Books like The Crucible
A 1953 play about the 1692 Salem witch trials, written in answer to the anti-Communist hearings of its day, in which a town lets a vengeful girl's accusations run its court.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Crucible
The Great Galeoto
A play: when a wealthy Madrid gentleman takes his late friend's son into his home, the town's idle talk about the young man and his patron's wife begins to make the scandal it imagines.
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
Tituba, born on Barbados to an enslaved mother, learns healing from an old woman of the island and is sold to a Puritan minister in Massachusetts, where she is among the first accused in the Salem trials.
The Mercies
In 1617, after a storm drowns nearly every man of a fishing village on the Norwegian island of Vardø, the women learn to fend for themselves, until a witch-hunter arrives with his young Scottish wife.
The House of the Seven Gables
A curse laid during the Salem witch trials hangs over the Pyncheon family's gloomy house, where an impoverished old maid opens a cent shop and waits for her brother to come home from prison.
The Familiars
In 1612 Lancashire, seventeen-year-old Fleetwood Shuttleworth, pregnant again after miscarriages that nearly killed her, hires a midwife named Alice Gray just as the Pendle witch accusations begin.
Desire Under the Elms
A play: on a stony New England farm in 1850, Ephraim Cabot, seventy-five, brings home a young third wife, Abbie, to the fury of his son Eben, who believes the farm is his.
Mourning Becomes Electra
A play in three parts setting the Oresteia in New England just after the Civil War: General Ezra Mannon comes home to a wife who hates him and a daughter who adores him.
The Scarlet Letter
A woman in Puritan Massachusetts is condemned to wear a scarlet letter for adultery, and the punishment exposes the hypocrisy of the community that imposed it.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
In 1687 Kit Tyler leaves Barbados for her aunt's strict Puritan household in Connecticut, and her friendship with an old Quaker woman the town calls a witch puts her in danger.
Othello
A Moorish general in the service of Venice marries a senator's daughter and is talked, by a man who tells him he is his friend, into murdering her on their wedding sheets.
Satan in Goray
In the town of Goray, rebuilt after the massacres of 1648, the news that the messiah Sabbatai Zevi has come drives the community into a frenzy.
The Ox-Bow Incident
A posse rides out to lynch three men suspected of cattle rustling and murder, forcing a reckoning with frontier justice.