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The Citadel

A.J. Cronin · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy · 76 pages

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

Finding PurposeFall From GraceClassismCharacter-Driven
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Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy · 440 pages

Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv

ClassismWorking-Class ProtagonistFall From GraceCharacter-Driven
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An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser · 831 pages

The classic depiction of the harsh realities of American life, the dark side of the American Dream, and one man's doomed pursuit of love and success..."Mr. Dreiser is not imitative and belongs to no school. He is at heart a mysticist and a fatalist, though using the realistic method. He is, on the evidence of this novel alone, a power." --The New York Times Book Review

Fall From GraceClassismWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

Finding PurposeWorking-Class ProtagonistClassismCharacter-Driven
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Martin Eden

Jack London · 411 pages

Jack London's Martin Eden was first published in 1909 and is the story of a young writer's quest for celebrity and love. Much loved by writers who identify with Martin's belief that when he posted a manuscript, 'there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps,' that automatically ret

Fall From GraceClassismWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates · 346 pages

Fall From GraceFinding PurposeCharacter-DrivenClassics
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The Second Life of Mirielle West

Amanda Skenandore · 384 pages

Fall From GraceMedicineClassismCharacter-Driven
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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 182 pages

Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to

Fall From GraceClassismCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · 742 pages

ClassismFall From GraceFinding PurposeWorking-Class Protagonist
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The Cider House Rules

John Irving · 573 pages

Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--obstetrician and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds. It is also the story of his favorite orphan, Homer, who is never adopted.

MedicineFinding PurposeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller · 139 pages

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupporta

Fall From GraceFinding PurposeWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Native Son

Richard Wright · 398 pages

Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: [Early Works](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506449W)

Fall From GraceClassismWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Bel-Ami

Guy de Maupassant · 303 pages

.I Quand la caissiere lui eut rendu la monnaie de sa piece de cent sous, Georges Duroy sortit du restaurant. Comme il portait beau, par nature et par pose d'ancien sous-officier, il cambra sa taille, frisa sa moustache d'un geste militaire et familier, et jeta sur les dineurs attardes un regard rapide et circulaire, un de ces regards de joli garcon qui s'etendent comme des coups d'epervier. Les fe

Finding PurposeClassismCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Fall From GraceClassismCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham · 582 pages

Of Human Bondage is a moving exploration of loneliness, obsessive love, and a young man's search for meaning and direction in life. Written in the third person, it tells the story of Philip Carey, a self-conscious orphan with a club-foot who learns medicine. Not only is this a significant work in the Bildungsroman tradition, but its largely autobiographical basis gives it a special interest in vie

Finding PurposeClassismCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought

Fall From GraceWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenClassics
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The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Fall From GraceClassismWorking-Class ProtagonistClassics
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The Red and the Black

Stendhal · 472 pages

Fall From GraceClassismLiterary FictionClassics
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A Walk on the Wild Side

Nelson Algren · 346 pages

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern

Working-Class ProtagonistClassismCharacter-DrivenClassics
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How Green Was My Valley

Richard Llewellyn · 495 pages

**This is a story set in a south Wales coal mining valley and tells of a family striving to improve their lives through hard work, education and their non-conformist faith.** The main character is the youngest son, Huw Morgan and his life's journey through the difficulties associated with the mining industry and the awful risks involved in deep coal mining in the **mid nineteenth century**. The

WalesWorking-Class ProtagonistClassicsLiterary Fiction
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The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow · 536 pages

Augie's nonconformity leads him into an eventful, humorous, and sometimes earthy way of life.

Finding PurposeWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenClassics
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Ask the Dust

John Fante · 165 pages

Finding PurposeWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Gaban

Munshi Premchand, muNshii premcNd · 272 pages

Fall From GraceClassismLiterary FictionClassics
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Falling Leaves [Yaprak Dokumu]

Resat Nuri Guntekin · 152 pages

Fall From GraceClassismCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction

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