
The Great Gatsby
Gatsby throws enormous parties hoping the woman he loved will wander into one. Fitzgerald made the Jazz Age America's myth of itself, and the last page is the most beautiful in American writing.

Gatsby throws enormous parties hoping the woman he loved will wander into one. Fitzgerald made the Jazz Age America's myth of itself, and the last page is the most beautiful in American writing.

Clarissa Dalloway buys the flowers herself and gives a party, one June day in London, while a veteran wrecked by the war comes apart nearby. Woolf moves between strangers' minds without warning.

Every life in Gide's novel is a forgery: boys passing false coins, adults faking passions they do not feel, and a novelist inside the book writing a novel called The Counterfeiters.

Clyde Griffiths, raised by street preachers and starving for money, gets a factory girl pregnant as a rich one turns toward him. Dreiser drew the lake that follows from a 1906 murder case.

A woman watches her lover go and promises to scatter azaleas in his path rather than weep. Kim Sowol put Korean folk-song rhythm into modern verse, and the whole country memorized him.

Sara Smolinsky's father studies Torah in a Lower East Side tenement while her mother takes in boarders and he marries her sisters to men they dread. She leaves at seventeen for night school.

Lorelei Lee, a blonde from Arkansas, keeps a diary about the men who buy her diamonds and gives away far more than she knows. Edith Wharton called it the great American novel.