A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

Booker T. Washington believed that every man and woman deserved a chance, regardless of their skin color. This classic work of literature relays the story of a man born into slavery who, once freed, pursued education and racial equality. Originally published in 1901, the new edition of Booker T. Washington's autobiography features a foreword from media personality and advocate for the advancement of African Americans, Mychal Massie. In his story,...

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

One of twentieth-century America's most politically influential novels, The Jungle is Upton Sinclair's hard-hitting exposé of the meat-packing industry. Journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair was a known muckraker who used his work to expose the horrific underbelly of the American government in the early 1900s. The Jungle is the fictional story of Jurgis Rudkus and his wife, Ona Lukoszaite. The couple immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania in the...

"Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and ... learn what it had to teach." Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond -- on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson -- outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature,...

"The story of the slave Tom. Devout and loyal, he is sold and sent down south, where he endures brutal treatment at the hands of the degenerate plantation owner Simon Legree. By exposing the extreme cruelties of slavery, Stowe explores society's failures and asks a profound question: "What is it to be a moral human being?""-- Amazon.com