classic

Tom Sawyer - a clever, talkative, frequently dishonest small-town Missouri boy living with his Aunt Polly and his brother Sid in the fictional St. Petersburg, modeled on Mark Twain's own boyhood Hannibal - whitewashes a fence by selling the right to whitewash it, falls for the new judge's daughter Becky Thatcher, witnesses the murder of Dr. Robinson by Injun Joe one midnight in the graveyard with his friend Huckleberry Finn, swears a blood oath of silence and breaks it on the witness stand at the wrong man's trial, runs away with Huck and Joe Harper to Jackson's Island and returns in time to attend his own funeral, gets lost with Becky in McDougal's Cave on a school picnic, and ends the novel splitting twelve thousand dollars in buried gold with Huck. Mark Twain's 1876 boyhood novel, set on the 1830s-1840s Mississippi, and read for a century and a half as the canonical version of American childhood - alongside racial content that still requires the reader to do the work.

Chariton of Aphrodisias's mid-first-century AD Greek romance - the oldest surviving complete prose novel - sends the supernaturally beautiful Callirhoe and her Syracusan husband Chaereas through entombment, pirates, slavery in Miletus, an adultery trial in Babylon before the Persian king Artaxerxes, an Egyptian rebellion, and a naval battle on their two-thousand-year-old way back to each other.

S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel - written while she was a junior in high school - opens on fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis getting jumped on his way home from a movie in Tulsa, and walks the next several days through a fountain killing, a hideout in an abandoned country church, a fire that saves schoolchildren, a rumble between greasers and Socs, a Robert Frost poem, and one of the more devastating closing arcs in YA literature.

Jane Austen's 1813 masterpiece follows Elizabeth Bennet through misjudgment and revelation - a Hunsford proposal that goes horribly, a letter that rearranges everything, a visit to Pemberley that changes what she thought she knew - in the great Regency comedy of manners about what we get wrong about other people and ourselves.