A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television.

Scientists pursuing the mysteries of the deep are threatened by a beautiful girl who seems to have returned from the dead and by a prehistoric sea creature that dwells in the deadly Bermuda Triangle.

In New York, armed men hijack a subway car and demand a ransom for the passengers. Even if it's paid, how could they get away?

A young, white school teacher is assigned to Yamacraw Island, an isolated fishing community off the coast of South Carolina, populated mostly by poor black families. He finds that the basically illiterate, neglected children there know so little of the world outside their island.

Rural runaway finds himself in Manhattan.

Set in the early 1900s in the fictional Catfish Row section of Charleston, South Carolina, which serves as home to a black fishing community, the story focuses on the titular characters, crippled beggar Porgy, who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, and the drug-addicted Bess, who lives with stevedore Crown, the local bully.

In 1859, idealist John Wickliff Shawnessey, a resident of Raintree County, Indiana, is distracted from his high school sweetheart Nell Gaither by Susanna Drake, a rich New Orleans girl. This love triangle is further complicated by the American Civil War, and dark family history.

An orphaned teen gets involved with some chain-gang convicts.

The story of president Andrew Jackson from his early years, through his meeting with and subsequent marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards. The plot concentrates on the later scandal concerning the legality of their marriage and how they overcame the difficulties.