Stephen Crane 
The Third Violet 

What a neat novella, exploring the divides between urban and rural, artist and non-artist, cultural elite and scrapers-by. In doing so, it shows interesting alignments between these, as well as the forces that make an individual on one side of a divide simultaneously envy and loathe someone on the other side of it. Crane has an impressive ability to make characters that the reader both hates and wants to defend.