Frank Carlson Library

The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden...

In this compelling book of beloved heroines and the remarkable writers who created them, Erin Blakemore explores how the pluck and dignity of literary characters such as Anne Shirley, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O'Hara, Scout Finch and Jo March can inspire women today.

"One of the great American novels-and one of America's most popular-featuring a new foreword by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko Jay Gatsby seemingly has everything. Everybody who's anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his West Egg, Long Island, mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing, and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby--young, handsome, fabulously rich--always seems...

This sprawling drama traces the passage of three individuals through the events of the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and seventies from the Apollo in Harlem to the Olympia in Paris. Love and courage bind a former child evangelist, a famous gospel singer, and the latter's manager-brother.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin , Harriet Beecher Stowe created America's first black literary hero as well as the nation's antecedent protest novel. The novel's vast influence on attitudes towards African American slavery was considered an incitation towards the American Civil War; conjointly, its powerful anti-slavery message resonated with readers around the world at its time of publication. With unashamed sentimentality and expressions of faith, Harriet...