United States

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: Humbert Humbert's disturbing confession about Dolores Haze. A controversial masterpiece - summary, analysis, and where to buy.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: Scout, Atticus Finch, and Boo Radley in 1930s Alabama. Classic on justice and racism - summary, analysis, and where to buy.

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: Huck and Jim raft down the Mississippi River. American literature classic on freedom and morality - summary and where to buy.

Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: The Joad family's journey from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl. Pulitzer winner - summary and where to buy.

Joseph Heller's Catch-22: Yossarian fights absurd military bureaucracy in WWII. The novel that defined paradoxical logic - summary, analysis, and where to buy.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: a Black man's search for identity in a nation that refuses to see him. Summary, analysis, and where to buy.

Kerouac's On the Road: Sal and Dean's cross-country journeys that defined the Beat Generation. Freedom, jazz, and the open American highway.

Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: Thomas Sutpen's doomed dynasty and the South's original sin. A dense, demanding masterpiece of American Gothic fiction.

Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: Santiago's epic battle with a giant marlin. The Nobel Prize-winning parable of courage and endurance.

Toni Morrison's Beloved: a former slave is haunted by the ghost of her past. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of memory, motherhood, and slavery's legacy.

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: Scarlett O'Hara's fierce survival through the Civil War. The sweeping epic of love, war, and the Old South.

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: expatriates drink, love, and watch bullfights in 1920s Paris and Spain. The novel that defined the Lost Generation.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: the revolutionary poetry collection that invented American verse. Summary, analysis, and where to buy.

Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: Hester Prynne defies Puritan Boston with her scarlet 'A.' A haunting tale of sin, guilt, and defiance.

Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie Crawford's journey through love, loss, and self-discovery in the Black South.

Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: love and war on the Italian front. A masterpiece of spare prose and devastating emotion.

Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: Isabel Archer's fateful quest for freedom in a world that conspires to contain her. A masterwork of psychological fiction.

Nabokov's Pale Fire: a murdered poet's final work, annotated by a possibly mad editor. A dazzling puzzle-box of a novel.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time, from the Dresden firebombing to an alien zoo. An anti-war classic.

Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: the Bundren family's harrowing journey to bury their mother. A darkly comic Southern masterpiece told in fifteen voices.