Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie, an independent-minded young black woman, and her life with the free-spirited Tea Cake. Hurston paints a vivid portrait of the small African American towns of the deep South.

The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hester Prynne lives in a repressive, Puritan town that has condemned her as an adulteress. Hawthorne dissects the hypocrisy behind the Puritan mindset and attempts to put forth an explanation for the New England way of thinking prevalent in the nineteenth century.

Pembroke (1894), by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. In Pembroke, Freeman tells a story based on an incident that happened in her mother's family. The fathers of two people about to marry get into an argument. The young man is ordered from his fiancee's house, and her...