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.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1916.

Tarkington was a widely read and prolific multiple Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and dramatist. Here Tarkington satirizes first love.

"Every man and woman over fifty ought to read Seventeen. It is not only a skillful analysis of adolescent love, it is, with all its side-splitting mirth, a tragedy. No mature person who reads this novel will ever seriously regret his lost youth or wish he were young again...." -- William Lyon Phelps, The Advance of the English Novel

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1912.

A young man leads a solitary life growing and harvesting medicinal herbs. He dreams of meeting his true love, subsequently sees her in a vision, and finally sets out to find her...