 | Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (Voices of the South Series) by Robert Penn Warren
Buy new: $20.95 / Used from: $5.89 probably the most important text in American literature routinely bypassed by teachers and textbooks
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 | Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $4.90 misclassified as history; arguably best piece of American writing since World War II
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 | September, September by Shelby Foote
Buy new: $15.00 / Used from: $0.01 Foote's only post-Civil War fiction is a sui generis work of genius
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 | Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie (Penguin Classics) by Kate Chopin
Buy new: $11.70 / Used from: $1.20 the side of Kate Chopin known to her time; the local color school at its best
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 | American skin by Peter Viertel
Buy used from: $0.01 teethed by Hemingway, the virtually unknown Viertel delivers a perfectly pitched black comedy
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 | The Blithedale Romance (Penguin Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Buy new: $10.00 / Used from: $0.01 Hawthorne's politically incorrect take on American utopianism will never have enough readers
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 | Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (Penguin Classics) by Herman Melville
Buy new: $11.21 / Used from: $6.57 perhaps the most villified and misunderstood American classic (yes, classic), a scathing take on American literary pretense, 19th century style
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 | World Enough and Time (Voices of the South) by Robert Penn Warren
Buy new: $14.96 / Used from: $4.10 Penn Warren's other masterpiece novel
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 | Democracy: An American Novel (Meridian) by Henry Adams
Buy used from: $0.01 mysteriously never taught; the mother of all American political novels
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 | The Hard Blue Sky (Voices of the South) by Shirley Ann Grau
Buy new: $18.95 / Used from: $3.81 breakout book by a masterful stylist too little known
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 | Across The River And Into The Trees by Ernest Hemingway
Buy new: $9.89 / Used from: $1.31 much mocked and belittled, a bittersweet and uncompromising slice of life, war, and romance from Papa
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 | Pylon: The Corrected Text by William Faulkner
Buy new: $9.95 / Used from: $2.95 the unknown Faulkner, modernist and wastelander, upon whom the masterpieces are built
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 | Battle Pieces: The Civil War Poems of Herman Melville (American Poetry) by Herman Melville
Buy new: $8.99 / Used from: $0.13 yes, he was a major poet too
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 | Shane by Jack Schaefer
Buy new: $6.99 / Used from: $0.01 dismissed as a Western for boys, this novella is Jungian in its perfection of an archetype
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 | Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage Classics) by Willa Cather
Buy new: $8.40 / Used from: $0.01 meet the now politically incorrect Willa, a formidable master
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 | Flappers and Philosophers by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Buy new: $5.99 / Used from: $0.80 the Fitzgerald embraced by his own age was an artfully light wit, not to be missed
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 | The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot
Buy new: $8.64 / Used from: $0.01 challenging and surreal, T.S. (yeah, I claim him to be an American) Eliot at his experimental best
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 | The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $4.60 forget the lucicrous film rip-off; the book is a brilliant and fully engaged attack on new age decadence
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 | Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison
Buy new: $10.52 / Used from: $1.89 Matchless essays on American literature, culture, and music from a modern virtuoso
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 | The Dean's December (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Saul Bellow
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $0.73 The Nobel laureate takes his gloves off; raw , passionate and uncompromising
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 | Buchanan Dying : A Play by John Updike
Buy used from: $0.47 a rare gem from Updike; historical meditation in the best tradition
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 | The Vixen by W.S. Merwin
Buy new: $17.00 / Used from: $6.74 one of the most skilled, lovely, and penetrating works of poetry in the last 30 years.
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 | Play It As It Lays: A Novel by Joan Didion
Buy new: $9.36 / Used from: $2.86 Didion at her finest, summing up a nation reaching critical mass through the turbulent lens of California.
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 | Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $2.99 sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, arguably the best prose published by Hemingway in his lifetime
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 | Flags in the Dust: The complete text of Faulkner's third novel, which appeared in a cut version as Sartoris by William Faulkner
Buy new: $10.16 / Used from: $1.23 The modernist comes home, and delivers an uncompromising opener to his major saga
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