The Pickwick Club was founded by the most learned minds in London for the purpose of making a scientific tour of the world. No sooner have the distinguished members begun their historic journey than they are set upon by a charming but notorious con man. So begins a series of hilarious misadventures that takes the incorrigibly innocent Pickwicks wandering around England, coming in contact with some of the most colorful and comical characters in all...

Classics. Mark Twain's tale of a boy's picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work had done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous 'Duke' and 'Dauphin'. Beneath the exploits, however, are...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Army Life in a Black Regiment is a riveting and empathetic account of the lessons learned from an encounter between a New England intellectual and nearly a thousand newly freed slaves. In the fall of 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was asked to take command of the 1st Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, and he immediately understood the significance of the experiment...

Contains over 200 illustrations by Medal of Honor recipient Charles W. Reed "Most histories of the Civil War focus on battles and top brass. Hardtack and Coffee is one of the few to give a vivid, detailed picture of what ordinary soldiers endured every day-in camp, on the march, at the edge of a booming, smoking hell. John D. Billings of Massachusetts enlisted in the Army of the Potomac and survived the conditions he recorded. The authenticity of...

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four is the second novel in the Sherlock Holmes series, following the enormously successful novel A Study In Scarlet. With the mysterious disappearance of a British Indian army officer, a one-legged hooligan, a stolen treasure, and a nefarious pact between four con-men, this novel of revenge and love is an exquisite classic of crime fiction. In the infamous opening of the novel, Dr. Watson finds Sherlock Holmes in...