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Cogewea, the Half-Blood

Cogewea, a mischievous young rancher, lives with her older sister and brother-in-law on their homestead, the Horseshoe Bend Ranch, located in the Flathead Indian Reservation. A member of the Okanogan tribe, Cogewea is nevertheless stigmatized as a “breed”—a derogatory term historically applied to people of mixed Native American and European descent. Drama arrives at the Horseshoe Bend with the person of Alfred Densmore, a businessman who has set out from the Eastern states in search of adventure and money.

Mourning Dove · Drama · 33 ch

Contending Forces

In response to the upcoming abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Charles Montfort, an English planter in Bermuda, decides to move his family (and his human chattel) to the southern United States in order to free his slaves on his own schedule. However, Montfort’s arrival arouses the jealousy and anger of his neighbors, who murder Montfort and capture his wife and sons as slaves. Several decades later, Charles Montfort’s lineage survives in the Smiths, a family of Black Bostonians headed by the matriarch Ma Smith, who keeps a boarding house alongside her daughter Dora and her son Will.

Pauline E. Hopkins · Drama · 23 ch

Cousin Henry

As an old squire approaches his death, he vacillates over how to leave his substantial property: to the niece he loves, or to the nephew he despises? A will is made in favor of the nephew, following the squire’s sense of duty. But during the young man’s visit to the estate, the squire’s revulsion makes him produce a new will in favor of his niece.

Anthony Trollope · Drama · 24 ch

Cranford

Cranford was first serialized in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The structureless nature of the stories, and the fact that Gaskell was busy writing her novel Ruth at the time the Cranford shorts were being published, suggests that she didn’t initially plan for Cranford to be a cohesive novel. The short vignettes follow the activities of the society in the fictional small English country town of Cranford.

Elizabeth Gaskell · Drama · 16 ch

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment tells the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, an ex-student who plans to murder a pawnbroker to test his theory of personality. Having accomplished the deed, Raskolnikov struggles with mental anguish while trying to both avoid the consequences and hide his guilt from his friends and family. Dostoevsky’s original idea for the novel centered on the Marmeladov family and the impact of alcoholism in Russia, but inspired by a double murder in France he decided to rework it around the new character of Raskolnikov.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Psychological · 41 ch

Dangerous Liaisons

Dangerous Liaisons ( Les Liaisons dangereuses ) is an early French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes in 1782. At the time of its publication novels were a new literary form, and Laclos chose to present his story in an epistolary style, composing the novel solely of a series of letters written by the major characters to each other. It was first translated into English in 1812 and has since become universally regarded as one the most significant early French novels.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Drama · 179 ch

Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, was George Eliot’s last novel. It deals with two major characters whose lives intersect: One is a spoiled young woman named Gwendolen Harleth who makes an unwise marriage to escape impending poverty; the other is the titular character, Daniel Deronda, a wealthy young man who feels a mission to help the suffering. During her childhood Gwendolen’s family was well-off.

George Eliot · Drama · 72 ch

David Copperfield

Like many of Dickens’ works, David Copperfield was published serially, then as a complete novel for the first time in 1850. Dickens himself thought of it as his favorite novel, writing in the preface that of all his works Copperfield was his favorite child. This isn’t surprising, considering that many of the events in the novel are semi-autobiographical accounts from Dickens’ own life.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 66 ch

Dead Souls

Dead Souls is Nikolai Gogol’s last novel, and follows the tale of Pavel Chichikov, a down-on-his-luck gentleman determined to improve his lot in life. The story charts his scheme to purchase dead souls—the titles of deceased serfs—from wealthy landowners. The novel’s satirical take on the state of Russian society at the time leads Chichikov into increasingly difficult circumstances, in his attempts to cheat both the system and the cavalcade of townspeople he meets along the way.

Nikolai Gogol · Comedy · 20 ch

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Set in the 1850s, this short novel is about the struggles and triumphs of a bishop, Jean Marie Latour, and his loyal friend and vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant. They have been sent to reawaken and spread the Roman Catholic faith in an area where it has grown weak: New Mexico, recently annexed by the United States. Desolate and remote, the territory is home to many diverse groups: Mexicans, including those on ranches established for hundreds of years; Indians, who have been there much longer and who are divided by language and customs into thirty nations; and newcomers—hunters, fur trappers, and those seeking gold.

Willa Cather · Drama · 10 ch

Democracy

At age thirty, Madeleine Lee, a wealthy, wellborn widow, has tired of Gilded Age New York and its shallow society. She decides to spend the winter in Washington with her sister, renting a house on Lafayette Square, within easy reach of all the intense partying, horse-trading, and other activities that politics requires. As she makes friends (and enemies) with the locals, one question remains uppermost in Madeleine Lee’s mind: “Who, then, is right?

Henry Adams · Comedy · 14 ch

Demons

Young Pyotr Stepanovitch returns to the small town of his father and attempts to start a revolution that will ultimately remake the very fabric of society and bring forth a new social and political order. In order to realize his plan, Pyotr recruits a few men into his group, who are believed to be one cell among many spread throughout the country. Demons is told by a semi-omniscient narrator, and focuses mainly on the lives of middle- and upper-class Russians.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Psychological · 34 ch

Doctor Thorne

Doctor Thorne is the third book in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series, which is set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, somewhere in England’s West Country. Unlike the two earlier novels in the series, Doctor Thorne isn’t set in the cathedral city of Barchester, but in the small village of Greshamsbury and the estate of the local squire, Greshamsbury Park. Doctor Thorne is a middle-aged medical practitioner in Greshamsbury, a friend of the local squire Mr. Gresham, who is deeply in debt because of ill-advised attempts to gain a seat in Parliament.

Anthony Trollope · Drama · 48 ch

Dodsworth

In the booming American Midwest of the 1920s, an innovative auto manufacturer decides to retire early at the age of fifty, having achieved the American Dream through his hard work and ingenuity. With his younger, socially ambitious wife, he embarks on a long-dreamed-of European tour—a seemingly perfect capstone to a successful life. But what begins as a leisurely vacation opens up profound questions about identity, marriage, and the nature of fulfillment.

Sinclair Lewis · Drama · 36 ch

Dombey and Son

The fictional Dombey and Son is a prominent mercantile “house” in England, and as Dombey and Son the novel opens, the third generation “and Son” has just been born. For Paul Dombey, the proud second “and Son” to graduate to “Dombey,” this moment has been the focus of his life to this point. So much so that he barely knows his six-year-old daughter Florence exists.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 64 ch

Don Quixote

An aging gentleman, drunk on romances of chivalry, renames himself Don Quixote and rides out with his neighbor Sancho Panza to right wrongs across Spain. Their misadventures pit heroic fantasy against everyday life in what is often called the first modern novel.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · Comedy · 139 ch

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

Dorothy Gale, accompanied by her cat, Eureka, is traveling to visit her Uncle Henry and her other relatives in California, when she encounters her second cousin, Zeb. While en route in a horse-drawn buggy, an earthquake strikes, creating a vast crevasse into which Dorothy, Zeb, Eureka, and a cab-horse named Jim fall. While underground, they encounter the Wizard, who was last seen flying off in a balloon at the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

L. Frank Baum · Fantasy · 21 ch

Dracula

Dracula is one of the most famous horror novels, responsible not just for introducing the eponymous Count Dracula, but for laying the foundations for many of the common tropes we see in modern horror fiction. Count Dracula isn’t the first vampire to have graced the pages of Western literature—that honor belongs to Lord Ruthven in “ The Vampire,” a short story by John William Polidori —but Dracula is the vampire on which the modern vampire trope is based. Dracula wasn’t as famous in its day as it is today; readers of the time seemed to enjoy it as nothing more than a good story, and Stoker died nearly penniless.

Bram Stoker · Horror · 29 ch

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of picturesque short stories that paint a portrait of life in middle-class Dublin in the early 20th century. Joyce, a Dublin native, was careful to use actual locations and settings in the city, as well as language and slang in use at the time, to make the stories directly relatable to those who lived there. The collection had a rocky publication history, with the stories being initially rejected over eighteen times before being provisionally accepted by a publisher—then later rejected again, multiple times.

James Joyce · Drama · 17 ch

El Dorado

In the Scarlet Pimpernel’s fourth outing, he and his league want to free the orphaned Dauphin of France from his captors. But someone else has the same idea, although for very different, and selfish, reasons. In addition to trying to outflank his rival, the Pimpernel also has to deal with a member of his inner circle whose romance has caused him to disobey orders and put the entire plan in jeopardy.

Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 50 ch