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.

The novel follows Chichikov, an unscrupulous young gentleman of a middle social class who is determined to make his fortune. He plans to buy the title to serfs that have died since the last census. The owners should be agreeable as they are still paying tax on the dead 'souls'. Nabakov described Gogol as a great writer whose prose style combined superb descriptive power with a disregard for novelistic clichés. In this most unusual work Gogol combines devastating satire and beautifully rendered characters to create an enduring masterpiece.

The Inspector-General is a satirical masterpiece portraying greed, stupidity, and the endemic corruption of power in tsarist Russia. It caused such uproar when published in 1836 that only the personal intervention of Tsar Nicholas I allowed it to be staged. Although it used the forms, elements, and premises of plays written before, it marks the beginning of a new tradition. Widely adapted. Seemingly the clear inspiration for the hotel inspector episode of the TV series, Fawlty Towers.

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.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1920.

Milt Dale, the man of the forest, overhears a plot to kidnap a young woman and cannot in good conscience do nothing. He sets out to save the girl ...

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1918.

An epic novel set against the construction of the Union-Pacific Railroad between 1864 and 1869 and the introduction of the telegraph. Full of wonderfully drawn characters and a central romantic thread.