Literary

In a Free State: A Novel

Man Booker Prize 1971

by V.S. Naipaul

No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel,...

The Fixer

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1967, National Book Award for Fiction 1967

by Bernard Malamud & Jonathan Safran Foer

The Fixer is the winner of the 1967 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest...

The Centaur: A Novel

National Book Award for Fiction 1964

by John Updike

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER

The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable...

The Reivers

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1963

by William Faulkner

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's...

Goodbye Columbus

National Book Award for Fiction 1960

by Philip Roth

National Book Award Winner

Philip Roth's brilliant career was launched when the unknown twenty-five-year-old writer won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for a collection that was to be called Goodbye,...

The Magic Barrel

National Book Award for Fiction 1959

by Bernard Malamud & Jhumpa Lahiri

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri

Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in...

A Death in the Family

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1958

by James Agee

The classic American novel, re-published for the 100th anniversary of James Agee?s birth

Published in 1957, two years after its author?s death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect...

A Fable

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1955, National Book Award for Fiction 1955

by William Faulkner

This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 195. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was...

Invisible Man

National Book Award for Fiction 1953

by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen...

The Old Man and the Sea

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1953

by Ernest Hemingway

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal:...

Men At Arms

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 1952

by Evelyn Waugh

Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair...

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: A Drama In Two Acts

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1952

by Herman Wouk

The novel that inspired the now-classic film The Caine Mutiny and the hit Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life—and mutiny—on...

The Man with the Golden Arm

National Book Award for Fiction 1950

by Nelson Algren & James R. Giles

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For...

Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem

Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1949

by Arthur Miller & Christopher Bigsby

Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play that forever changed the meaning of the American Dream and won multiple Tony Awards for the 2012 Broadway production directed by Mike Nichols and starring Philip...

The Grapes of Wrath

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1940

by John Steinbeck

Penguin Classics celebrates the quintessential American author's introduction to our signature black-spine classics line Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one...

The Root and the Flower

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 1935

by L.H. Myers & Penelope Fitzgerald

Set in the war-torn world of Mughal India and first published in the gathering darkness of the 1930s, The Root and the Flower is an epic story of intrigue, murder, and romance; of Tantric abandonment and Buddhist...

Miss Lulu Bett and Selected Stories

Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1921

by Zona Gale

Lulu Bett lives in a small town with her sister Ina and Ina’s husband Dwight–a dentist who rules his household with self-righteous smugness. The unmarried Lulu has learned that she cannot question her role...