This was Goethe's first major success, though it also lead to some difficulties. It started "Werther Fever"; some young men so identified with Werther that that they began dress like him. It also lead to more than 2,000 copycat suicides. The problem became so concerning to the authorities that a rival 'happy ending' was published by Friedrich Nicolai, another author. Goethe was incensed and published a poem in which Nicolai defecates on Werther's grave, starting a literary war that lasted all his life.

One of the first and finest "sensation novels", the story begins when the protagonist, Walter Hartright, encounters a mysterious woman dressed all in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. She is confused and in distress, and Hartright helps her to find her way back to London. In return she gives him a warning. Soon after, Hartright learns that she might have escaped from an asylum. The story is told by a succession of character, each with different motivations and agendas.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The trip has been recreated many times since most recently in 2005 for the BBC. Quotes and references turn up regularly, ranging from references in Robert A. Heinlein's 1958 Have space suit will travel through to the 2006 film Pirates of the Caribbean.

A tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between Catherine, a dull but sweet daughter, and her brilliant domineering father as Catherine slowly develops maturity and independence. "Everybody likes Washington Square, even the denigrators of Henry James," wrote critic Donald Hall.

1872 Best Seller.

In his day E. P. Roe was a bigger seller than Mark Twain.

A story of the Chicago fire.

"We accord a hearty commendation to this work. The narrative is vigorous, often intense, but rarely if ever melodramatic. Its language is usually no less chaste than forcible and impressive. It betrays a power of invention and description which is not met with every day in the best of writers of popular fiction." -- Dr. Ripley, in the New York Tribune (contemporary review)

1895 Best Seller.

Sketches of rural Scottish life based on the authors experiences as a minister in Perthshire.

1898 Best Seller.

A new minister arrives at a mining and lumber boomtown in the 1880's West. He is determined to 'clean up the town' and win a few souls, but the task proves more challenging than he anticipated.