of
dunces. Baton
Rouge :
Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Set in New
Orleans,
this Pulitzer Prize winning farce is of Ignatius
Reilly and
his various attempts at employment and one-man
wars.
F Tyler
Tyler,
Anne. The accidental tourist. 1st ed.
New York : Knopf
:
Distributed by Random House, 1985. An
author of
guidebooks
for travelling businessmen goes through life
"accidently". It is an accident tinged with purpose when he
gets
involved with the astonishing Muriel and her talent for
finding
adventure.
F Tyler
Tyler,
Anne. Breathing lessons. 1st trade ed. New York :
Knopf,
1988. While driving to the funeral of a
friend, a
couple
married twenty-eight years examine the expectations
and
disappointments of their marriage.
F Tyler
Tyler,
Anne. Celestial navigation. [1st ed.].
New York, :
Knopf,
1974. Jeremy Pauling runs a boarding house,
spending
most of his
time creating things out of scraps of materials.
Three women
see him differently, but only Miss Vinton seems
to have the
real key to Jeremy; she knows that he sails by
celestial navigation, seeing things at a
distance, living at
a distance.
F Tyler
Tyler,
Anne. Saint maybe. 1st ed.
New York : Knopf :
Distributed
by Random House, 1991. In 1965 the Bedloe
family
lives on a quiet street in Baltimore.
Seventeen-year-old Ian has dreams for the future, until the
night when
he meddles in his older brother's life--and from
that
careless moment on, nothing can ever be the same.
F Updike
Updike,
John. Rabbit, run. [1st ed.].
New York, : Knopf, 1960.
Rabbit
Angstrom is a former star athlete who cannot reach
maturity
and whose later life, without the applause of the
games,
seems an anti-climax.
F Uris
Uris, Leon M.,
1924-. Topaz; : a novel,. [1st ed.].
New York,
:
McGraw-Hill, [1967]. A Russian defector
tells about
Topaz, an
espionage network in the French government for the
Soviet
Union, and the existence of Soviet weapons in Cuba.
Getting the
French to believe in Topaz's existence is the
problem.
F Vonnegut
Vonnegut,
Kurt. Breakfast of champions, or,
Goodbye blue Monday!
New York :
Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1999. Dwayne
Hoover, a
successful
automobile dealer, suddenly decides that he is a
machine and
begins to act accordingly.
F Vonnegut
Vonnegut,
Kurt. Player piano. New York : Delta Trade
Paperbacks,
1999, c1980. Describes a future America
in
which computers
solve all your problems, machines give you
everything
you need, and you are taken care of from cradle
to grave by
an industrial society.
F Vonnegut
Vonnegut,
Kurt. The sirens of Titan. New York : Delta Trade
Paperback,
1998. The richest man on earth is
offered a
chance to
journey space with a beautiful woman where he
learns the
purpose of human life.
F Vonnegut
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slapstick : or, Lonesome no more! New York :
Delta Trade
Paperbacks, 1999. In a future time, a
former
President
of the United States writes his memoirs, including
an
explanation of how, as President, he was forced to sell
the
original Louisiana Purchase lands to the King of
Michigan.
F Vonnegut
Vonnegut,
Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five : or, The
children's crusade
: a duty-dance with death. New York : Delta Trade
Paperbacks,
1999. A fourth-generation
German-American is
tortured by
his memories of the fire-bombing of Dresden in
1944, which
he witnessed while a prisoner of war.
F Wallin
Wallin,
Luke. The redneck poacher's son : a
novel. Scarsdale,
N.Y. :
Bradbury Press, c1981. The youngest of
three sons
raised to
be poachers in the Alabama swamps rises above the
snare of
his destiny.
F Warloe
Warloe,
Constance. The legend of Olivia
Cosmos Montevideo : a
novel. New York : Atlantic Monthly Press,
c1994. The story
of a mother
whose ordinary life and limited horizons are
shattered
by the death of her son in Vietnam.
F Welch
Welch, James,
1940-. Fools crow. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. :
Penguin
Books, 1987, c1986. In 1870 the Lone
Eaters, a
small band
of Pikuni (or Blackfeet) Indians, are living in
the Two
Medicine Territory of Montana. The extinction of the
Pikuni way
of life is ominously in sight. Only the form of
that end is
in question.
F West
West, Nathanael,
1903-1940. Miss Lonelyhearts, &
The day of the
locust. [Norfolk, Conn., : J. Laughlin, 1962]. In Miss
Lonelyhearts, a man who writes an "advice to the lovelorn"
column
tries to live the role of the omniscient counselor he
has assumed
for the paper, but his attempts to reach out to
suffering
humanity are twisted by circumstances, and he is
finally
murdered by a man he has tried to help. In The Day
of the
Locust, the central character is Homer Simpson, who
arrives in
Hollywood only to find monotony and boredom,
culminating
in a surrealistic riot at a movie premiere.
F Wharton
Wharton, Edith,
1862-1937. Ethan Frome. New York : Scribner,
c1939,
[1911]. A grim tale of retribution
involving a
discouraged
New England farmer, his hypochondriac wife, and
a girl who
still finds some joy in living.
PB Addams
Addams, Jane,
1860-1935. Twenty years at
Hull-House. Signet
Classic
ed. New York : New American Library,
1981. Jane
Addam's
account of her settlement house in Chicago's West
side slums
covering the years 1889 to 1909.
PB Alexie
Alexie, Sherman,
1966-. The Lone Ranger and Tonto
fistfight in
heaven. 1st HarperPerennial ed. New York :
HarperPerennial, 1994. Victor, a
Spokane Indian through
whose eyes
we view the community, is strongly aware of
Native
American traditions but wonders how his ancestors
view
today's Indians. In spite of the bleakness of
reservation
life, the text of these stories brims with humor
and passion
as it juxtaposes ancient customs with such
contemporary artifacts as
electric guitars and diet Pepsi.
PB Anaya
Anaya, Rudolfo
A. Bless me, Ultima; : a novel. Berkeley, Calif.
: Quinto
Sol Publications, 1972, 1986. Antonio
Marez is six
years old
when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New
Mexico. She
is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and
magic.
Under her wise wing, Tony probes the family ties and
discovers
himself in the secrets of the pagan past.
PB Banks
Banks, Russell,
1940-. Cloudsplitter : a novel. 1st
HarperPerennial ed. New York :
HarperPerennial, 1999.
Re-creates
the antislavery movement of the 1840s and traces
it through
the brutal guerrilla warfare of Bloody Kansas,
culminating
in a haunting, powerful re-creation of Brown's
insurrectionary raid on Harpers Ferry.
PB Bellow
Bellow,
Saul. Seize the day, : with three
short stories and a
one-act
play. New York, : Viking Press, 1956.
PB Buck
Buck, Pearl S.
(Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. Death
in the
castle, : a novel,. New York, : John Day Co., [1965].
PB Buck
Buck, Pearl S.
(Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. Dragon
seed,.
New York, :
The John Day company, [c1942]. With the
fall of
Nanking during the Japanese war,
Ling Tan and his family are
unprepared
to grasp the full implications of the looting and
the horror
that follow. Despite the chaos, they make an
attempt to
continue some kind of life.
PB Capote
Capote, Truman,
1924-. Breakfast at Tiffany's : a
short novel
and three
stories. New York : Penguin,, 1994. Breakfast at
Tiffany's
-- House of flowers -- A diamond guitar -- A
Christmas
memory. Holly Golightly is a piquantly
wacky
ex-hillbilly who lives in a Manhattan Upper East Side
brownstone.
She is a kind of expense account tramp, who is
alone a a
little afraid.
PB Conroy
Conroy,
Pat. The prince of tides. Bantam Books, 1986. Tom
Wingo is a
high school football coach whose marriage and
career are
crumbling. He flies to New York after learning of
his twin
sister's suicide attempt. He realizes that while
trying to
save her, this may be his last chance to save
himself as
well.
PB Conroy
Conroy,
Pat. The Great Santini. Toronto ; New York : Bantam,
1987,
c1976. Bull Meecham is all Marine, a
fighter pilot,
and
absolute ruler of his family. Ben, his oldest son has to
fight
against a father who doesn't give in.
PB Cormier
Cormier,
Robert. In the middle of the night. New York :
Delacorte
Press, c1995. Sixteen-year-old Denny
lives in the
shadow of a
deadly accident with which his father was
connected when he was Denny's age,
a disaster for which some
of the
survivors still blame his father.
PB Craven
Craven,
Margaret. I heard the owl call my
name. Mark, a young
minister,
is sent to the Kwakiutl Indian village of
Kingcome.
He has only two years to live, but does not know
it. When he
hears the owl, an Indian legend, he understands
what is
going to happen.
PB Davis
Davis, H.L.
(Harold Lenoir), 1896-1960. Honey in
the horn.
Moscow, ID
: University of Idaho Press, 1992, c1935.
A
novel of
the open spaces of Oregon during the homesteading
years
1906-1908. Clay Calvert is mixed up in a jail delivery
and his
subsequent long string of adventures brings him into
contact
with herders, horse traders, sawmill workers,
hoppickers,
sherrifs, storekeepers, desperadoes, Indians,
and
settlers of every variety.
PB DeLillo
DeLillo,
Don. White noise. New York : Viking Penguin Books,
1985. A professor of Hitler Studies lives in a
confused
home in the confusion of modern America.
Winner of the
American
Book Award.
PB Dickey
Dickey,
James. Deliverance. Boston, : Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
Four
southern businessmen take a hunting trip down a river.
One man is
murdered. The other three deal with the
psychological trauma of escape.
PB Doctorow
Doctorow, E. L.,
1931-. Billy Bathgate : a novel. 1st trade ed.
New York : Random House, c1989. The story of Billy
Bathgate, a
boy who has insinuated himself into the inner
circle of
the notorious Dutch Schultz gang to become
apprentice
and protege to one of the great murdering
gangsters.
PB Doig
Doig, Ivan. This house of sky : landscapes of a
Western mind.
1st
Harvest/HBJ ed. New York : Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich,
1980,
c1978.
PB Doig
Doig, Ivan. English creek. 1st ed.
New York : Atheneum, 1984.
Jick
McCaskill and his family live in northern Montana,
where his
father is a forest ranger and range rider. His
older brother at 18 is set on
marriage to a town girl and
livelihood
as a cowboy, which throws the family into
conflict.
PB Doig
Doig, Ivan. Ride with me, Mariah Montana. New York : Penguin
Books,
1990. Jick, facing age and loss, his
prized ranch
beset by
outside interests, is jumpstarted back into
adventure
by Mariah, a red-headed newspaper photographer.
PB Doig
Doig, Ivan. Dancing at the Rascal Fair. New York :
HarperPerennial, 1987.
Chronicles the American experiences
of Angus
McCaskill and Rob Barclay, Scottish immigrants, who
lived for
three decades in Two Medicine Country at the base
of the
Rocky Mountains.
PB Doig
Doig, Ivan. Winter brothers : a season at the edge of
America.
New York :
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1980.
PB Dorris
Dorris, Michael. A yellow raft in blue water. Warner Books ed.
New York,
NY : Warner Books, 1988, c1987. The
bitter rifts
and
inevitable bonds between generations are highlighted as
a teenage
daughter, mother, and grandmother of an
American-Indian family tell their life stories.
PB Dreiser
Dreiser,
Theodore, 1871-1945. An American
tragedy. New York :
New American Library, 1981 [1925]. The corruption of a
young man
becomes a portrait of the society that shaped his
ambitions
and destroyed him.
PB Dreiser
Dreiser,
Theodore, 1871-1945. Sister Carrie. Indianapolis, :
Bobbs-Merrill, 1970 [1900]. An
innocent country girl
becomes a
success on the New York stage.
PB Dreiser
Dreiser,
Theodore, 1871-1945. Jennie
Gerhardt. [New York] :
Penguin
Books, 1989 [1911]. The portrait of a
working girl
set in the
1880s and 1890s. Her life is irreversibly shaped
by an early
sexual transgression.
PB Evans
Evans, Nicholas,
1950-. The horse whisperer. New York : Dell
Pub.,
[1996]. A mother brings her teenage
daughter and
their
horse, Pilgrim, both seriously injured by a speeding
truck, to
the Horse Whisperer in Montana.
PB Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. As I lay dying. [New ed.].
New
York, :
Random House, 1964, [1930]. As I lay
Dying is the
story of
the death of Addie Bundren and the ordeals her
family
undergo in carrying the body to Jefferson,
Mississippi
for burial. During the course of the journey
each member
of the family remembers his relationship with
Addie,
revealing various family secrets that have directed
their lives
over time.
PB Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. Three famous
short novels. New
York, :
Random House, [1958, c1942]. Spotted
horses.--Old
man.--The
bear.
PB Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. The hamlet. [3d ed.].
New York,
: Random
House, [1964]. Flem Snopes begins as a
clerk in a
store in
Yoknapatawpha County early in the 20th century.
Through
usury, connivance and thrift he becomes part-owner
of the
store and husband of his employer's daughter. He
later works
his way up to vice president in a bank, driving
the
president from town.
PB Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. Light in August. New York, :
Random
House, [1967, c1959]. Joe Christmas,
part negro,
part white,
has an affair with Joanna Burden, whom he kills,
and sets
fire to her house. The enraged townspeople capture
and lynch
him.
PB Faulkner
Faulkner,
William, 1897-1962. A fable. New York : Vintage
Books, 1978, c1954.
PB Flagg
Flagg,
Fannie. Fried green tomatoes at the
Whistle Stop Cafe.
1st
McGraw-Hill paperback ed. New York :
McGraw-Hill, 1988.
Evelyn
Couch hears 80 year old Ninny Threadgoode's life
story which
centers on a cafe in the railroad town of
Whistle
Stop, Ala., and on Idgie and Ruth, the two women who
own the
cafe.
PB Ford
Ford, Richard,
1944-. Independence day. 1st Vintage
contemporaries ed. New York :
Vintage Books, 1996, c1995.
In the
aftermath of his divorce and ruin of his career,
Frank
Bascombe has entered an existence period, selling real
estate in
New Jersey and mastering the act of normalcy. One
Fourth of
July, Frank is suddenly called into bewildering
engagement
with life.
PB Gardner
Gardner, John
Champlin, 1933-. Grendel. [1st ed.].
New York, :
Knopf,
1971. Grendel, the monster, tells his
side of the
Beowulf
story, and compares his values with the chief values
of human
beings.
PB Gardner
Gardner, John
Champlin, 1933-. The sunlight
dialogues. [1st
ed.]. New York, : Knopf; [distributed by Random
House],
1972. A noble, but somewhat befuddled old police
chief
attempts to
get hold of a strange magician called the
Sunlight
Man. The Sunlight Man believes in absolute
existential
freedom. The Chief, Fred Clumly, believes in Law
and Order
and Absolute Justice here and now. The two mad
idealists
hunt each other until each drives his enemy to a
bedrock
humanness, stripped of illusion, full of grace.
PB Gibbons
Gibbons, Kaye,
1960-. Ellen Foster. Vintage Books ed. New York
: Vintage
Books, 1990. Having suffered abuse and
misfortune
for much of
her life, a young child searches for a better
life and
finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman
with
several foster children.
PB Glasgow
Glasgow, Ellen
Anderson Gholson, 1873-1945. Barren
ground. New
York : Hill
and Wang, 1953, c1925. This is the
story of a
woman's
effort to find a place for herself in the world and
to live
without joy. A universal story of the triumph of the
human
spirit over the environment.
PB Glasgow
Glasgow, Ellen
Anderson Gholson, 1873-1945. Virginia. New York
: Penguin
Books, c1913, 1989. Virginia
Pendelton's
disillusionment with the life she has been trained to lead
becomes a
coming-of-age amidst the sexual and racial
politics of
the turn-of-the-century American South.
PB Gurganus
Gurganus, Allan,
1947-. Oldest living Confederate
widow tells
all. Ballantine ed. New York : Ivy Books, 1990.
Lucy
Marsden's
testament of her Civil War days includes a
three-way
love story, an eccentric small-town family,
accounts of
combat, and the price she paid--the lives of her
nine
children and the freedom of her best friend.
PB Guthrie
Guthrie, A. B.
(Alfred Bertram), 1901-. The big
sky. Thorndike
large
print. Thorndike, Me. : Thorndike
Press, 1985, c1947.
PB Hamill
Hamill, Pete,
1935-. Snow in August. New York, NY : Warner
Vision
Books, [1998], c1997. In the year 1947,
eleven-year-old Michael Devlin is about to forge an
extraordinary bond with a refugee of war named Rabbi Judah
Hirsch.
Standing united against a common enemy, they will
summon from
ancient sources a power in desperately short
supply in
modern Brooklyn, a force known as magic.
PB Hemingway
Hemingway,
Ernest, 1899-1961. In our time :
stories. 1st
Scribner
classic/Collier ed. New York : Collier,
1986,[1958]. On the Quai at
Smyrna--Indian camp-The doctor
and the
doctor's wife--The end of something--The three-day
blow-The battler--A very short
story-Soldier's home--The
revolutionist--Mr. and Mrs. Elliot--Cat in the rain--Out of
season--Cross-country snow--etc.
PB Hemingway
Hemingway,
Ernest, 1899-1961. The snows of
Kilimanjaro, and
other
stories. 1st Scribner classic/Collier ed. New York :
Collier
Books, 1986, c1961. The snows of
Kilimanjaro -- A
clean,
well-lighted place -- A day's wait -- The gambler,
the nun,
and the radio -- Fathers and sons -- In another
country --
The killers -- A way you'll never be -- Fifty
grand --
The short happy life of Francis Macomber.
PB Hemingway
Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961. The old man and the sea. New
York, :
Scribner, 1952. A Cuban fisherman, who
has gone 84
days
without a catch, hooks a gigantic marlin, and after a
two-day
battle with the fish, finally harpoons it. Sharks
have other
ideas for the marlin, however, and the fisherman
is kept
busy trying to fight them off.
PB Henry
Henry, O.,
1862-1910. The gift of the Magi and other
short
stories. New York : Dover Publications, 1992. Gift of the
Magi -- Cop
and the anthem -- Springtime a la Carte -- The
Green door
-- After twenty years -- The furnished room --
The
pimienta pancakes -- The Last leaf -- The voice of the
city --
While the auto waits -- A retrieved information -- A
municipal
report. A collection of sixteen short
stories by
O. Henry.
PB Hersey
Hersey, John,
1914-. Hiroshima. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York
: Vintage
Books, 1989, c1985. An account of the
dropping of
an atomic
bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, from the viewpoint of
the people
who lived through it.
PB Hijuelos
Hijuelos,
Oscar. The mambo kings play songs of
love. 1st ed.
New York :
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989. Cesar and
Nestor,
Cuban
musicians, make their way from Havana to the New York
stage in
1949 where they share triumphs and tragedies.
PB Houston
Houston, Jeanne
Wakatsuki and James D. Farewell to
Manzanar.
Bantam
Books, 1973. Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven
years old in
1942 when
her family was uprooted from their home and sent
to live at
Manzanar internment camp with 10,000 other
Japanese
Americans. Story of a native-born American child
who discovered what it was like
to grow up behind barbed
wire in the
United States.
PB James
James, Henry,
1843-1916. The ambassadors. Hertfordshire,
England :
Wordsworth Editions, Ltd., 1993.
Lambert Strether
is sent by
a wealthy widow to persuade her son Chad to come
home. Chad
is involved with a charming French woman, and
Strether
gradually realizes that life holds more real
meaning for Chad in Paris than in Woolett,
Massachusetts.
PB Johnson
Johnson,
Charles. Middle Passage. New York : Penguin, 1990.
Rutherford
Calhoun, freed slave, ardent womanizer and
self-confessed liar and thief, must
flee New Orleans because
of bad
debts in 1830. He stows away on a ship bound to pick
up human
cargo in Africa. The voyage is extraordinary.
PB Johnson
Johnson, James Weldon, 1871-1938. The autobiography of an
ex-coloured
man. New York : Penguin Books, 1960. Narrated
by a man
whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white,
describes
his journey through African-American society from
genteel
aristocrats to the musicians of ragtime.
PB Kennedy
Kennedy, William
P. Ironweed. Penguin Books, 1983.
PB Kennedy
Kennedy,
William, 1928-. Very old bones. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.
: Viking,
1992. Chronicles the complex, moving,
and
sometimes
hilarious saga of a hard-pressed, hard-drinking
Irish-American family. From Malachi, the nineteenth-century
patriarch
whose religious fervor drove him to the ultimate
sin, to
Francis, Peter's self-exiled brother; to Orson, half
insider,
half outsider, teetering on the brink of madness,
the
Phelan's come vibrantly to life.
PB Kerouac
Kerouac, Jack,
1922-1969. Visions of Cody. [1st ed.].
New
York, :
McGraw Hill, [1972].
PB Kerouac
Kerouac, Jack,
1922-1969. The town & the city. San Diego :
Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, c1978.
PB Kerouac
Kerouac, Jack,
1922-1969. Book of dreams. City Lights Books,
1981. Kerouac has recorded his dreams after waking
up and
strung them
together. Many of his literary characters appear
in these
dreams, offering commentary upon his novels.
PB Kerouac
Kerouac, Jack,
1922-1969. On the road :
Introduction by Ann
Charters. New York : Penguin
Books, 1991. A novel that
defined the
beat generation of the 1950s, in which Sal
Paradise
tells about his travels throughout the North
American
continent in search of belief and meaning.
PB Kesey
Kesey, Ken. Sometimes a great notion : a novel. New York :
Penguin
Books, 1977, c1964.
PB Kesey
Kesey, Ken. One flew over the cuckoo's nest. New York : Signet,
c1962. The struggle for power between a head nurse
and a
male
patient in a mental institution leads to a climax of
hate,
violence and death.
PB Kingsolver
Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal dreams : a novel. 1st ed.
New
York, NY :
HarperCollins, c1990. Codi returns to
her
hometown to
confront her past and face her ailing father.
What she
finds is a town threatened by an environmental
catastrophe
and a man who could change her life.
PB Kingsolver
Kingsolver,
Barbara. Pigs in heaven : a novel. 1st ed.
New
York :
HarperCollins, c1993. Six-year-old Turtle
Green
witnesses a
freak accident drawing her and her mother into a
conflict of
historic proportions.
PB Kinsella
Kinsella, W.
P. Shoeless Joe. 1st Ballantine Bks. ed. New York
: Ballantine, 1983. An Iowa farmer builds a baseball
stadium in
his cornfield, hoping his hero, Shoeless Joe
Jackson,
will play in it. The movie "Field of Dreams" was
based on
this book.
PB Leonard
Leonard, Elmore,
1925-. Bandits. New York : Warner, c1987. An
ex-nun, an
ex-con, and an ex-cop stumble onto a private
fund-raising scheme to aid the Contras in Nicaragua.
Together
they create a plan to make out like bandits.
PB Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Cass Timberlane, : a
novel of
husbands
and wives. [1st Modern library
ed.]. New York :
[Random House,
1957, c1945].
PB Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Dodsworth; : a novel;. New York, :
Modern
Library, [c1947]. Samuel Dodsworth, a
rich
automobile
manufacturer, goes to Europe with his frivolous
wife Fran
who becomes involved with several European
adventurers. Lonely and unhappy, he meets Edith Cortwright,
an American
widow who teaches him to appreciate the
traditions
of Europe. He eventually leaves Fran for the more
mature
companionship of Edith.
PB Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Elmer Gantry. Cambridge, Mass. : R.
Bentley,
1979, c1927. A brazen ex-football
player enters
the
ministry and becomes a famous evangelist and leader of a
large
midwestern church.
PB Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Gideon Planish. [1943].
PB Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. The God-seeker. [1949].
PB Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Arrowsmith. New York, : Harcourt,
Brace &
World, [1952? c1925]. A young doctor,
Martin
Arrowsmith, begins medical
practice in a small town, moving
on to a
city health department, and eventually becomes the
doctor at
an "institute" sponsored by a rich man and his
wife. In
his quest for pure science, Arrowsmith encounters
meanness,
corruption and misunderstanding, and he finds
himself
oftern frustrated with the practice. The novel is
frequently
satiric and caused much controversy when it was
first
published in 1925.
PB Lewis
Lewis, Sinclair,
1885-1951. Kingsblood royal. New York, :
Random
house, [1947].
PB London
London, Jack,
1876-1916. The sea-wolf. New York, : Horizon
Press,
1969. The ruthless power of Wolf
Larsen, captain of
teh
schooner 'Ghost' is challenged by Humphrey Van Weyden, a
literary
critic, and Maude Brewster, a poet, both of whom he
as rescued.
PB London
London, Jack,
1876-1916. White Fang. Scholastic Inc. : New
York. White Fang was part dog, part wolf. In his
lonely
world, he
soon learned to follow the harsh law of the North
- kill or
be killed. A cruel Beauty Smith purchases White
Fang from
his Indian master and turns him into a vicious
killer -- a
pit dog forced to fight for money. Will he ever
know the
kindness of a gentle master or will he die a fierce
deadly
killer?.
PB London
London, Jack,
1876-1916. The sea-wolf and selected
stories. New
York : New
American Library, 1981. The sea-wolf --
The law
of life --
The one thousand dozen -- All gold canyon --
Moon-face
-- Afterword.
PB London
London, Jack,
1876-1916. The unabridged Jack
London.
Philadelphia : Running Press,
c1981. Son of the Wolf -- God
of his
fathers -- Children of the Frost -- White Fang -- The
Faith of
Men -- Call of the Wild -- The Sea-Wolf -- Tales of
the Fish
Patrol. Includes the author's major
novels and
short
stories as they appeared in their original form. Each
work is
preceded by a short introduction placing it in a
biographical and chronological context.
PB Mailer
Mailer,
Norman. The armies of the night :
history as a novel,
the novel
as history. New York : Plume,
[1994], c1968. The
author
reports on his participation in a Vietnam War protest
that took place in Washington D.C.
on October 21, 1967,
where he
was part of a crowd estimated at anywhere from
20,000 to
200,000 made up of people from all walks of life
and hovered
over by helicopters and armed soldiers.
PB Malamud
Malamud,
Bernard. The natural. New York : Avon Books, 1993.
Now an
American baseball hero and a winner after a dark
period, Roy
finds the woman he thought he had lost. But he
is up
against corrupters, seducers, and glory destroyers.
And he has
to win the toughest game of his life.
PB Malamud
Malamud,
Bernard. The fixer. New York : Dell, 1969. The story
of an
ordinary man accused of ritual murder, and of his
heroic
victory over almost incredible brutality and
degradation.
PB McCarthy
McCarthy,
Cormac, 1933-. All the pretty
horses. 1st Vintage
International ed. New York :
Vintage Books, 1993, c1992.
The story
of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line
of Texas
ranchers, who, along with two companions, sets off
on an
idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where
dreams are
paid for in blood.
PB McMurtry
McMurtry,
Larry. Anything for Billy. New York : Simon and
Schuster,
c1988. A novel of the life and times of
Billy the
Kid, a
legendary outlaw and gunman, and of the people who
are drawn
into his brief struggle to make a name for himself
as a
desperado.
PB McMurtry
McMurtry,
Larry. The last picture show. Harmondsworth, Eng. ;
New York :
Penguin Books, 1979, c1966.
PB McMurtry
McMurtry,
Larry. Terms of endearment. Boston, Mass. : G.K.
Hall, 1984,
c1975.
PB McMurtry
McMurtry,
Larry. Texasville : a novel. New York : Simon and
Schuster,
c1987. Sequel to: The Last Picture
Show. Thalia,
once a
backwater Texas town, then a boom town, collapses
with the
oil prices. Then a former high school beauty
returns
from a career as a Hollywood star, and shakes the
town to its
roots.
PB McMurtry
McMurtry, Larry.
Buffalo girls : a novel. New York : Simon and
Schuster,
c1990. Tells of the life and times of
Calamity
Jane and
others whose pasts embrace the violent history of
the West.
PB Michener
Michener, James A. (James Albert), 1907-. Chesapeake. 1st ed.
New York :
Random House, c1978. Three families and
the
Indians,
Blacks and Irish immigrants with whom they interact
live for
four centuries on Maryland's eastern shore.
PB Michener
Michener, James
A. (James Albert), 1907-. The
source; : a
novel,. New York, : Random House, [1965].
PB Millhauser
Millhauser, Steven. Martin Dressler : the tale of an American
dreamer. 1st Vintage Contemporaries ed. New York : Vintage
Books,
1997, c1996. Set in late nineteenth
century New York
City, a
young entrepreneur named Martin Dressler has the
audacity to
make his dreams come true and the ability to do
so on a
grand scale.
PB Mitchell
Mitchell,
Joseph, 1908-. Up in the old hotel,
and other stories.
1st Vintage Books ed. New York : Vintage Books, 1993. The
Old house
at home. -- Mazie. -- Hit on the head with a cow.
--
Professor sea gull. -- A spism and a spasm. -- Lady Olga.
-- Evening
with a gifted child. -- A sporting man. -- The
cave
dwellers. -- King of the Gypsies. -- The Gypsy women.
-- The
deaf-mutes club. --Santa Claus Smith. -- The
don't-swear
man. -- Obituary of a gin mill. -- Houdini's
picnic. -- The Mohawks in high steel.
-- All you can hold
for five
bucks. -- A mess of clams. -- The same as monkey
glands. --
Goodbye, Shirley Temple. -- On the wagon. -- The
kind old
blonde. -- I couldn't dope it out. -- The downfall
of fascism
in Black Ankle County. -- I blame it all on
Mamma.
--Uncle Dockery and the independent bull. -- Old Mr.
Flood. --
The black clams. -- Mr. Flood's party. -- Up in
the old
hotel. -- The bottom of the harbor. -- The rats on
the
waterfront. --Mr. Hunter's grave. -- Dragger captain. --
The
rivermen. -- Joe Gould's secret. A
collective portrait
of an unsuspected
New York and its odder citizens.
Saloon-keepers, street preachers, gypsies, steel-walking
Mohawks, a
bearded lady are portrayed by a master artist.
PB Momaday
Momaday, N.
Scott, 1934-. House made of dawn,. [1st ed.].
New
York, :
Harper & Row, [1968]. Abel lives in
the pueblo of
San Ysidro
with his grandfather until he is drafted into the
army, where
he is unable to adapt to the whites world or to
find
himself among the vestiges of his dying culture.
PB Moon
Heat Moon,
William Least. Blue highways : a
journey into
America. Boston, Mass. : G.K. Hall, 1983. When his wife
leaves him
and he loses his job, William Least Heat Moon
drives
America, writing about his travel and experiences on
the back
roads of this country and learning about himself in
the
process.
PB Morrison
Morrison,
Toni. Beloved : a novel. New York : New American
Library,
1988, c1987. Sethe, an escaped slave
who now lives
in
post-Civil War Ohio, has borne the unthinkable and works
hard at
"beating back the past." She struggles to keep
Beloved, an
intruder, from gaining possession of her present
while
throwing off the legacy of her past.
PB Morrison
Morrison,
Toni. Song of Solomon. New York : Knopf, 1977.
Follows the
life of Macon Dead, Jr., the son of the richest
black
family in a midwestern town, as he leaves home on a
quest for
personal freedom.
PB Morrison
Morrison, Toni. Jazz.
New York : Plume Books, 1992. A
mysterious
voice weaves the story of a black door-to-door
salesman of
beauty products who shoots his young lover, and
of his wife who tries to disfigure the
corpse with a knife
in 1926.
PB Morrison
Morrison,
Toni. Sula. New York, N.Y. : Plume, c1973. Traces
the lives
of two African-American women who grew up together
in a small
Ohio town and chose different lifestyles as
adults.
PB Nabokov
Nabokov,
Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977. Invitation
to a
beheading. New York : Capricorn Books, 1959.
PB Nabokov
Nabokov,
Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977. Pnin. New York :
Random,
1993, c1957. The story of a
Russian-born professor
struggling
to cope with American idioms and idiosyncrasies
at a
university in upstate New York.
PB Norris
Norris, Frank,
1870-1902. McTeague; : a story of
San Francisco.
Cambridge,
Mass., : R. Bentley, 1971.[1899]. When
McTeague
is
forbidden to practice dentistry for lack of a licence and
diploma, he
grows brutish and surly and killing his wife for
her money.
He is pursued to Death Valley where a twist of
fate dooms him.
PB O'Hara
O'Hara, John,
1905-1970. Appointment in Samarra. 1st Vintage
Books
ed. New York : Vintage Books, 1982,
c1934. Julian
and
Caroline English, leaders in Gibbsville, Pennyslvania,
are the
main characters in this story of three days in 1930.
Julian
drinks too much and gets in trouble with other women,
which is
only the beginning of his troubles involving
underworld
gansters and the country club crowd.
PB Oates
Oates, Joyce
Carol, 1938-. Do with me what you
will. Greenwich,
Connecticut
: Fawcett Crest, [1973].
PB Otto
Otto, Whitney. Now you see her. New York : Ballantine Books,
1995,
c1994. Kiki Shaw, a game show question
writer is
disappearing. Parts of her that were always there are
vanishing
and no one seems to notice. As she contemplates
this, sh
makes discoveries about her life and those of the
women
closest to her.
PB Porter
Porter,
Katherine Anne, 1890-1980. Pale
horse, pale rider :
three short
novels. Toronto, Ontario : Signet, [1962],
c1939. Old mortality -- Noon wine -- Pale horse,
pale
rider.
PB Proulx
Proulx,
Annie. The Shipping News. New York : Toronto : New York
: Scribner ; Maxwell Macmillan Canada ;
Maxwell Macmillan
International, c1993. Quoyle and
his two emotionally
disturbed
daughters return to the family ancestral home in
Newfoundland to start new lives.
PB Rand
Rand, Ayn. The fountainhead. 25th anniversary ed.
Indianapolis, : Bobbs-Merrill, [1968] [1943]. An architect
of enormous
conceit succeeds in justifying his faith in the
permanent values of honest design.
PB Rawlings
Rawlings,
Marjorie Kinnan, 1896-1953. The
Yearling. 1938. Set
in the
scrub country of northern Florida, the story recounts
one year in
the lives of a backwoods farmer, his wife and
his young
son, Jody, who adopts an orphan fawn and finds in
the animal
the love and companionship he craves. When the
fawn begins
to eat the family corn, Jody is ordered by his
father to
shoot him. The tragedy lifts Jody out of his
boyhood.
PB Robbins
Robbins, Tom. Still life with Woodpecker. New York : Bantam
Books,
1980. Princess Leigh Cheri is a strong
willed girl
with her
own ideas about the world and how things should be
dealt with.
She is well brought up though sometimes naive,
and this
proves to be true when she looses her heart to
Bernard, a
man with a natural affinity for blowing things
up. It
tells of his imprisonment and her long battle to keep
their love
going.
PB Salinger
Salinger, J.D.
(Jerome David), 1919-. Franny and
Zooey.
PB Shaara
Shaara,
Michael. The killer angels; : a
novel. New York :
Ballantine
Books, [1974]. A fictional account of
four days
in July,
1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg discussing
tactics,
plans and preparations for battle from both the
Northern
and Southern points of view.
PB Shields
Shields,
Carol. The stone diaries. New York : Penguin Books,
1994. The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's
story of
her journey
through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill
drifts
through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother,
and finally
into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to
understand
her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find
a way to
tell her story within a novel that is itself about
the
limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with
incident,
and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She
listens,
she observes, and through sheer force of
imagination
she becomes a witness of her own life: her
birth, her death,
and the troubling misconnections she
discovers
between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for
herself in
her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled
decades of
our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of
the human
heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her
own that
place where the domestic collides with the
elemental.
With irony and humor she weaves the strands of
The Stone
Diaries together in this, her richest and most
poignant
novel to date.
PB Silko
Silko, Leslie,
1948-. Ceremony. New York : Viking Press, 1977.
Follows
Tayo, a young half breed, after his release from a
veteran's
hospital following World War II as he searches for
meaning and
sanity in his life.
PB Sinclair
Sinclair, Upton,
1878-1968. The jungle. New York : Signet
Classic,
[2001]. Describes the conditions of the
Chicago
stockyards
through the eyes of a young immigrant struggling
in America.
PB Smiley
Smiley,
Jane. A thousand acres. New York : Fawcett Columbine,
1991. The story of an Iowa farmer who decides to
retire in
1979 and
turns over his valuable land to his three
daughters.
PB Stegner
Stegner, Wallace
Earle, 1909-. Angle of repose. New York, :
Ballantine,
1990 [1971]. A young married couple
comes West
so the
husband can pursue his trade of engineering. The wife
is strong,
artistic, sensitive, able to converse with some
of the finest minds of her day, but she is unable to
make a
success of
her marriage. The story is told by their
grandson, a
historian who has lost a leg and lost his wife.
He buries
himself in the lives of his ancestors to forget
his own
life.
PB Stegner
Stegner, Wallace
Earle, 1909-. Crossing to safety. New York,
N.Y.,
U.S.A. : Penguin Books, 1988, c1987.
The story of a
friendship between two couples, the
Langs and the Morgans,
who meet as
young college instructors and develop together
over a
lifetime.
PB Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. The Long valley. [1938].
Thirteen
stories of
people in the Salinas Valley in California who
relate to
the migrants coming into the valley.
PB Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. Travels with Charley : in
search of
America. New York : Penguin Books, 1980, c1962. Contains
observations about life and descriptions of nature as
described
by Steinbeck as he traveled from coast to coast
with his
dog Charley.
PB Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. Of mice and men. New York : Bantam,
1984,
c1965. Two close friends in the Salinas
Valley of
California
dream of the time they will have enough money to
buy their
own farm.
PB Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. The grapes of wrath. New York, N.Y.
: Viking,
1986. The story of the Joad family,
"Okies" who
travel from
the Dust Bowl of the American Southwest to
California
in search of a better life.
PB Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. Cannery row. New York, : Viking
Press,
1992. An account of the midadventures
of workers in
a
California cannery and their friends.
PB Steinbeck
Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968. The Pearl. [1947].
Kino, an Indian
pearl-fisher in the Gulf of California, and his wife, Juana,
have a baby
who is bitten by a scorpion. Kino finds a large
pearl to
pay the doctor, but it brings only tragedy.
PB Tan
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York : Ivy Books, c1989. In
1949 four
Chinese women began meeting in San Francisco to
play mah
jong. They called their gathering the Joy Luck
Club. Forty
years later three of them look back on their
lives and
tell their stories to their dead friend's
daughter.
PB Taylor
Taylor, Peter
Hillsman, 1917-. A summons to
Memphis. New York :
Ballantine,
1986. The unmarried, middle-aged
children of a
charming
elderly widower attempt to foil his plans to
remarry.
PB Theroux
Theroux,
Paul. The Mosquito Coast : a novel. Boston : Houghton
Mifflin,
1982. Disgusted with modern American
culture,
Allie Fox
takes his family to live in the jungles of Central
America.
PB Updike
Updike,
John. The centaur. New York : Fawcett Crest, c1962,
1996. A high-school science teacher, George
Caldwell begins
to lose
meaning in his life as he watches his son grow and
change.
Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest
centaur and
his own relationship to Prometheus.
PB Vonnegut
Vonnegut,
Kurt. Jailbird : a novel. New York : Delacorte
Press/Seymour Lawrence, c1979.
Walter Starbuck relfects on
various
aspects of American life as he has seen it during
his
sixty-six years.
PB Vonnegut
Vonnegut,
Kurt. Palm Sunday : an
autobiographical collage. New
York :
Delacorte Press, c1981. A collection of
speeches,
letters,
fiction, articles, and a musical comedy.
PB Vonnegut
Vonnegut,
Kurt. Galapagos. New York : Dell Pub. Co., 1985.
Back one
million years in time, in 1986 A.D., a simple
vacation
cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey.
Thanks to
an apocalpyse, a small group of survivors stranded
on the
Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors
of a brave
new and totally different human race. This satire
looks at our world and shows us
what is awry and what is
worth
saving.
PB Walker
Walker, Alice,
1944-. The color purple : a novel. New York :
Pocket
Books, 1985, c1982. Tells the story of
two sisters:
Nettie, a
missionary in Africa, and Celie, a child-wife
living in
the South, in the medium of their letters to each
other and
in Celie's case, the desperate letters she begins,
"Dear God.".
PB Welty
Welty, Eudora,
1909-. The Optimist's daughter. [1st ed.].
New
York, :
Random House, [1972]. When Laura is
summoned to New
Orleans to
be with her father who is undergoing surgery, she
clashes
with his second wife Fay, from a completely
different
world and background.
PB Welty
Welty, Eudora,
1909-. The wide net and other
stories. New York,
: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, [1974, c1971]. First
love.--The
wide net.--A still moment.--Asphodel.--The
winds.--The
purple hat.--Livvie.--At the hanging.
PB Welty
Welty, Eudora,
1909-. Selected stories of Eudora
Welty :
containing
all of A curtain of green and other stories and
The wide
net and other stories. New York : Modern
Library,
1969,
c1943. Lily Daw and the Three ladies --
A piece of
news --
Petrified man -- The key -- Keela, the outcast
indian
maiden -- Why I live at the P.O. -- The whistle --
The
hitch-hikers -- A memory -- Clytie -- Old Mr. Marblehall
-- Flowers
for Marjorie -- A Curtain of Green -- A visit of
charity --
Death of a traveling salesman -- Powerhouse -- A
worn
path. Contains seventeen stories.
PB Wharton
Wharton, Edith,
1862-1937. Summer. New York : Harper & Row,
198o,
c1917. One summer in the life of an
inexperienced
girl in a
small town.
PB Wharton
Wharton, Edith,
1862-1937. The custom of the country. New York,
N.Y. :
Penguin Books, [1987] c1913. Beautiful
Undine Spragg
from Apex,
Kansas, is a social climber. Her society career,
marriages,
divorces, and conquests are all part of her
greed.
PB Wharton
Wharton, Edith,
1862-1937. The house of Mirth. New York :
Charles
Scribner's Sons, n.d., c1905). Lily
Bart, an
orphaned
child of a New York merchant, calmly prepares a
campaign to marry for the power and luxury
that money
brings.
PB White
White,
Bailey. Mama makes up her mind : and
other dangers of
southern
living. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York : Vintage
Books,
1994. Presents more than fifty
vignettes from Bailey
White's
radio show and magazines about her tiny home town in
Georgia.
PB Wolfe
Wolfe, Tom. The bonfire of the vanities. New York : Bantam,
c1987, 1988
printing. Sherman McCoy, a young
investment
banker with
a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan becomes
involved in
a freak accident. Prosecutors, politicians,
press, police, clergy, and
assorted hustlers close in on
him.
PB Wolfe
Wolfe, Tom. The Electric kool-aid acid test. New York : Bantam,
c1968. A portrait of the novelist Ken Kesey and the
West
Coast
"Merry Pranksters" during a several-years pursuit of
the LSD
experience and development of psychedelia in the
sixties
(1960's).
PB Wolff
Wolff, Tobias,
1945-. The barracks thief. 1st ed.
New York :
Ecco Press,
1984. When three young paratroopers
stand guard
over an
ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they
discover in
themselves an unexpected capacity for
recklessness and violence. They emerge from their common
danger,
full of confidence in their own manhood and in the
bond of
friendship they have formed. This new confidence is
soon shaken
as a series of thefts throws suspicion in every
direction.
PB Wright
Wright, Richard,
1908-1960. Native son. New York, : Harper &
Row,
[1966]. The story of Bigger Thomas, the
product of a
Chicago
slum, whom society victimizes because of his race.
He commits
two murders, is defended in court by a Communist
lawyer and
is condemned to death.
PB Wright
Wright, Richard,
1908-1960. Black boy : [American
hunger] : a
record of
childhood and youth. 1st HarperPerennial
ed. New
York :
HarperPerennial, 1993, c1945. The
autobiography of
an
African-American writer, recounting his early years and
the
harrowing experiences he encountered drifting from
Natchez to
Chicago to Brooklyn.
PB Wright
Wright, Richard,
1908-1960. Native son. New York :
HarperCollins, 1998. Tells the story of Bigger Thomas who
was caught
in a downward spiral after he kills a young white
woman in a
brief moment of panic.
SC Baudin
Contemporary
short stories v. 1 : representative selections. New
York :
Bobbs-Merrill, 1953. Xingu, by Edith
Wharton.--Paul's case, by Willa Cather.--Who dealt? by Ring
Lardner.--Your obituary, well written, by Conrad
Aiken.--Rope, by Katherine Anne
Porter.--The day the dam
broke, by
James Thurber.--King the cats, by Stephen Vincent
Benet.--The
daring young man on the flying trapeze, by
William
Saroyan.--Hook, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.--The
hunted, by
Maurice Baudin.
SC Baudin
Contemporary
short stories v. 2 : representative selections. New
York :
Bobbs-Merrill, 1954. Nice girl, by
Sherwood
Anderson.--Blood pressure, by Damon
Runyon.--Young man
Axelbrod,
by Sinclair Lewis.--Blue murder, by Wilbur Daniel
Steele.--Old Man Minick, by Edna Ferber.--The old demon, by
Pearl
Buck.--Send in your answer, by William March.--Babylon
revisited,
buy F. Scott Fitzgerald.--The undefeated, by
Ernest
Hemingway.--The leader of the people, by John
Steinbeck.--City folks, by Thyra Samter Winslow.--The
tuxedos, by Jerome Weidman.
SC Carmer
Carmer,
Carl. Listen for a lonesome drum : a
York state
chronicle. New York : David McKay, 1936. Genesee
Fever.--Look down to Honeoye.--The world on the turtle's
back.--Truth shall spring out of the earth.--Down the bear
path
road.--The land of frozen flame.--Storm country.
Stories of
Shakers and Perfectionists, Mormons,
Spiritualists, cockfighting, forgotten romances, Indians and
other
people population "York state,"or upper New York
state.
SC Ch
Children of
the night : the best short stories by black writers,
1967 to the present. 1st ed.
Boston : Little, Brown,
c1995. Samuel Delaney: The Tale of Gorgik --
Sherley Anne
Williams:
Meditations on History -- John Edgar Wideman:
Damballah
-- Jewelle Gomez: Louisiana -- Alexis DeVeaux:
Remember
Him a Outlaw -- Andrea Lee: Mother -- Jewell parker
Rhodes:
Long Distances -- Howard Gordon: After Dreaming of
President
Johnson -- Diane Oliver: Neighbors -- Ann Petry:
The Witness
-- Maya Angelou: Steady Going Up -- Toni Cade
Bambara:
The Lesson -- Gloria Naylor: Kiswana Browne -- Rita
Dove:
Second-Hand Man -- Jess Mowry: Crusader Rabbit --
Helen
Elaine Lee: Silences -- Carolyn Ferrell: Proper
Library --
Alice Walker: Diary of an African Nun -- Shay
Youngblood:
In a House of Wooden Monkeys -- Joyce Carol
Thomas:
Young Reverend Zelma Lee Moses -- James Baldwin:
Tell Me How
Long the Train's Been Gone -- Michael Weaver: By
the Way of
Morning Fire -- Charles Johnson: China -- Jamaica
Kincaid:
Blackness -- Edward P. Jones: Lost in the City --
Randall Kenan:
Run, Mourner, Run -- Sam Greenlee: Blues for
Little Prez
-- Terry McMillan: Ma'Dear -- Kelvin Christopher
James:
Transaction -- James Alan McPherson: A Loaf of Bread
-- Ralph
Ellison: Backwacking a Plea to the Senator --
Colleen
McElroy: The Woman Who Would Eat Flowers -- Thomas
Glave: And
Love Them? -- Clarence Major: An area in the
Cerebral
Hemisphere -- Ntozake Shange: oh she gotta head
fulla hair
-- Carolivia Herron: That Place -- Edwidge
Danticat:
New York Day Women. A compilation of
short
stories
written by black authors from 1967 to 1995, that
present a
portrait of the African-American experience in the
post-Civil
Rights era.
SC Davis
Davis, Robert
Gorham. Ten modern masters; : an
anthology of the
short
story. 3d ed.
New York, : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
[1972]. Jorge Luis Borges -- Anton Chekhov -- Joseph
Conrad
-- William
Faulkner -- James Joyce -- D. H. Lawrence --
Bernard
Malamud -- Thomas Mann -- Frank O'Connor -- Eudora
Welty.
SC Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald, F.
Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940.
Before Gatsby :
the first
twenty-six stories. Columbia : University of
South
Carolina Press, 2001. Jemima, the
mountain girl --
Babes in the
woods -- Tarquin of Cheapside -- The debutante
-- The four
fists -- Dalyrimple goes wrong -- The smilers --
Porcelain
and pink -- Benediction -- The cut-glass bowl --
Head and
shoulders -- Mr. Icky: the quintessence of
quaintness
in one act -- Myra meets his family -- The ice
palace --
The camel's back -- Bernice bobs her hair -- The
offshore
pirate -- May Day -- The jelly-bean -- The Lees of
happiness
-- His russet witch -- Two for a cent -- The
diamond as
big as the Ritz -- The popular girl -- Winter
dreams. A collection of
twenty-six stories by F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
SC Gallagher
Gallagher,
Tess. The lover of horses : and
other stories. St.
Paul, MN :
Graywolf Press, c1992. The lover of
horses --
King Death
-- Recourse -- Turpentine -- At mercy -- A pair
of glasses
-- The woman who saved Jessie James --
Beneficiaries -- Bad company -- The wimp -- Desperate
measures --
Girls. One story shows what happens
when you
bring
together a woman, her Avon lady, and a fortune teller.
Then there
is the wife who comes to understand the worth of
her short,
balding husband; a widow who realizes what her
loveless
marriage meant to her and to her husband; the
daughter
who comes home to her dying father. Tess Gallagher
shows us
people reaching across small and large spaces,
bouncing
off each other, meeting for moments, or living
together
for years.
SC Harrison
Harrison, Jim, 1937-. Legends of the fall. New Delta ed. New
York :
Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1989. Revenge
-- The man who
gave up his
name -- Legends of the fall. These
three
novellas
explore the theme of revenge and the actions to
which
people resort when their lives or goals are
threatened.
Legends of the fall has been made into a movie.
SC Hemingway
Hemingway,
Ernest, 1899-1961. The Nick Adams
stories. New York,
: Scribner,
[1972]. The Northern woods: Three
shots.--Indian camp.--The doctor and the doctor's wife.--Ten
indians.--The indians moved away.--On his own: The light of
the world.--The battler.--The
killers.--The last good
country.--Crossing the Mississippi.--War: Night before
landing.--Nick sat against the wall...--Now I lay me.--A way
you'll
never be.--In another country. A soldier home: Big
Two-hearted
River.--The end of something.--The three-day
blow.--Summer people.--Company of two: Wedding day.--On
writing.--An alpine idyll.--Cross-country snow.--Fathers and
sons. Nick Adams is a memorable character growing from
child to
adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent
-- a
sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's
life.
Hemingway style is short, simple, and fluid - a master
storyteller. The stories are collected here for the first
time.
SC Henry
Henry, O.,
1862-1910. O. Henry stories;. New York, : Platt &
Munk, [1962]. The ransom of Red Chief -- The cop and the
anthem --
The gift of the Magi -- After Twenty years -- A
retrieved
reformation -- One dollar's worth -- The skylight
room --
From the cabby's seat -- The theory and the hound --
The atavism
of John Tom Little Bear -- Jimmy Hayes and
Muriel --
Hygeia at the Solito -- Hearts and hands -- A
blackjack
bargainer -- A chaparral Christmas gift -- Two
Thanksgiving day gentlemen -- The
reformation of Calliope --
Out of
Nazareth -- A Call Loan -- The Green Door -- Hearts
and crosses
-- The adventures of Shamrock Jolnes -- The
passing of
Black Eagle -- The Caliph and the Cad -- Friends
in San
Rosario -- The Whirligig of life -- Whistling Dick's
Christmas
stocking -- Mammon and the archer -- The Pimienta
pancakes --
The last leaf -- A departmental case -- Vanity
and some
sables -- Bexar Scrip No. 2692 -- The Ransom of
Mack -- The
Caliph, Cupid and the Clock.
SC James
James, Henry,
1843-1916. The short stories of
Henry James.
Modern
Library, 1948. Four Meetings.--A Bundle
of
Letters.--Louisa Pallant.--The Liar.--The Real Thing.--The
Pupil.--Brooksmith.--The Middle Years.--The Altar of the
Dead.--"Europe".--The Great Good Place.--The Tree of
Knowledge.--The Tone of Time.--Mrs.Medwin.--The
Birthplace.--The Beast in the Jungle.--The Jolly Corner.
Henry James
was celebrated as a master craftsman of moral
themes: the
relationship between innocence and experience,
especially
as exemplified in the confrontation of American
and
European civilizations, the dilemma of the artist in an
alien
society, and the achievement of self-knowledge through
psychological and moral perception. These stories are
generally
from the turn of the century.
SC Kalpakian
Kalpakian,
Laura. The delinquent virgin. St. Paul, MN :
Graywolf Press, c1999.