Hardcover Fiction

by Taylor Caldwell · Scribner

by Mary Jane Ward · Random House

A 75th anniversary edition of the landmark novel that forever changed the way we think about mental illness and its treatment After experiencing a nervous breakdown in 1940, novelist Mary Jane Ward was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and committed to Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York. From that horrific experience came this landmark novel. The Snake Pit tells the story of Virginia Cunningham, a young white middle-class woman who finds herself in a psychiatric hospital with no memory of how she got there. It opens with Virginia in a highly confused state of mind, the reader initially as challenged as Virginia to make sense of her surroundings. Virginia's treatments seem a series of cruel punishments inflicted on her for crimes she cannot name, while the penalty for failing to follow the hospital's many seemingly arbitrary rules is transfer to another, even worse ward. The novel was memorably adapted for the screen two years after it was published, with Olivia de Havilland playing the role of Virginia, its powerful and ambivalent conclusion softened for Hollywood. Together, the book and film had an outsized influence on popular perceptions of mental illness, and The Snake Pit is often credited with setting in motion important investigative journalism and the introduction of legislation at the state level to reform the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Too long out of print, Ward's unforgettable novel belongs in the company of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden--three books it influenced or inspired.

by W.Somerset Maugham · Heinemann

Maugham found a parallel to the turmoil of our own times in the duplicity, intrigue and sensuality of the Italian Renaissance. Then and Now enters the world of Machiavelli, and covers three important months in the career of that crafty politician, worldly seducer and high priest of schemers.

by Erich Maria Remarque · Appleton-Century

by Frederic Wakeman · Rinehart. & Company

by Rosamond Marshall · Prentice Hall

by Garland Roark · Little Brown and Company

by Gladys Schmitt · Doubleday

by James M. Cain · Knopf

Early in the Civil War, the Confederacy sends Roger Duval to Sacramento, to keep an eye on the situation in California in hopes of turning the Western territory towards the Southern cause. It's a plush assignment, well out of the line of fire, but Duval hasn't been there long before he comes into mortal danger. On a swim in the Sacramento River, he gets knocked on the head by a paddleboat, and is drowning in the muck when Morina, a quick-witted woman of the night, tosses him a rope. Suffocated by instant, irresistible love, Roger follows Morina to her home turf: Virginia City, Nevada. For the miners, gamblers, and gunfighters who populate this hardscrabble town, her price is negotiable. But for a man in love, she charges a thousand dollars. Roger will sacrifice body, mind, and soul to get that money -- but will his sacrifice be enough to make her love him?

by Daphne du Maurier · Doubleday

by Evelyn Waugh · Little, Brown

by Upton Sinclair · Viking Press

by Frank Yerby · Dial Press

by Edmund Wilson · Doubleday

by R.G. Waldeck · Doubleday

by Marian Castle · Morrow