Description
The American Classics Collections box set includes The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnby Mark Twain, with new introductions and bespoke covers.
Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.
Whether you love the glamour of upper class New York, are passionate about the history of Puritan New England or are intrigued by the hard times of late nineteenth-century Mississippi, pivotal American literature unfolds in this collection of classic novels.
About the Author
Among the “Lost Generation” of writers that came of age during the Roaring Twenties, the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) epitomized “The Jazz Age”: a period of declining traditional values, prohibition and speakeasies, and great artistic leaps. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a financial success, but subsequent ones, including his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, sold poorly. In need of money, he turned to writing commercial short stories and Hollywood scripts, while his lifelong alcoholism destroyed his health and led to an early death. The 1945 reissue of The Great Gatsby spurred a wide resurgence of interest, and Fitzgerald is now considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.
Edith Wharton was born in 1862 to a prominent and wealthy New York family. In 1885 she married Boston socialite Teddy Wharton but the marriage was unhappy and they divorced in 1913. The couple travelled frequently to Europe and settled in France, where Wharton stayed until her death in 1937. Her first major novel was The House of Mirth (1905); many short stories, travel books, memoirs and novels followed, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Reef (1912). She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with The Age of Innocence (1920) and she was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also decorated for her humanitarian work during the First World War.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born is Salem, Massachusetts in 1804. His father died when he was four years old. His first novel, Fanshawe, was published anonymously at his own expense in 1828. He later disowned the novel and burned the remaining copies. For the next twenty years he made his living as a writer of tales and children s stories. He assured his reputation with the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and The House of the Seven Gables the following year. In 1853 he was appointed consul in Liverpool, England, where he lived for four years. He died in 1864.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, the son of a lawyer. Early in his childhood, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri – a town which would provide the inspiration for St Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After a period spent as a travelling printer, Clemens became a river pilot on the Mississippi: a time he would look back upon as his happiest. When he turned to writing in his thirties, he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain ( Mark Twain is the cry of a Mississippi boatman taking depth measurements, and means two fathoms ), and a number of highly successful publications followed, including The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889). His later life, however, was marked by personal tragedy and sadness, as well as financial difficulty. In 1894, several businesses in which he had invested failed, and he was declared bankrupt. Over the next fifteen years – during which he managed to regain some measure of financial independence – he saw the deaths of two of his beloved daughters, and his wife. Increasingly bitter and depressed, Twain died in 1910, aged seventy-five.
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