Jake Barnes, a World War I veteran rendered impotent by his wound, travels with a group of expatriates from Paris to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. Hemingway's debut novel defined the "Lost Generation" of American writers in Europe.
A collection of short stories and vignettes alternating between Nick Adams's experiences in Michigan and brief sketches from the war. Hemingway's first major work, which established his minimalist "iceberg theory" style.
An American in Paris falls into a passionate relationship with an Italian barman, Giovanni, while his American fiancée is traveling in Spain. Baldwin's second novel was groundbreaking in its frank portrayal of homosexual desire.
Young Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have adventures along the Mississippi River, including witnessing a murder and searching for treasure. Twain's affectionate portrait of childhood on the frontier.
Sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield recounts the days following his expulsion from prep school, wandering New York City and railing against the "phoniness" of the adult world. One of the most controversial and widely read American novels.
A teenage runaway joins a historical band of scalp hunters marauding through the US-Mexico borderlands in the 1850s. McCarthy's most celebrated and most violent novel is a meditation on war, evil, and the nature of violence in human history.
The decline of the Compson family in the American South is narrated four times from different perspectives, including that of Benjy, a man with an intellectual disability, and told through extreme shifts in chronology. Faulkner's breakthrough novel.
Young Scout Finch watches her father, lawyer Atticus Finch, defend a Black man falsely accused of rape in Depression-era Alabama. Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut sold over 40 million copies and remains a staple of American school curricula.
The narrator Ishmael joins the obsessive Captain Ahab's vengeful quest for the white whale that took his leg. Melville's encyclopaedic novel about whaling, obsession, fate, and the American character was a commercial failure in its time.
Macon "Milkman" Dead III sets off to find a cache of gold and instead discovers his family's history and his African American heritage. The novel that brought Morrison wide recognition and is considered among her finest achievements.
Former slave Sethe is haunted — literally — by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare her from slavery. Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel confronts the psychological and moral trauma of American slavery with extraordinary force.
Two families in California's Salinas Valley across several generations re-enact the Cain and Abel story. Steinbeck called it his magnum opus and the book he had been preparing to write his whole life.
The Joad family, Oklahoma tenant farmers ruined by the Dust Bowl, joins the mass migration west to California and finds exploitation instead of the promised land. Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of the Great Depression.
Two itinerant ranch workers in California — the sharp George and the simple, powerful Lennie — share a dream of owning their own land. A spare, tragic novella about friendship, loneliness, and the crushing of dreams.
American lieutenant Frederic Henry serves as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I and falls in love with English nurse Catherine Barkley. A classic anti-war novel that draws on Hemingway's own wartime experiences.
An American volunteer fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War spends three days behind enemy lines preparing to blow up a bridge. One of Hemingway's longest and most politically engaged novels.
An aging Cuban fisherman struggles alone at sea with a giant marlin for three days, only to have it devoured by sharks on the way back to shore. The novella won the Pulitzer Prize and is widely cited as a factor in Hemingway's Nobel Prize.