Harper's modern classics

Contains: - [Bartleby, the Scrivener]( - Benito Cereno - [Billy Budd](

The stirring story of a Norwegian immigrant and his wife and their lives as pioneers on the prairies of Dakota.

Booth Tarkington grew up in Indianapolis, and attended Princeton University. He set much of his fiction in Indiana. Tarkington was one of the more popular novelists of his time, and in 1921 booksellers rated him in a poll as the most significant contemporary American author. -Wikipedia entry for Tarkington

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley prophesied a capitalist civilization, which had been reconstituted through scientific and psychological engineering, a world in which people are genetically designed to be passive and useful to the ruling class. Huxley opens the book by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on the tour of the fertilizing Room of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning center, where the high tech reproduction takes place. One of the characters, Bernard Marx, seems alone, harboring an ill-defined longing to break free. Satirical and disturbing, Brave New World is set some 600 years into the future. Reproduction is controlled through genetic engineering, and people are bred into a rigid class system. As they mature, they are conditioned to be happy with the roles that society has created for them.

Saga of the prairies dealing with the hardships of Norwegian farmers who set out in 1873 to settle in the Dakota country.

This book contains a collection of essays, poems, and stories by the author. Most of the items originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine.