By George Orwell
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 27, 2016. 1:30 PM.

Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a "Negative Utopia," watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.

By Mark Twain

When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents - of slavery, adult control and, above all, of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.

By Mark Twain

The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.

Became numerous movies: Tom Sawyer (1907, 1917, 1930, 1936, 1973. 1973-TV movie, 1984, and 2000), Huck and Tom (1918), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944 and 1985), Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1990-TV movie), and Tom and Huck (1995).

By Ernest J. Gaines

An elderly woman recalls her struggle against bigotry and racial injustice from her childhood during the Civil War to her participation in the twentieth-century civil rights demonstrations.

By Sylvia Plath
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian , Kaye Spurrell, Readers' Services Librarian

Esther Greenwood, a talented and successful writer, finally succumbs to madness when the world around her begins to falter.

By Wallace Stegner

Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.

By Jack London
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

A classic novel of adventure, drawn from London’s own experiences as a Klondike adventurer, relating the story of a heroic dog caught in the brutal life of the Alaska Gold Rush.

By John Steinbeck

Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California.

By J.D. Salinger
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen–year–old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City.

By E. E. Cummings

"This centennial edition of E. E. Cumming's Complete Poems, published in celebration of his birth on October 14, 1894, contains all of the poems published or designated for publication by the poet in his lifetime.At the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth–century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time–in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle–twentieth–century." –from the Publisher

By Emily Dickinson

"The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called "the Poetry of the Portfolio," - something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts." - from the Publisher

By Mark Twain

A blow on the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing the printing press.

Became numerous movies: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1921, 1949, 1989-TV movie), A Connecticut Yankee (1931, 1955-TV movie), A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court (1978- TV movie), Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979), A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995), A Kid in Aladdin’s Palace (1998-TV movie) *spin-off*, A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1996), A Knight in Camelot (1998-TV movie), and Black Knight (2001).

By Arthur Miller
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

As a wave of anti-communist investigations swept across American society during the 1950s, Miller exposed the horror of such witch-hunts by retelling the story of the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692.

By Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s second full-length work is a scathing personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class.

By Willa Cather
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

“In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour becomes the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico, and over the next forty years he faces the lawlessness and loneliness of the frontier as he tries to spread his faith (From the Publisher).”

By Edith Wharton
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. 

By Ernest Hemingway

An American's love for an English nurse during the First World War ends in tragedy.

Became the movie: A Farewell to Arms (original in 1932, remake in 1957)

Became the Mini-Series: A Farewell to Arms (1966)

By Daniel Keyes

After being mentally retarted for all of his thiry–two years, Charlie Gordon undergoes an operation designed to change his life.

By Lois Lowry

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

Became the movie: The Giver (2014)

By Pearl S. Buck
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

A slave bride of a Chinese laborer devotes herself to her husband's family, but when civil war in China brings wealth to the family, her happiness is endangered as her husband brings home a second wife.

By John Steinbeck
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, June 24, 2014. 1:30 PM.

The landmark novel about the plight of American farmers who were forced off their farms by drought and foreclosure during the 1930's.

Became the movie: The Grapes of Wrath.

By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Recommended By Josephine Amoia, Children's Librarian
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 26, 2017. 1:30 PM.

A classic novel portrays the Jazz Age and all its decadence and excess as it follows the life of Jay Gatsby, a newly rich man obsessed with money, power, and glamour.

Became the movie: The Great Gatsby.

By Edith Wharton

The tragic story of Lily Bart, a beautiful young woman caught up in the shallow and corrupt world of New York society at the turn of the century, where wealth and social status are everything.

Became the movie: The House of Mirth.

By Walt Whitman

Presents Whitman's classic collection celebrating himself and the American experience.

By Louisa May Alcott
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young women in mid-nineteenth-century New England. 

By William Golding
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, September 23, 2014. 1:30 PM.

The classic study of human nature which depicts the degeneration of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island.

By John Steinbeck
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

The tragic story of two itinerant ranch hands on the run––one is the lifelong companion to the other, a developmentally disabled man.

Became the movie: Of Mice and Men.

By Ernest Hemingway
Recommended By Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

The story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal - a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

By S. E. Hinton
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

The struggle of three brothers to stay together after their parent’s death and their quest for identity among the conflicting values of their adolescent society.

By John Steinbeck
Recommended By Josephine Amoia, Children's Librarian, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Amy B., Children's Librarian
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, January 13, 2015. 7:30 PM

Kino, a poor Mexican pearl fisher, finds a valuable pearl. Yet instead of bringing blessings, the pearl acts as a harbinger of misfortune to Kino and his wife, Juana.

By Henry James

Spirited, beautiful young American Isabel Archer journeys to Europe to, in modern terms, "find herself." But what she finds there may prove to be her undoing, especially when an infinitely sophisticated lady plots against her.

By Stephen Crane

Presents Stephen Crane’s classic novel about Henry Flemming, a young Civil War Union soldier who experiences his first battle and then has to come to terms with his own fears and feelings of cowardice.

Became the movie: The Red Badge of Courage

By Robert Frost

Originally published in 1916 under the title "Mountain Interval," this volume contains many of Frost's finest and most moving poems. In addition to the title poem: "An Old Man's Winter Night," "In the Home Stretch," "Meeting and Passing," "Putting in the Seed," "A Time to Talk," many more.

By Nathaniel Hawthorne
Recommended By Josephine Amoia, Children's Librarian

“The landscape of this classic novel is uniquely American, but the themes it explores are universal—the nature of sin, guilt, and penitence, the clash between our private and public selves, and the spiritual and psychological cost of living outside society (From the Publisher).”

Became the movie: The Scarlet Letter.

By Ernest Hemingway

The story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma, evokes in poignant detail, life among the expatriates on Paris's Left Bank, during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

A young college student realizes his anxieties, frustrations, and ideals are not typical of his generation.

By Harper Lee
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Adrienne Rein, Library Clerk, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, June 28, 2011. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

The explosion of racial hate in an Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.

Became the movie: To Kill a Mockingbird.

By Betty Smith
Recommended By Kaye Spurrell, Readers' Services Librarian

A young girl from an impoverished family comes of age in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century.

By Harriet Beecher Stowe

A devoutly Christian slave becomes separated from his wife and family when he is sold to the brutal planter, Simon Legree.

By Henry James

Catherine Sloper, heiress to a fortune, attracts the attention of a good-looking but penniless young man, Morris Townsend, but her father is convinced that his motives are merely mercenary. He will not consent to the marriage, regardless of the cost to his daughter.

By Emily Brontë
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist

“...Remains one of literature’s most disturbing explorations into the dark side of romantic passion. Heathcliff and Cathy believe they’re destined to love each other forever, but when cruelty and snobbery separate them, their untamed emotions literally consume them (From the Publisher).”