It’s often said that America’s strength lies in its middle class: ordinary, hard-working citizens who raise families, pay taxes, and build churches. In his 1920 novel Main Street, Sinclair Lewis explores these stalwarts through the eyes of a young woman who wants more from life than mediocrity.

Carol Milford, a college graduate with lofty ambitions, marries Dr. Will Kennicott, who takes her to his home in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. There she finds her new neighbors small-minded, coarse,...

No matter what you think about communism, this is a heartbreaking book. Historian Anne Sebba, in her masterful account of the Rosenberg case, uses documents and interviews to portray a woman whose goal was to be a good person, a good wife, and a good mother. Ethel Rosenberg’s execution for treason in 1953 lingers in the public conscience because a sense of injustice still hangs over an America that is supposed to believe in justice.

Ethel grew up in an impoverished New York City neighborhood...

In the Old Testament, God repeatedly warns that the sins of the fathers will fall upon their children, “even to the third and fourth generation.” Ann Patchett explores this notion in Commonwealth. When an uninvited party guest makes a pass at the host’s wife, two families are ripped asunder, leaving the children to bear the consequences.

Commonwealth is a brilliant novel focusing largely upon six children forced to patch together a new family from the shreds of two tattered ones. I was...