Books about scoundrels and troublemakers

A Confederacy of Dunces

By John Kennedy Toole

Set in New Orleans, the protagonist is nearly arrested for being a suspicious character and encounters many unfortunate events.

One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life. As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was "committed to the deep expression of [nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility, toward man."

The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

A mysterious American millionaire tries to recapture the sweetheart of his youth, which results in tragedy.

Books about scoundrels and troublemakers

A Confederacy of Dunces

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The Return of the Native

The Great Gatsby