Last week Book Buzz brought you literary must reads written by women. This week’s classics list features male authors. Besides the well known Dickens, London, Hemmingway, Orwell, Steinbeck and Twain (among many others), the following perhaps less-known authors works consistently appear on lists of must-read literature. Check out Lihu‘e Library’s substantial Classics collection.
Happy Reading!
An American Tragedy
By Theodore Dresser
Classics Fiction Dresser
On one level this is the story of the corruption and destruction of one man who forfeits his life in pursuit of success. On another level the novel is a portrayal of the dark side of the American dream, of a society whose values both shape his ambitions and seal his fate.
Cry, The Beloved Country
By Alan Paton
Classics Fiction Paton
This impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is the story of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice.
Death Be Not Proud
By John Gunther
Classics Fiction Gunther
This memoir is a skillful and loving evocation of the author’s son who struggled with and died from a brain tumor. It is also an stirring account of the limitations of medical science. To read this book is to grasp the meaning of man’s power to defy Death’s hurt; to be filled with confidence and emptied of despair.
The Education
of Little Tree
By Forrest Carter
Classics Fiction Carter
This is the story of a young orphan adopted by his Cherokee grandparents in Appalachia during the Great Depression. His grandparents teach him how to live, act and think in the Cherokee way. When Little Tree is taken by whites for schooling, we learn of the cruelty to Indian children in an attempt to assimilate them and how the perceptions of Anglos differ from the Cherokee.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
By Douglas Adam
Classics Fiction Adam
Join Adams’s hapless science fiction hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic dialogue.
Main Street
By Sinclair Lewis
Classics Fiction Lewis
This novel centers on an idealistic young woman who marries a country doctor and settles in the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness, she reflects a whole country hesitating between a new sophistication and its traditional insularity.
The Metamorphosis
By Franz Kafka
Classics Fiction Kafka
Kafka’s comic and harrowing meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation is told as the story of a young man, who transforms overnight into a giant and monstrous insect, and becomes an object of disgrace to his family and an outsider in his own home.
Native Son
By Richard Wright
Classics Fiction Wright
Wright’s compelling and controversial novel about a young African-American man who murders a white woman in 1930s Chicago is a remarkable literary work exploring violence, crime and racism.
Night
By Elie Wiesel
Classics Fiction Wiesel
The Nobel Peace Prize winning author was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp. This is the terrifying record of Wiesel’s memories of the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and his confrontation with the evil of man.
One Hundred
Years of Solitude
By Gabriel Garcis Marquez
Classics Fiction Garcia Marquez
Nobel Laureate in literature, this is the author’s most famous work. It is the tale of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Maconado through the history of the Buendia family chronicling their loves, madnesses and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths.
Siddhartha
By Hermann Hesse
Classics Fiction Hesse
In this novel young Siddhartha leaves his family for a contemplative life, then discards it for one of the flesh. Finally sickened by lust and greed, he moves on again and comes to a river where he hears the unique sounds of his life-the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace and finally, wisdom.
Things Fall Apart
By Chinua Achebe
Classics Fiction Achebe
Nigerian novelist Achebe’s deceptively simple 1959 masterpiece depicts the ascendance and descendance of Okonkwo, a man whose sense of manliness is more akin to that of his warrior ancestors than to that of his fellow clansmen who have converted to Christianity. The tough, proud, hardworking protagonist is at once a quintessential old-order Nigerian and a universally identifiable father figure.
• Carolyn Larson, head librarian at Lihu‘e Public Library, brings you the buzz on new, popular and good books available at your neighborhood library. Book annotations are culled from online publishers’ descriptions and published reviews.
