Edith Wharton`s dark view of society, the somber economics of marriage, and the powerlessness of the unwedded woman at the turn of the twentieth century emerge dramatically in the tragic novel The House of Mirth

The world`s first great narrative history, Herodotus`s The Histories vividly describes how the Greeks - few in number, poor, and disunited - managed to repulse a massive invasion by the powerful Persian army in the 5th century B.C.

A monumental work unsurpassed for its brilliant description, accuracy, and penetrating insights, Thucydide`s History of the Peloponnesian War is a spectacular eyewitness report of the war between Greece`s two most powerful city-states, Athens and Sparta, as it unfolded during the fifth century B.C.E

Epigrammatic, enigmatic, intensely poetic, the Tao Te Ching is the mystical, spiritual soul of Taoism, one of the three great religions of ancient China. The Tao is usually translated as "the way" or "the path", but it is better understood as a universal life force that flows around and through all things

A classic of American political thought, The Federalist is a series of eighty-five essays by three authors - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay - written to curry support for the proposed new Constitution of the United States, a document that many considered too redical

One of the most influential books ever published in America, W.E.B. Du Bois`s The Souls of Black Folk is an eloquent collection of fourteen essays that discribe the life, the ambitions, the struggles, and the passions of African Americans at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century

Set in the 1740s just as the French and Indian wars have begun, the novel opens as Natty Bumppo - known as Deerslayer - and his friend Hurry Harry travel to Tom Hutter`s house in upstate New York. Hurry plans to marry Tom`s beautiful daughter Judith, while Deerslayer has come to help his close friend Chingachgook save his bride-to-be, Wah-ta-Wah, from the Huron Indians. When war breaks out, and Hurry and Tom are captured by Indians, Deerslayer must go on his first warpath to rescue them

Considered the most important poem of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot`s The Waste Land is an oblique and fascinating view of the hopelessness and confusion of purpose in modern Western civilization

Greed, treachery, mesmerism, and murder are just some of the bricks Hawthorne uses to build The House of the Seven Gables. Generations before the present story begins, wealthy Colonel Pyncheon covets Matthew Maule’s land. When Maule is hanged for witchcraft, he puts a curse on the Colonel—and all his descendants. Now the menacing Judge Pyncheon continues the family tradition of hiding cruelty under a dazzling smile, while his scowling niece, Hepzibah, and half-mad nephew, Clifford, are reduced to poverty by his machinations. But the younger generation, embodied in their distant cousin Phoebe, becomes a ray of hope penetrating the dark house

At a much lower price than comparable anthologies, the Fifth Edition provides 18 extraordinary plays, with a strong representation of historical periods and minority and women playwrights. The Introduction focuses on the study of drama as both a literary genre and a performing art; also provided are expanded introductions to the plays, an updated select bibliography, and a new filmography