Ocean State Libraries

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854—1900) was an Irish poet and playwright who became one of the most popular in London during the 1880s and 1890s. Well-known for his sharp wit and extravagant attire, Wilde was a proponent of aestheticism and wrote in a variety of forms including poetry, fiction, and drama. He was famously imprisoned for homosexual acts from 1895 to 1897 and died at the age of 46, just three years after his release. Although...

Best known for her novel The awakening, Kate Chopin (1851-1904) established her literary reputation with short stories about life in rural Louisiana during the late nineteenth century. After her 1870 marriage to Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader and commission merchant, she lived in and around New Orleans for more than a decade until her husband's death in 1882. During these years, Chopin became acquainted with Creoles, Cajuns, and newly freed...

Set in fifteenth century Switzerland this play is based on a legend characteristic of the Austrian domination period. Schiller exhibits enthusiasm for freedom and natural life in this historic play. The story unfolds on Lake Lucerne with the fateful enmity of the tyrant Gessler, Governor of the Swiss cantons, and William Tell, an obscure huntsman, trying to row to safety a peasant who is pursued by the Governor's horsemen.

On a drunken impulse, Henchard sells his wife and daughter at a country fair. Years later, when he has become a respected and prosperous man, his wife and daughter seek him out in Casterbridge.

Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) is a book by American investigative journalist Nellie Bly. For her first assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's famed New York World newspaper, Bly went undercover as a patient at a notorious insane asylum on Blackwell's Island. Spending ten days there, she recorded the abuses and neglect she witnessed, turning her research into a sensational two-part story for the New York World later published as Ten Days in a Mad-House. Checking...