| Synopsis | Work |
|---|
| Celie (an African American) is raped by her stepfather, marries an abusive husband, forms a romantic attachment with his mistress, and finds her lost sister Nettie at the end | |
| Ignatius Reilly, Myrna Minkoff, Police officer Angelo Mancuso, Miss Trixie, Mr and Mrs Levy | |
| South Africa/Stephen Kumalo goes to see sister Gertrude (prostitute) and find son Absalom who has killed Arthur Jarvis, son of Stephen's neighbor James | |
| Title taken from Yeats 'Second Coming'/Okonkwo, leader in Igbo (Ibo) village, exiled for accidental murder, returns to find Brits running things, commits suicide after murder | |
| Describes the formative years of Stephan Dedalus and is semi-autobiographical and tied to the myth of Daedalus and Icarus | |
| Narrator unnamed African American from the South becomes involved in the Brotherhood in Harlem, falls down manhole while chased by police, lives underground with 1369 light bulbs | |
| Covers one day in the life of the namesake, Clarissa _______, character who is a high society London woman who will be hosting a party that evening | |
| Jose Buendia founds the town of Macondo, the story covers 7 generations of the family there | |
| The Bundren family is trying to take their dead mother, Addie, to Jefferson MS for burial/stream of conciousness writing with 15 different narrators | |
| The Harling, Burden, and Shimerda families struggle to survive on the Nebraska prairie/title characters family emigrated from Bohemia | |
| Futuristic, Dagny Taggart runs railway, loves Francisco D'Anconia, Hank Reardon, and John Galt/Galt convinces money men/industrialists to let society collapse to defeat socialism | |
| Follows Paul Morel, his relationship with his mother who married below her station, and his search for love with Miriam the farm girl and Clara Dawes/semi-autobiographical | |
| Lucy Honeychurch encounters George Emerson in Italy/can't be together b/c he's from lower class/they elope in the end | |
| Holly Golightly changes from a country girl to a New York socialite, living off rich men who give her money and presents | |
| written in Nadsat and set in a future society with extreme youth violence, Alex is a gang leader who is arrested for murder and undergoes a treatment called the Ludovico Technique | |
| Robert Jordan is an American dynamiter fighting for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War | |
| George and Lennie are migrant farm workers in California/Lennie is mentally disabled and accidentally kills a woman/George shoots Lennie to save him from mob retaliation | |
| Set in future US under Christian theocracy (Republic of Gilead)/Offred is handmaid (concubine) for The Commander/falls for Nick/modeled after Canterbury Tales | |
| About the Earwicker family composed of father HCE, mother ALP, and children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy | |
| Janie Crawford, African American, tells story of her 3 marriages to Logan Killicks (older farmer), Jody Starks (store owner), and Tea Cake (gambler) | |
| Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke entertains his extended family with stories about his adventures with title characters as they perform astronomical and surveying exploits in Brit colonies | |
| Joad family leaves Oklahoma for California b/c of Dust Bowl/Tom Joad and Rose of Sharon Rivers are main characters | |
| Thomas Sutpen buys and builds an estate in Jefferson MS/children are Henry and Judith/Charles Bon wants to marry Judith but discovers he is also Sutpen's son from former marriage | |
| allegory of October Revolution in Russia/the main characters are Mr. Jones, the owner, Napoleon and Snowball, the pigs, and the horse, Boxer | |
| Brit Adela Quested accuses young Indian Muslim doctor Aziz of attempting to assault her in a cave in India/she later admits he didn't/deals with racial prejudice in colonial India | |
| Fiver a rabbit seer has a vision of destruction of Sandleford warren, joined by Hazel, Bigwig and Silver they find a new home at title location/rescue female rabbits from Efrafan | |
| Mersault helps Raymond get revenge on his Arab girlfriend and later kills an Arab man/remorseless he is sentenced to execution | |
| Benny Profane ex-US sailor reconnects with pseudo-bohemian artists called the Whole Sick Crew in NY and Herbert Stencil who is searching for title entity (Veronica Manganese) | |
| Frodo must destroy the One Ring created by Sauron/Sauron is seeking the Ring because if he regains it, he can conquer Middle Earth | |
| | Synopsis | Work |
|---|
| Pioneering work in True Crime genre/details the 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, his wife, and 2 of 4 children | |
| Prequel to Jane Eyre/Story of Antoinette Cosway (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha Mason) before and after her marriage to Mr. Rochester | |
| Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who, after a long string of not catching anything, catches a massive fish and helplessly watches the sharks eat it | |
| Set in the Ramsay's summer home in the Hebrides on the Isle of Skye over a 10 year period (1910-1920), at the end the father takes son to title location in attempt to reconcile | |
| Follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he travels through Dublin/his wife Molly cheats on him/coresponds to Greek epic/Buck Mulligan, Stephan Dedalus, Blazes Boylan | |
| Constance (Connie) is married to Clifford (aristocrat paralytic), has affair with gamekeeper Oliver Mellors/highlights class distinctions/banned in UK until 1960 for sex | |
| Historian Antoine Roquentin settles in Bouville but gets a 'sweetish sickness' relating to issues of existence | |
| Novel appears to be a 999-line poem by John Shade with foreword, commentary, and index by Charles Kinbote | |
| The Southern aristocratic Compson family from Jefferson MS as it declines over a 30 year period | |
| Holden Caulfield is expelled from Pencey Prep school, returns to New York without going home and wanders around the city for a couple days | |
| Based on author's childhood/his father went out of town to see his grandfather but dies in a car wreck on the way home/shows how loss of father affects wife and children | |
| Elaine Risley daughter of traveling entomologist remembers childhood experience being bullied by 3 'friends'/follows her into adulthood as Feminist artist | |
| Based on the travels of author and friends across America (1947-50)/Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty/jazz, poetry, drug use | |
| Chaplian's assistant Billy Pilgrim is captured by the Germans in WWII and imprisoned in Dresden/he survives but is later killed in Chicago by Lazzaro to avenge the death of Weary | |
| Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, and Robert Cohn go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls | |
| Charles Ryder becomes involved with the Roman Catholic Marchmain family through friendship with son, Sebastian/romantic relationship begins and ends with daughter, Julia | |
| Saleem Sinai, born on India's independence day, has telepathic powers & large dripping nose/forms title group/loose allegory for India's before-after independence/magic realism | |
| Captain Yossarian, Major Major, and Milo Mindbender/if you want to fly missions you're crazy and don't have to, but if you don't want to you're sane and have to | |
| American Frederic Henry serves in the ambulance corp of the Italian Army in WWI, falls in love with Catherine Barkley who dies with her child during childbirth | |
| Sethe escapes from slavery in KY to OH but when a posse comes to return her, she kills her daughter/years later a woman presumed to be the dead daughter comes to haunt her | |
| Traces the rich Wilcox's, the half-German Schlegel sisters, and the lower-middle class Basts couple/all tied to a property with namesake title | |
| Winston Smith falls in love with Julia/seeks to rebel against Big Brother and Ingsoc/both are brainwashed again at the end | |
| Fermina Daza falls for Florentino Ariza, but her father ends the relationship/she marries Dr Juvenal Urbino who is trying to end cholera | |
| Jack & Beryl Stapleton, Seldon, Laura Lyons, Dr. Mortimer/Set in Dartmoor in Devonshire/a baronet is found dead & death is attributed to a family curse involving a vicious canine | |
| Professor Humbert Humbert marries a widow b/c he's infatuated with her 12 year old daughter Dolores whom he nicknames with title name/when widow dies they become sexually involved | |
| Set in the Salinas Valley, California in early 1900's follows the Hamilton and Trask families through their difficulties/associations with biblical Cain and Abel | |
| Set in Europe after WWII, centers on design, production and dispatch of German V-2 rockets/Schwarzgerat to be installed on rocket 00000/won 1974 Nat'l Book Award for Fiction | |
| Set in 632 AF (After Ford), John the Savage leaves a reservation to go to futuristic London where people take the drug soma and engage in recreational sex | |
| Namesake town just above Monterey, CA/main character Danny inherits 2 houses and lives it up with his friends (all Mexican-Americans) | |
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