1855 Best Seller.

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room is temperance novel that helped demonize alcohol. In the story a miller gives up his mill and opens a tavern. The narrator visits intermittently over the years and charts the changes in the proprietor and the town due to the negative influence of alcohol.

1871 Best Seller.

From age 19 Eggleston was an itinerant preacher until travelling broke his health.

The books relates the experiences of a young man sent to be the only teacher of a backwoods rural Indiana town. It is an early example of American realist fiction.

1878 Best Seller.

Green's first and best-known novel is a nicely complicated murder mystery with a classic drawing room resolution. It was apparently used by Yale Law School to demonstrate the weakness of circumstantial evidence.

1895 Best Seller.

One of the most influential anti-war stories ever written The Red Badge of Courage was adapted as a film in 1951 by John Huston. Crane wanted to show what war was like and achieved a ground breaking 'psychological portrayal of fear'. The story follows an archetypical 19 year old recruit in the American Civil War.

1896 Best Seller.

Tom Grogan is a stevedore on the 1890s New York City docks. Tom dies unexpectedly and his wife Mary decides to carry on his business by taking Toms place. It is not easy to maintain the fiction that she is Tom Grogan, nor to keep the business afloat in the face of many challenges.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1903.