书名：Four Classic American Novels 美国四大经典小说

作者：Nathaniel Hawthorne; Mark Twain; Stephen Crane; Herman Melville
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2007
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451530554
商品尺寸：10.6 x 3 x 17.1 cm
包装：简装
页数：752 （以实物为准）
Four Classic American Novels《美国四大经典小说》收录了纳撒尼尔·霍桑的《红字》、马克·吐温的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》、斯蒂芬·克莱恩的《红色勇气勋章》（红色英勇勋章）以及赫尔曼·麦尔维尔的《水手比利·巴德》四篇经典文学作品。本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版，内容完整无删减，书本轻巧便携。

Shining examples of American literature at its best, these four novels explore timeless themes adventure, war, sex, and morality through compelling narratives. An adulterous, a runaway boy, a terrified soldier, and a maltreated sailor the heroes of these novels have become a part of popular culture. This indispensable volume includes
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Billy Buddby Herman Melville
With an Introduction by Sandra Newman
Nathaniel Hawthornewas born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1825 he graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, and he returned to Salem determined to become a writer of short stories. For the next twelve years he was plagued with unhappiness and self-doubts as he struggled to master his craft. He finally secured some small measure of success with the publication of Twice-Told Tales (1837).The Scarlet Letter (1850), which brought him immediate recognition, was followed by The House of the Seven Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy; he returned home to Massachusetts in 1860.He died on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire. 

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called the Lincoln of our literature.

Stephen Cranewas born in 1871 in Newark, NJ, the youngest of fourteen children. He wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets while an undergraduate at Syracuse University. In 1895 he achieved acclaim for The Red Badge of Courage, hailed as the epitome of war stories, although he had never seen battle. An active journalist, he reported from Greece and Cuba in addition to being an acclaimed novelist. He died of tuberculosis in Germany in1900.

Herman Melvillewas born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, Melville tried work as a bank clerk, as a ship's cabin-boy, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping outin1841 on a whaler bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on a frigate to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick. Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and was packed away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Sandra Newman is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Country of Ice Cream Star. She has taught writing and literature at Temple University, Chapman University, and the University of Colorado, and she has published fiction and nonfiction in Harper’s, Granta, and London’s Observer, Telegraph, and Mail on Sunday newspapers, among other journals and newspapers.

The Scarlet Letter《红字》

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》
The Red Badge of Courage《红色勇气勋章》（红色英勇勋章）
Billy Budd《水手比利·巴德》

This was also the period when American literature as a distinct entity was born. The writing of previous U.S. authors was really English literature carried on in foreign exile. This could even to some degree be said of Hawthorne and Melville: while their themes and subjects are uniquely American. their style is not markedly different from that of their British contemporaries. But Huckleberry Finn is a novel that could not have come from a British pen, and by the time Stephen Crane traveled to England, no one was surprised to find that this upstart from an upstart culture knew nothing of the classics, and considered his writing to issue more from life experience than from study of his predecessors. The emphasis on originality, rawness, and sheer emotional power in American letters had begun to produce its peculiar masterpieces.