Dear Mother and Father, I have great trouble, and some comfort, to acquaint you with. I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. Selden paused in surprise. A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley.

[In your answer, please indicate whether or not you used a search engine.]

There was a question?

It's a puzzle. I've given lots of hints.

Is this about the milliondollar website?

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded - Samuel Richardson

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens

Lady Chatterly's Lover - D.H. Lawrence

O Pioneers! - Willa Cather

White Fang - Jack London

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - Stephen Crane

Close, so close, Taz.

Curses! Back to the drawing board....

Oops!

The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells

All books that have had films made of them?

(probably not, since I haven't actually found one for "Maggie")

No, thy're not selected as members of any particular class, just all fiction. (Pamela clues you into that, but perhaps spuriously suggests all will be novels.)

I mean, except that in each case the first line of the work is given. but you knew that.

*ponders*

Hm. Something about names?

...Somebunny better help me out here!

I'm tempted to just sit back, but I'm not that evil.

There's NO FURTHER PUZZLE. JUST IDENTIFYING THE works the first lines came from.

YOU GOT IT. Taz wins.

ha! Well... I was right on my way to figuring out how each of these stands for somebody's name at Metachat. But, Hay, it doesn't matter, because I'M THE BIG WEINER!!!!!!!!!11

(Well, yes, there is that.)

what, the names part or weiner part? Because if it's the former, well, all I can say is, "don't make me start beatin' on you"!

Why do I have this image of you standing there with a riding crop, taz?

it's true! Fuzzy bunny slippers and riding crop!

(mudpuppie was "White Fang", by the way, which is awesome.)

ortho, I also meant to say that I love the poetic, stream of consciousness quality of those three paragraphs.

Thanks. I was trying for sentences that could semi-plausibly be in sequence, and wouldn't be complete give-aways. (E.g. "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.") Books that began with non-prose lines (poems, the etymology in Moby Dick) also were rejected, as what counted as a first line was ambiguous.

Yes -- that was a great read in itself. I'm reminded of If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (one of my favorite books).

Do that again sometime!

didn't he miss peter rabbit?

Peter Rabbit was a give-away. And taz is a girl, I think.

taz is very much of the female persuasion.