"F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), is a devastating portrait of a generation of wealthy young Americans who struggle to find meaning and happiness in their lives. The sophisticated but emotionally fragile Anthony Patch enjoys an initially idyllic marriage to the beautiful Gloria Gilbert. But their intense romance turns sour as they waste their time and energy in decadent leisure and luxury. Their happiness comes...

Jamie Conway, an aspiring writer, abandons the wheat fields of Kansas for the skyline of Manhattan, and the city's seductive party subculture. Hitting the clubs night after night, Jamie soon spins out of control, and he risks losing everything and everyone he loves.

Days before his 21st birthday, William, a young actor, meets Sara, a seductive singer/songwriter. He falls madly in love with her and goes on a journey of passion, rage, and need. Now he must come to terms with his own past.

In New York City in the 1870s, a rigid social code governs how people talk, walk, meet, part, dine, earn their livings, fall in love, and marry. Not a word of the code is written down anywhere, but these people have been studying it since they were born. In this elegant milieu, marriages, like treaties between nations, exist to provide for the orderly transmission of wealth; scions of old and rich families understand that their personal desires have...

Washington Square (1881), by Henry James, tells the story of Catherine Sloper, the plain, obedient daughter of the widowed, well-to-do Dr. August Sloper of Washington Square. When a handsome, feckless man-about-town proposes to Catherine, her father forbids the marriage because he believes the man to be after Catherine's fortune and future inheritance. The conflict between father, daughter, and suitor provokes consequences in the lives of all three...

Bernard Chanticleer is a very nice young man anxious to step out into the "adult world." His plan is to move out of his parents' Long Island house into an eighth-floor Greenwich Village walkup and try to convince someone to share his new "liberated lifestyle" with him. You're a Big Boy Now was Francis Ford Coppola's UCLA Film School Master's thesis and a hilarious, high-speed debut in film comedy for the future maker of The Godfather and Apocalypse...

A recent college graduate who discovers that his father is cheating on his mother only to become smitten with his father's mistress. He also gets life lessons from his new neighbor.

Calamity Jane: Day and Howard Keel fuss, feud and fall in love as Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok in this entertainment mother lode. At first curvaceous Calamity is too darned busy fighting Indians and cracking a bullwhip to pay mind to such girly what-alls as dresses and perfume. And Wild Bill is too danged busy wooing a dainty chanteuse (Allyn McLerie) to give a hoot about a hotheaded tomboy. But things change in a rootin', tootin' big way when...

Losing Ground: Tells the story of a marriage of two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives. Sara Rogers, a black professor of philosophy, is embarking on an intellectual quest to understand "ecstasy" just as her painter husband Victor sets off on a more earthly exploration of joy. Celebrating a recent museum sale, Victor decides to rent a country house where he can return to more realism after years working as an abstract expressionist....

Most commonly known as the principle screenwriter for director William Desmond Taylor, Julia Crawford Ivers was a filmmaker of diverse talents, working as director, scenarist, production supervisor, and editor at Paramount. This collection includes The Intrigue, about the inventor of a formidable weapon who is being followed by a female spy; The majesty of the law, in which a young man is falsely accused of theft by his father, who ends up being the...