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To this day Jack London is the most widely read American writer in the world," E. L. Doctorow wrote in The New York Times Book Review. Generally considered to be London's greatest achievement, The Call of the Wild brought him international acclaim when it was published in 1903. His story of the dog Buck, who learns to survive in the bleak Yukon wilderness, is viewed by many as his symbolic autobiography. "No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in The Call of the Wild," said H. L. Mencken. "Here, indeed, are all the elements of sound fiction."
        White Fang (1906), which London conceived as a "complete antithesis and companion piece to The Call of the Wild," is the tale of an abused wolf-dog tamed by exposure to civilization. Also included in this volume is "To Build a Fire," a marvelously desolate short story set in the Klondike, but containing all the elements of a classic Greek tragedy.
        "The quintessential Jack London is in the on-rushing compulsive-ness of his northern stories," noted James Dickey. "Few men have more convincingly examined the connection between the creative powers of the individual writer and the unconscious drive to breed and to survive, found in the natural world. . . . London is in and committed to his creations to a degree very nearly unparalleled in the composition of fiction."

One of William Faulkner's finest novels, As I Lay Dying was originally published in 1930, and remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, it vividly brings to life Faulkner's imaginary South, one of the great invented landscapes in all of literature, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world'sbest books, at the best prices.

Set in turn-of-the-century New York, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime seamlessly blends fictional characters and realistic depictions of historical figures to bring to life the events that defined American history in the years before the First World War. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Al Alvarez. Welcome to America at the turn of the twentieth century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. Harry Houdini astonishes audiences with magical feats of escape, the mighty J. P. Morgan dominates the financial world and Henry Ford manufactures cars by making men into machines. Emma Goldman preaches free love and feminism, while ex-chorus girl Evelyn Nesbitt inspires a mad millionaire to murder the architect Stanford White. In this stunningly original chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and incredible change - in short, the era of ragtime. E.L. Doctorow (b.1931) is one of America's most accomplished and acclaimed living writers. Winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Humanities Medal, he is the author of nine novels that have explored the drama of American life from the late 19th century to the 21st, including Ragtime, The Book of Daniel and Billy Bathgate. If you enjoyed Ragtime, you might like John Dos Passos' U.S.A., also available in Penguin Classics. 'In its perfection it stuns and holds from beginning to end' Daily Mail 'Witty, lyrical, put together with admirable craft ... dazzling economy and insight ... Mr Doctorow knows what he is doing and has done it beautifully' Guardian 'One of the best American novels for years' Economist

The Pulitzer Prize winning Arrowsmith (an award Lewis refused to accept) recounts the story of a doctor who is forced to give up his trade for reasons ranging from public ignorance to the publicity-mindedness of a great foundation, and becomes an isolated seeker of scientific truth. Introduction by E.L. Doctorow.

It was the war to end all wars, the global struggle that would finally make the world safe for democracy - at any cost. But one American soldier has paid a price beyond measure. And within the disfigured flesh that was once a vision of youth lives a spirit that cannot accept what the world has become. An immediate bestseller upon its first publication in 1939, Trumbo's stark, profoundly troubling masterpiece about the horrors of the First World War brilliantly crystallized the uncompromising brutality of war and became the most influential protest novel of the Vietnam era. As timely as ever.

Hard Times is the name of a town in the barren hills of the Dakota Territory. To this town there comes one day one of the reckless sociopaths who wander the West to kill and rape and pillage. By the time he is through and has ridden off, Hard Times is a smoking ruin. The de facto mayor, Blue, takes in two survivors of the carnage-a boy, Jimmy, and a prostitute, Molly, who has suffered unspeakably-and makes them his provisional family. Blue begins to rebuild Hard Times, welcoming new settlers, while Molly waits with vengeance in her heart for the return of the outlaw. Here is E. L. Doctorow's debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics.
"A forceful, credible story of cowardice and evil."
"-The Washington Post"
"We are caught up with these people as real human beings."
"-Chicago Sun-Times
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"Dramatic and exciting."
-"The New York Times
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"Terse and powerful."
"-Newsweek"
"A taut, bloodthirsty read."
"-The Times Literary Supplement"
"A superb piece of fiction."
"-The New Republic"

'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom' It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.

These dazzling short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick house in rural Illinois ('A House on the Plains'), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California ('Baby Wilson'), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas ('Walter John Harmon'), sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages ('Jolene: A Life'), and witnessing an FBI special agent at a personal crossroads while he investigates a grave breach of White House Security ('Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden'). Comprised in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.

John Leonard was a lion of American letters. A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature. "Reading for My Life" is a monumental collection of Leonard's most significant writings--spanning five decades--from his earliest columns for the "Harvard Crimson" to his final essays for the "New York Review of Books." Definitive reviews of Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth, among others, display Leonard's encyclopedic knowledge of literature and make this book a landmark achievement from one of America's most beloved and influential critics.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist and author of three well-received books and many essays. He is also a death-row inmate, awaiting execution in Pennsylvania for allegedly killing a police officer in 1981. For many around the world, he is an inspired leader and the centerpiece to a revived progressive movement critical of our justice system and escalating global economic inequities. For others, he is a cold-blooded killer who has duped millions, including a vast array of Hollywood celebrities, writers, intellectuals and world political leaders, into believing that he is a political prisoner falsely imprisoned. Whatever the outlook, he and his case have become a flashpoint in the ever-raging debate over capital punishment in this country and a symbol of what is wrong with our criminal justice system.

Here, for the first time, the story of Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial and his struggle to gain his freedom has been told. Executing Justice takes us inside the courtroom where a fierce and skilled prosecutor wove a damning narrative of a young black radical who brutally murdered a young white police officer in the red-light district of Philadelphia, and then later boasted about the killing. It was, the prosecutor said, the strongest murder case he's ever tried. Daniel R. Williams, defense lawyer and chief legal strategist for Mumia Abu-Jamal, invites us to ask: why has this case engendered such enormous attention and aroused the passions of people worldwide?

Executing Justice is the story of how the death penalty really works in this country—not from the perspective of appellate judges, academics, or politicians who pontificate about the pros and cons of capital punishment, but from ground zero, within the pit of the courtroom where the war over life and death is fought. It is also a story of one of the most remarkable trials in our history. Above all, Executing Justice is an honest, at times confessional, book that seeks not to preach, but to raise questions about what we expect from our legal system and the depth of our commitment to capital punishment as a form of executing justice.

Despite increasing competition, this annual collection remains the place to find the most compelling short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY). To usher in the new millennium, THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2000 brims with a rich variety of lyrical and wise stories about our country’s past, present, and future. This year’s editor, the best-selling author E. L. Doctorow, has chosen new works by Raymond Carver, Amy Bloom, Ha Jin, Walter Mosley, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. The most popular compendium of its kind, THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the only volume that offers the finest short fiction each year, chosen by a distinguished author.

Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois New York comfort, their home a mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the war with his lungs seared by gas, and when both of their parents die, they seem perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era. As romantic Homer and eccentric Langley construct a life on the fringes of society, they hold fast to their principle of self-reliance. But they are mocked and spied on, and despite wanting nothing more than to shut out the world, the epic events of the century flow through their housebound lives as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"E. L. Doctorow [is] always astonishing. . . . In "The March," he dreams himself backward from "The Book of Daniel" to "Ragtime" to "The Waterworks" to the Civil War, into the creation myth of the Republic itself, as if to assume the prophetic role of such nineteenth-century writers as Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Poe."-John Leonard, "Harper's"
In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorow's hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.
"An Iliad-like portrait of war as a primeval human affliction . . . [welds] the personal and the mythic into a thrilling and poignant story."
-Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"Splendid . . . carries us through a multitude of moments of wonder and pity, terror and comedy . . . with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy." -John Updike, "The New Yorker"

"Something close to magic." The Los Angeles Times
The astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair . . .

"From the Paperback edition."

Doctorow's new novel is set towards the end of the American Civil War and follows General Sherman's epic march with sixty thousand Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, one of the major manoeuvres to bring the war to its conclusion. THE MARCH ranges widely over a diverse set of characters - each of whom is brilliantly realised - so that we see the war through the eyes of both white-skinned Pearl (daughter of slave and slave owner) and General Sherman; a deserting confederate who sets himself up as a photographer; a ruthless army surgeon who enjoys his reputation as an amputator; and the two brothers of a brutal slave owner who find themselves in uniforms facing Sherman's forces. Doctorow's narrative brilliantly blends the intimate and the epic, sweeping the reader along the route of Sherman's notorious march and making us care deeply about each individual's fate.

Based on the trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of delivering information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel includes a new introduction by Jonathan Freedland in Penguin Modern Classics. As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, Daniel is also haunted, like millions of others, by the need to come to terms with a country destroying itself in the Vietnam War. A stunning fictionalization of a political drama that tore the United States apart, The Book of Daniel is an intensely moving tale of political martyrdom and the search for meaning. E.L. Doctorow (b.1931) is one of America's most accomplished and acclaimed living writers. Winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Humanities Medal, he is the author of nine novels that have explored the drama of American life from the late 19th century to the 21st, including Ragtime, The Book of Daniel and Billy Bathgate. If you enjoyed The Book of Daniel, you might like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Art on this level can be only a cause for rejoicing' Joyce Carol Oates '[Doctorow] is at once a radical historian, a cultural anthropologist, a troubadour, a private eye, and a cost-benefit analyst of assimilation and upward mobility in the great American multiculture' John Leonard, New York Review of Books

Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, "Here at The New Yorker")
Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century's definitive chroniclers of the city--the speakeasies and highballs, social climbers and cinema stars, mistresses and powerbrokers, unsparingly observed by a popular American master of realism. Spanning his four-decade career, these more than thirty refreshingly frank, sparely written stories are among John O'Hara's finest work, exploring the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters and showcasing the snappy dialogue, telling details and ironic narrative twists that made him the most-published short story writer in the history of the "New Yorker."

" An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction."
- The Washington Post Book World
One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer's fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow's skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of "The New York Times," " a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past."
" Startling and spellbinding . . . The waters that lave the narrative all run to the great confluence, where the deepest issues of life and death are borne along on the swift, sure vessel of [Doctorow' s] poetic imagination."
- "The New York Times Book Review"
" Hypnotic . . . a dazzling romp, an extraordinary read, given strength and grace by the telling, by the poetic voice and controlled cynical lyricism of its streetwise and world-weary narrator."
- "The Philadelphia Inquirer"
" A gem of a novel, intimate as chamber music . . . a thriller guaranteed to leave readers with residual chills and shudders."
- "Boston Sunday Herald"
" Enthralling . . . a storyof debauchery and redemption that is spellbinding from first page to last."
- "Chicago Sun-Times"
" An immense, extraordinary achievement."
"- San Francisco Chronicle"

CITY OF GOD begins in mystery: the large brass cross behind the altar of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in lower Manhattan has disappeared ... and even more mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. The church's maverick rector and young rabbinical couple who lead the synagogue set about attempting to learn who the vandals are who have committed this strange double act of desecration and to what purpose, but their joint clerical investigation only deepens the mystery. A writer alerted to the story by a newspaper article befriends the priest and the rabbis and find that their struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. In fact, as the narrative advances and the story broadens, more and more people are implicated in what may be the elusive prophecy of a new American culture. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, the book opens into a multi-voiced narrative that incorporates the monumental historical events and predominating ideas of our age.

"The writer," according to Emerson, "believes all that can be thought can be written...In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported." And what writer worth his name, E. L. Doctorow asks, will not seriously, however furtively, take on the universe? Human consciousness, personal history, American literature, religion, and politics--these are the far-flung coordinates of the universe that Doctorow reports here, a universe that uniquely and brilliantly reflects our contemporary scene.