McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Twentieth Century Classics)

The novelist Frank Norris is almost forgotten today, but in books like "McTeague," published in 1899, he paved the way for a whole generation of American writers--a generation that included Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and, less directly, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. McTeague is a dentist saddled with a grasping wife, and the book chronicles his rise and fall in awkward but powerful prose. This type of social realism, so contrary to the uplifting entertainment of the day (and to Mark Twain's more fanciful, comic novels), provided turn-of-the-century America a disturbing mirror in which to view itself.

• The House of Mirth (Twentieth-Century Classics)
• The Red Badge of Courage (Fourth Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
• The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Shorter Ninth Edition) (Vol. 2)
• The Awakening (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Sister Carrie (Penguin Classics)
• The Marrow of Tradition (Penguin Classics)
• The Octopus: A Story of California (The Epic of the Wheat) (v. 1)
• A Hazard of New Fortunes (Penguin Classics)
• The Rise of Silas Lapham (Penguin Classics)
• Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings (Modern Library Classics)