Martin Eden

Jay Gatsby builds a fortune to win back the woman he lost, and the effort destroys him. Fitzgerald turns the Jazz Age into a study of ambition, class and self invention.

F Scott Fitzgerald

A prosperous realtor starts to suspect his whole life is a performance he never chose. Lewis wrote the sharpest satire of middle class conformity in American fiction.

Sinclair Lewis

A farm girl is ruined by one encounter and spends the rest of her life paying for it. Hardy's angriest novel about how society punishes women for what is done to them.

Thomas Hardy

Anna leaves her husband for a young officer and watches her world close around her. Tolstoy sets her ruin against a parallel story of a marriage that quietly works.

Leo Tolstoy

A man engaged to the right woman falls for the wrong one, and old New York closes ranks. Wharton shows how politeness can be the most effective weapon there is.

Edith Wharton