Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James....

The adventures of Don Quixote, a common man from La Mancha, who has convinced himself that he is a knight. With his portly peasant squire, Sancho Panza, who recognizes his master's madness but is nonetheless captivated by promises of kingdoms and riches, Don Quixote mistakes windmills for giants and flocks of sheep for armies.

A dynamic backwoods lawyer batters his way into the governor's mansion, where he uses his unprincipled charm to become a brutal dictator.

"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...