The second volume in this essential library gathers James Joyce's modernist vision, Mark Twain's American wit, Jules Verne's boundless imagination, Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure and suspense, Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic brilliance, and Bram Stoker's gothic terror alongside voices from Tolstoy to Tagore, Stendhal to Sienkiewicz. Ranging from French Enlightenment fiction to Victorian sensation novels, Russian realism to early global literature, this collection widens the canon begun in V...

In the dead of night, a bungling burglar named Jim Faraday breaks into the Austin home and finds not fear, but calm compassion. Helen Austin meets him with gentle questions instead of a cry for help, drawing out the truth behind his first robbery and turning a crime in progress into a devastating confession about poverty, desperation, and survival. As Jim tells his story, the real theft comes into view: brutal labor at the Empire Steel Company, a catastrophic accident that cost him an eye,...

Allan Montague arrives in New York eager for a new life, only to find a city where ambition, money, and social influence matter as much as talent. Drawn into a veterans' gathering, he meets the old comrades of his father, including the comic yet memorable Major Thorne, the revered Colonel Anderson, and Judge Ellis, whose polished ease and political connections hint at the power of the right circle. As the Loyal Legion meeting unfolds, stories of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, captivity, su...

Upton Sinclair's The Overman is a searching, idealistic work built around a single powerful idea: the human being as something unfinished, striving toward a higher form of life. With its prophetic atmosphere of dawn and awakening, the book suggests a serious philosophical and dramatic exploration of ambition, identity, and transformation. Sinclair brings his familiar moral urgency to a story of intellect, passion, and spiritual longing, tracing a soul's struggle to rise above ordinary limi...

What happens when the pursuit of the American Dream collides with poverty, exploitation, and an unforgiving system? In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair follows Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in Chicago with his family hoping to build a better life. Instead, they encounter brutal working conditions, poverty, exploitation, corruption, and a society that offers little protection to vulnerable workers. Set in Chicago's meatpacking industry, the novel exposes the harsh realities fa...

Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus arrives in Chicago chasing the American dream and finds instead the brutal, filthy machinery of the meatpacking industry — a world of exploitation, corruption, and unsanitary horrors that Upton Sinclair exposed in unflinching detail. Published in 1906, The Jungle was written to indict the treatment of immigrant workers, but it was the novel's stomach-turning descriptions of the food supply that seized the public's attention, leading directly to the Pure F...

Upton Sinclair turns his autobiography into a vivid, self-mocking chronicle of a life spent testing ideas, challenging conventions, and colliding with history. He begins with a sweeping self-portrait that moves from childhood poverty in Baltimore to literary fame, political activism, and the restlessness that drove him from one cause, colony, and conviction to the next. Beneath the comic detail lies a sharp account of class consciousness, family pride, and the emotional damage of a home sh...

From the acclaimed author of The Jungle : The first in a Pulitzer Prize–winning historical saga about the son of an American arms dealer during WWI.Lanning "Lanny" Budd spends his first thirteen years in Europe, at the center of his mother's glamorous circle of friends. In 1913, he enters a Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precoc...

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning series, the first four novels featuring an American who comes of age during the turbulent years of the early 20th century.In World's End, Lanning "Lanny" Budd's language skills and talent for decoding messages are in high demand as WWI bursts over Europe. When the hostilities conclude, Lanny joins the Paris Peace Conference as the assistant to a geographer asked by President Woodrow Wilson to redraw the map of Europe.

The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair offers a candid, sweeping account of the life and times of the renowned muckraking author and social reformer. From his impoverished childhood and early struggles as a writer to his rise as a literary and political force, Sinclair chronicles his evolution as a socialist, activist, and Pulitzer Prize winner. He reflects on landmark works like The Jungle, his role in shaping public policy, and his lifelong fight for justice, labor rights, and education. Wi...

Upton Sinclair's Prince Hagen turns myth into a glittering social satire, beginning in a Canadian wilderness where the poetically inclined Gerald Isman meets the cryptic peddler Mimi and is drawn into talk of Nibelungs, gold, and hidden powers beneath the earth. A magic ring, a trance, and eerie music carry him into Nibelheim, where King Alberich rules a world of treasure, art, and oppressive splendor, and where the rebellious Prince Hagen refuses every effort to tame him. When Gerald is a...

Upton Sinclair's The Story of a Patriot follows Peter Gudge, a hungry, undersized drifter whose petty schemes and survival instincts carry him into the middle of a city convulsed by war fever, labor conflict, and anti-radical hysteria. Drawn toward a patriotic parade as much by the hope of a meal as by curiosity, Peter is caught in a bombing and quickly realizes that panic may be more useful than truth. What begins as an accident becomes a nightmare of suspicion when a circular in his pock...