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 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.

A seminal work of Realism, and one of the most influential novels ever written.

"What is remarkable in Madame Bovary is that its mediocre beings, with their earthbound ambitions and pedestrian problems, impress us, by virtue of the structure and the writing that create them, as beings who are out of the ordinary within their ordinary manner of being." - Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Perpetual Orgy

The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, as she spirals out of control trying to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

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.

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.

1899 Best Seller.

A novel full of wonderful character sketches. David Harum, a dry and somewhat excentric country banker, tells of a young man from a well to do family who finds himself in the small town of Homeville and begins a romance with a young lady.