A student is denied her diploma because of her unsightly appearance due to her grueling life going to school and supporting herself in grinding poverty, making her rebel against the divisions of class.
A woman being crushed by motherhood is offered a stay at a free vacation house but finds the strict humiliating living conditions worse than her life in poverty.
A mother dances on the edge of self-destruction when she paints her kitchen white for her son returning home from the military but has her rent raised by her cruel landlord as a response.
Beautiful Joe was a dog from the town of Meaford, Ontario, whose story inspired the bestselling 1893 novel Beautiful Joe, which contributed to worldwide awareness of animal cruelty.
This novel explores slavery's destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulattoes or mixed-race people, and the "e;degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America.
'Cousin Phillis' is a haunting story about Paul Manning, a youth of nineteen who moves to the country and befriends his mother's family and his cousin Phillis Holman, who is confused by her own placement at the edge of adolescence.
Much of the novel is written from the view-point of his canine character, enabling London to explore how animals view their world and how they view humans.
Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town.
The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England.
';The Lady of the Camellias' is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, subsequently adapted for the stage (becoming known as ';Camille' in the English-speaking world), and then becoming the opera ';La Traviata.
