Lyons Regional Library

Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." A daringly ironic...

'It was unnecessary for all to perish, when, by the death of one, it was possible, and even probable, that the rest might be finally preserved.' Travelling aboard a whaling vessel, a young stowaway is swept up in myriad misadventures - mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism - narrowly escaping numerous brushes with death. This rousing story of a daring sea voyage also presents its antihero with a host of psychological dilemmas, and offers an important insight...

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester...