An influential study of America's national government, egalitarian ideals, and character offers reflections on the effect of majority rule on the rights of individuals and provides insight into the rewards and responsibilities of a democratic government.

Here in one volume are all five of Nathaniel Hawthorne's world-famous novels. "The House of the Seven Gables" moves across 150 years from an ancestral crime condoned by the Puritan theocracy to a new beginning in the bustling and democratic Jacksonian era. Hawthorne's masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter," is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. "The Blithedale Romance"...

This Library of America volume brings together the first four works of Washington Irving, America’s first internationally recognized man of letters. Irving’s early writings earned the admiration of literary figures like Hawthorne, Poe, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, and Dickens. He was widely traveled, a connoisseur of the theater both at home and abroad, and an intimate of royalty and high society in Europe and America. Irving’s career as a writer...

Henry David Thoreau wrote four full-length works, collected here in a single volume. Interweaving natural observation, personal experience, and historical lore, they reveal his brilliance not only as a writer, but as a naturalist, scholar, historian, poet, and philosopher. "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is based on a boat trip taken with his brother from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire. "Walden" is at once a personal...

Examines the role of religion in human lives, the nature of the universe, truth, pragmatism, war, politics, and metaphysics

Contains the complete texts of four novels written by American author William Faulkner between 1936 and 1940, each of which explores the struggles of characters in the South. Includes notes and a chronology of the author's life.

Selection of writings by philosopher, psychologist, and champion of religious pluralism William James, including "The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy," "Psychology: Briefer Course," and ten other essays.

Collects James's travel writings, describing France, Italy, Switzerland, and Holland

Born enslaved, Frederick Douglass educated himself, escaped, and made himself one of the greatest leaders in American history. Here in this Library of America volume are collected his three autobiographical narratives, now recognized as classics of both American history and American literature. Writing with the eloquence and fierce intelligence that made him a brilliantly effective spokesman for the abolition of slavery and equal rights, Douglass...