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Curated playlist

American novels adapted into films

  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn9 min"You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter." That is how Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins. Mark Twain settled on that line only after writing it three…
  • The Sun Also Rises13 minThe Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway's first novel, opens on a wound that cannot be spoken of plainly. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, is in love with a woman named Brett Ashley. They both know they have no chance at a stable…
  • Mazes and Monsters (novel)4 minMazes and Monsters, a 1981 novel by Rona Jaffe, warns readers about the imagined dangers of the then-new hobby of fantasy role-playing games. In 1985, psychiatrist Thomas Radecki of the National Coalition on Television Violence pointed to…
  • The Great Gatsby12 minThe Great Gatsby arrived in bookshops on the 10th of April 1925 carrying a dust jacket unlike anything else in American publishing. A disembodied flapper's face, painted by a little-known Barcelonan artist named Francis Cugat, stared out…
  • Moby-Dick14 minMoby-Dick; or, The Whale begins with three words that have never lost their power: "Call me Ishmael." Herman Melville wrote those words as the opening of an 1851 novel about a sailor, a ship, and a white whale - and in doing so produced…
  • Carrie (novel)8 minCarrie, Stephen King's debut novel, opened with a scene its author did not know how to write. King was living in a trailer in Hermon, Maine, teaching English at Hampden Academy. A friend had suggested he try writing a story with a female…
  • Gone with the Wind (novel)9 minGone with the Wind arrived in bookstores in June 1936 at the virtually unprecedented price of three dollars, and within months it had sold roughly a million copies to a country still climbing out of the Great Depression. Margaret Mitchell,…
  • The Red Badge of Courage9 minThe Red Badge of Courage dropped onto American bookshelves on the 3rd of October 1895, and within a year it had already gone through ten editions. Its author, Stephen Crane, was twenty-four years old. He had never seen a battlefield. What…
  • Cthulhu Mythos8 minThe Cthulhu Mythos begins with a single sentence. In his short story "The Call of Cthulhu", H. P. Lovecraft wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." That…
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?10 minDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? opens in a San Francisco where the sky itself has turned against its inhabitants. A nuclear war has left Earth's atmosphere radioactive, most animal species are either extinct or vanishing, and the…
  • The Mist (novella)See structured sections and FAQ below.

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