Genre Other. Page - 377

Description William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World was first performed in 1700 at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. It was not well received, and as a result Congreve vowed never to write for the stage again—a vow he kept. Nonetheless the comedy was printed in the same year and has come to be regarded as the author’s masterpiece, a classic of Restoration drama. In a world still reacting against the puritanism of Cromwell and the Commonwealth, Restoration drama had slowly

Description American naturalist and conservationist Thornton W. Burgess was the author of more than one hundred books for children; the best-remembered of these is Old Mother West Wind, which was originally written for his young son. Burgess also wrote dozens of books about the creatures of the northern North American forest, four of which are collected here as the Green Forest Stories. This Green Forest Stories compilation focuses on Lightfoot the Deer, Blacky the Crow, Whitefoot the Wood

Description When Orion Clemens is appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, his brother Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, joins him on his journey west. Together with their all-important six pounds of Unabridged Dictionary they make their way to Nevada in a six-horsed mail coach and are, of course, derailed by all sorts of problems. In Roughing It Twain combines the beautiful descriptions of the West’s idyllic landscape with his now-patented sense of humor. He joins

Description The publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in 1918 was a tremendous success. In it, Strachey looked at four iconic figures of the Victorian Age and punctured the hagiographical illusions surrounding them. It seems only fitting that he should follow up in 1921 with a similarly unsentimental but fair biography of the person at the pinnacle of that era, Queen Victoria herself. Thoroughly researched, with his references documented in hundreds of footnotes, Strachey looks at

Description Thornton W. Burgess was an American naturalist and the author of dozens of books for children, the most enduring of which are Old Mother West Wind and The Burgess Bird Book for Children. Burgess was a passionate twentieth-century conservationist who dedicated his life to teaching children and their families about the importance of the natural life of the northern North American forest. The Green Meadow Stories compilation is made up of four distinct but entwined tales: those of

Description In a desire for better sheep-farming land on an unnamed British colony, Higgs decides to traverse the distant mountain range. On the other side he discovers not the empty rolling plains of his imagination but an entirely new civilization: the land of Erewhon. Inducted into the ways of their culture, he attempts to transcribe as best he can their thoughts on birth, death, machines, the production of food, their financial system, and many more subjects that on first glance seem absurd

Description The protagonist of this fictional autobiography wrestles with race in America from the perspective of someone who learns that he is considered black but also that he can pass as white if he wants to. His personal ambitiousness and racial ambivalence makes him a sort of American Hamlet: undone by indecision. Will he be “a credit to his race” by advancing an African-American heritage he loves and appreciates in the face of a hostile culture, or will he retreat into the mediocrity of a

Description In the year 2126, scientists Arcot and Morey chase a sky pirate—and invent the technology to travel through space. In the second story, the heroes travel to Venus and make first contact with an alien species. Finally, they must defend the solar system from invaders whose own star has long since gone dark. Originally published separately as “Piracy Preferred” in Amazing Stories June 1930 edition, “Solarite” in Amazing Stories November 1930, and “The Black Star Passes” in Amazing

Description Fritz Leiber is most famous for his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” stories, but he also wrote in many other genres. Between 1950 and 1963 he wrote a number of short stories that appeared in Galaxy magazine, including one in the same universe as The Big Time and the Change War stories (“No Great Magic”).

Description The first published novel by a black American author combines real-life stories, including his own story of escaping slavery and recollections he heard while helping others escape, with abolitionist agitprop, revealing ephemera from the newspapers of the time, and sympathetic (if somewhat melodramatic) characters. What emerges from this collage is an indictment of slavery and of American hypocrisy about liberty that found an enthusiastic and enraged audience when it was published in