"Stairs To The Roof" (1945) by Tennessee Williams --160 pages The drama concerns Benjamin Murphy, a clerk who wages a private war against workers' slavery to the clock and the growing anonymity of the average person in the mechanized world of the year 2001, when the play is set. Sixty years ago, this play was written by a young Tennessee Williams. It is a rare and different Williams' work: a love story, a comedy, an experiment in meta-theatre, with a touch of early science fiction.
"A Raisin In The Sun" (1958) by Lorraine Hansberry --160 pages
When it was first produced in 1959, it was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. ...the play was a radically new representation of black life. An African-American family is united
in love and pride as they struggle to overcome poverty and harsh living conditions, in the award-winning 1959 play about an
embattled Chicago family.
==Alice's==
"The Subjection of Women" (1869) by John Stuart Mill --112 pages
From the Dover publisher: Influential essay by great English philosopher -- argues for equality in all legal, political, social and domestic relations between men and woman. Carefully reasoned and clearly expressed with great logic and consistency, the work remains a landmark in the struggle for human rights.
"Hedda Gabler" (1890) by Ibsen --72 pages
Known as the father of modern drama, Ibsen is considered one of the world's greatest playwrights. Ibsen's genius, lies in his ability to define his characters and their struggles... Universally condemned in 1890 when it was written, Hedda Gabler has since become one of Ibsen's most frequently performed plays Hedda is an intelligent and ambitious woman, who has no means of finding personal fulfilment...
==Connie's==
"The Sun Also Rises" (1926) by Hemingway --256 pages
From Barnes and Noble: Hemingway's first bestselling novel, it is the story of a group of 'Lost Generation' Americans and Brits in the 1920s on a sojourn from Paris to Pamploma, Spain. The novel poignantly details their life as expatriates on Paris' Left Bank, and conveys the brutality of bullfighting in Spain. The novel established Hemingway as one of the great prose stylists of all time.
"Absolom, Absolom" (1936) by Faulkner -- 313 pages
Often proclaimed Faulkner's greatest masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, the son of a poor white in western Virginia who has a grand "design," and the effect his actions have on future generations in Yoknapatawpha County...The novel is written in dense, often intricate prose... it offers one of Faulkner's most compelling explorations of race, gender, and the burdens of the ast.
==Mary's==
"Regeneration" (1991) by Pat Barker -- 256 pages
First in a series of three novels which also includes the Booker Awards winning "The Ghost Road", set in a British military hospital during WWI, it blends fact and fiction, drawing its two protagonists from the pages of history. ... portrays overwhelmed men who try to come to terms with their outrage over a futile war.
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) by Jane Jacobs 458 pages
The classic work set a new agenda for urban planning. It is an attack on current methods of city planning and rebuilding..ground-breaking work... Jane Jacobs not only threw a monkey wrench into conventional thinking on the structure of cities and helped reshape urban planning, but she did so as a non-expert and as a woman - both historical taboos in the world of intellectual analysis. With flowing, descriptive prose, Jane's work leads us to think about each element...
==Susan's==
"The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath (1971) -- 288 pages
From Amazon: The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor...The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity.
"Optimist's Daughter" by Eudora Welty (1990) -- 192 pages
Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 for this novella her most celebrated work of fiction. In keeping with the characteristics of Southern writers such as William Faulker and Flannery O'Connor, Welty manages to include conflicts between true and false love, old money and white trash, and even progressive politics and the Ku Klux Klan in a story about coming home to a vanishing world.
==Tova's==
"Angle of Repose" by Wallace Stegner (2000) 592 pages
Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--the magnificent story of four generations in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for Stegner's masterpiece. Also, Last year, Angle of Repose was selected by the board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.
"The Accompanist" by Nina Berberova (1936) 96 pages
A spellbinding short novel set in post-revolutionary Russia about a young girl's jealousy. The fifth book of Nina Berberova, The Accompanist, written in 1936, proved to be a literary phenomenon in Europe where it was first published. A spellbinding, short novel set in post-revolutionary RussiaThe Accompanist portrays with extraordinary sensitivity the entangled relationships of three intriguing characters.
Nina Berberova was born in Russia. In 1922, when she emigrated to Berlin and then to Paris, where she lived until 1950. In 1950, she moved to the US with virtually no money and no knowledge of English. In 1963, she moved to Princeton and became professor of Russian literature. She was honored as a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts & Letters.
