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Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction 10: American Fiction is unavailable, but you can change that!

When Charles William Eliot assembled The Harvard Classics, more commonly known as “The Five-Foot Shelf,” and later the “Shelf of Fiction”, he gathered this epic collection of key works which he thought would best represent “the progress of man… from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century.” In his introduction to The Harvard Classics, Eliot likens the collection to a...

than on a new-born infant’s. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any—the slightest—connexion on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express
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