After learning how to fight at a young age, Oroonoko, an African prince, fights alongside his army against invading forces. When a celebrated general saves Oroonoko's life, trading his own to take an arrow for Oroonoko, the young prince feels indebted to the man and decides to go pay his respects to the late general's family. There, he meets Imoinda, the daughter of the general. Oroonoko and Imoinda quickly fall in love and become betrothed, but the...

This rather simple plot is a most compelling drama that bristles with suspense as it contains all the elements of a classic 19th-century mystery including, reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, and a tense courtroom scene. Set in the fictional frontier town of Dawson's Landing on the banks of the Mississippi River in the first half of the 19th century, the book turned from a farce to a tragedy in the course of Twain's writing...

First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...

Jill the Reckless - P. G. Wodehouse - Jill The Reckless is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse.The heroine here, Jill Mariner, is a sweet-natured and wealthy young woman who, at the opening, is engaged to an MP, the baronet Sir Derek Underhill. We follow her through financial disaster, an adventure with a parrot, a policeman and the colourful proletariat, a broken engagement, an awkward stay with some grasping relatives, employment as a chorus girl, and the...

"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary." Overcoming extreme poverty, racism, and other adversities Carter Godwin...

Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While she was not prolific, her work was powerful and critically acclaimed. Collected here are both, of her novels, 'Passing' and 'Quicksand'. 'Quicksand', was autobiographical in nature and examined a woman's need for sexual fulfilment balanced against respectability and acceptance amid a deeply religious society. The novel is deeply pessimistic and ends as the protagonist...

Early in his career, Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) wrote a series of plays revolving around characters obsessed with the sea. This period culminated in the 1922 production of Anna Christie, a Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of social realism that was among the first of the author's plays to explore characters searching for their own identities. Centering on the reunion of a barge captain and his daughter after a twenty-year separation, the play derives...

In reprinting these orations the editor has endeavored to present them here as nearly as possible in their original form. No effort has been made to improve the English. Published in this form, then, these orations will be of value not only to persons studying the development of the Negro in his use of a modern idiom but also in the study of the history of the race. It is in this spirit that these messages are again given to the public.

"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...

Revisit the debut novel of one of the "New Negroes" of the Harlem Renaissance filled with Niggerati sensibilities. Disgruntled by the treatment of Black soldiers in the military, Jake Brown heads to Harlem-the Mecca of Black creativity-to rebuild his life anew. Upon arriving, he discovers that Harlem isn't exactly the paradise of racial uplift and unity that one might read about in books; but then again, it's a far cry from the volatile streets of...