Akron Public Library

Novelist George Webber is driven from his hometown when his successful autobiographical novel infuriates the family and friends he has depicted in it.

Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "Life on the Mississippi" is Mark Twain's most brilliant and most personal nonfictional work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War. A priceless collection of of humorous anecodotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain's...

A documentary novel portraying industry's conditions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Sinclair's novel prompted public outrage which led President Theodore Roosevelt to demand an official investigation. This eventually led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws.

Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the town of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently performed play. It is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition, featuring a new Foreword by Donald Margulies, who writes, "You are holding in your hands a great American play. Possibly...

Presents the history of the United States from the point of view of those who were exploited in the name of American progress.

It was the time of the French Revolution - a time of great change and great danger. It was a time when injustice was met by a lust for vengeance, and rarely was a distinction made between the innocent and the guilty. Against this tumultuous historical backdrop, Dickens' great story of unsurpassed adventure and courage unfolds.Unjustly imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, Dr. Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter, Lucie, and safely transported...

This work, a collection of essays on the natural world during a year spent in the Blue Ridge valley of Virginia, reflects the author's interactions with her wilderness surroundings. The author takes us through a year of on-foot explorations through her own landscape, bringing anecdotes, curiosities, and insights about all she observes and experiences. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and thinks about wave mechanics; in the fall, she...

A 1928 novel in which the author offers a satiric view of intellectual life in the 1920s.

For the first time ever, the complete poetry collection spanning three decades from Nikki Giovanni, renowned poet and one of America's national treasures. When her poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement, in the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni immediately took her place among the most celebrated, controversial and influential poets of the era. Now, more than thirty years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices...

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance....