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Literary Reference Center
Novels, short stories, poems, plot summaries and synopses, and literary criticism. Research guides, lesson plans, and citation tools support student learning.
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This beautiful new edition features an eye-opening afterword written by Tappan Wilder that includes Thornton Wilder's unpublished notes and other illuminating photographs and documentary material. Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the small village of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned...
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"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths...
4) The bell jar
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Description
[This book] chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...
5) Native son
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Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...
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"Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city's sewer system. This is the devastating premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel The man who lived underground, written between his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) at the height of his creative powers."--...
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2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
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ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
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"Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much." --
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage....
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Autobiography of Mark Twain (1907) is a collection of autobiographical writings by American humorist Mark Twain. Dictated toward the end of his life, the Autobiography of Mark Twain is a series of brief reflections on 74 years of fame, hard work, and adventure by an icon of American literature. Originally serialized in the North American Review, the United States' oldest literary magazine, the Autobiography of Mark Twain has gone through countless...
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In this 1939 novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith. Narrated in a mixture of biblical rhetoric, black dialect, and colloquial English, Hurston traces Moses's life from the day he is launched into the Nile river in a reed basket, to his development as a great magician, to his transformation...