Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is a quintessential American classic that transports readers to the opulent drawing rooms and country estates of New York's upper crust in the 1870s.
Nearly a century after its publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby remains a quintessential classic of American literature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's First and Second Series of essays, originally published in 1841 and 1844, remain towering achievements of American literature and philosophy nearly two centuries later.