Books like Set This House on Fire by William Styron

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece examines the glittering yet hollow glamour of the Roaring Twenties as the enigmatic Jay Gatsby pursues love, wealth, and identity across the social divide.

A nonfiction novel chronicling the adventures of a group of friends on their cross-country journey of discovery, featuring characters like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as real-life friends Neal Casady.

A Little Life follows four college friends in New York as they confront trauma, love and the enduring scars of their pasts, weaving themes of friendship, family, and identity into a profound coming‑of‑age story.

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

Eighteen‑year‑old Susanna Kaysen is admitted to McLean Hospital in 1967, where she documents life in the psychiatric ward, exploring mental illness, recovery, and the cultural landscape of the late 1960s.

xxxv, 338 pages ; 21 cm

A biography of mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., detailing his brilliance, his 31‑year battle with schizophrenia, and his eventual remission.

William Styron’s memoir recounts his 1985 struggle with severe depression, hospitalization, and recovery, offering an honest portrait of living with mental illness.

The Moon and Sixpence follows middle‑aged stockbroker Charles Strickland as he abandons his comfortable life to pursue painting, leading to a turbulent career in Paris and Tahiti, mirroring the real-life journey of Paul Gauguin.

An experimental novel by William Faulkner that tells the same events from four distinct perspectives, each with a unique narrative style, charting the decline of a once‑wealthy Southern family.

Set in Rome, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun follows American travelers as they confront a murder rooted in love, examining transgression, guilt, and the impact of European culture on American morality.

Andrew Solomon’s acclaimed nonfiction journey into depression blends personal narrative, case studies, and scientific inquiry to illuminate the illness’s complexities, treatments, and cultural impact worldwide.

A mystery set in California that follows the interwoven lives of artists confronted with a missing persons case and the psychological separation of their identities.

A novel about a streetcar tycoon turned financier in turn-of-the-century America, based on the true story of Charles Yerkes.

Henry James’s novel *The American* reprinted with a textual history, background notes, source materials, and critical essays.

A historical fiction that examines the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia, exploring its causes, the rebellion’s impact on plantation society, and Turner’s eventual capture, trial, and execution.

The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

A young woman's quest for love and reconciliation after her husband's death in a French plantation setting in the 1870s.

A brilliant midwestern professor, Abe Ravelstein, embraces a sudden rise to wealth after publishing a philosophical book, and later confronts AIDS while reflecting on friendship, mortality, and intellectual life with his close friend Chick.