Frank Carlson Library

During one of his several adventurous voyages in the 1600's an Englishman becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lives for nearly thirty years on a deserted island.

Colonel Pyncheon does well in denouncing Old Matthew: he founds a New England dynasty and builds a remarkable mansion; but on its opening day he is found dead, slaked in his own blood. By 1840, that dynasty is almost spent; amid the dust and decay of the Seven Gables, Clifford and Hepzibah believed in their own continued nobility as much as they believe in the mysterious curse still tracking the Pyncheons.

A Swiss orphan is heartbroken when she must leave her beloved grandfather and their happy home in the mountains to go to school and to care for an invalid girl in the city.

"A sinful act ruins the lives of three people, especially that of Hester Prynne, a young, beautiful, and dignified woman, who has conceived a child out of wedlock and receives a public punishment of having to wear a scarlet "A" on her clothing. Despite Hester's attempts through the years to distance herself from her past and repent for her sins, she continues to be rejected by society. A best-seller upon its publication in 1850, The Scarlet Letter's...

The two years before he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866) had been bad ones for Dostoyevsky. His wife and brother had died; the magazine he and his brother had started, Epoch, collapsed under its load of debt; and he was threatened with debtor's prison. With an advance that he managed to wangle for an unwritten novel, he fled to Wiesbaden, hoping to win enough at the roulette table to get himself out of debt. Instead, he lost all his money; he had...

An orphan who endures a harsh child hood, Jane Eyre becomes the plain yet spirited governess at Thornfield Hall in the employment of the mysterious arrogant Mr. Rochester.

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

First published in 1877. Black Beauty, a horse with a white star on his forehead, describes his idyllic days on a country squire's estate and his harsh fate as a London cab horse.

A young Englishman, seeking to avenge the death of his father, becomes involved in the band of the Black Arrow and the events of the War of the Roses.