Free summaries
American Literature — page 13
609 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 13 of 13.
Trees, and Other Poems
Joyce Kilmer
A collection of verse rooted in the quiet sanctity of the domestic, the spiritual significance of nature, and the dignity of the common man. These poems bridge the gap between early twentieth-century urban life and a profound, traditional reverence for the divine.
Prejudices, first series
H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken
The critic’s duty, as defined here, is to cut through the veneer of polite American letters and expose the "swinish" and "inconsequential" realities beneath the reputations of its most famous figures.
The Apple of Discord
Earle Ashley Walcott
A young lawyer is thrust into a high-stakes power struggle between warring industrial titans and the volatile, incendiary labor unrest of 1870s San Francisco.
Fernley House
Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
HOOK In the sun-drenched gardens of an old estate, a group of young people learn that kindness, curiosity, and the courage to act are the greatest treasures of all.
Roderick Hudson
Henry James
The life of a gifted artist is a dangerous apprenticeship to his own ego. When a wealthy patron pulls a brilliant, restless sculptor from the stifling atmosphere of a New England town to the artistic crucible of Rome, he inadvertently sets in motion a tragedy of unchecked ambition and the volatile collision between…
The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete
John Greenleaf Whittier
A quiet, lifelong commitment to human equality, spiritual stillness, and political courage shapes a vast body of American writing.
Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings
Joel Chandler Harris
The trickster Brer Rabbit outwits his stronger, hungrier adversaries through sheer cunning, forever escaping the brier-patch and the snare. Within the quiet cabin of an elderly storyteller, ancient animal lore meets the complex social landscape of the post-Reconstruction South.
You can't win
Jack Black
A young man enters the American underworld of the late nineteenth century, learning the trades of burglary, safecropping, and hobo life before discovering that the game is stacked against him.
The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton
A relentless ambition drives a striking Midwestern woman to climb the rigid peaks of high society, discarding husbands and social codes in her unquenchable thirst for material triumph.
Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative
Harry Kemp
A poet’s wild youth, told without apology: the story of an American wanderer who trades steel mills, boxcars, and jail cells for the relentless pursuit of verse.
Tales of a Traveller
Washington Irving
Ghostly portraits wink from dark walls, ruined aristocrats nurse deadly vendetta, and obsessed treasure-seekers dig for pirate gold under the cover of night. Washington Irving’s frame narrative gathers a chorus of restless storytellers to probe the fine line between human imagination and real terror.
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
Margaret Sidney
Hardship and good humor live side by side in the little brown house, where five fatherless siblings and their cheerful mother discover that warmth, resourcefulness, and mutual support can turn the sparsest life into a rich adventure.
The Spy
James Fenimore Cooper
A humble peddler navigates the dangerous, divided neutral ground of Revolutionary Westchester, bearing the bitter burden of universal contempt to serve a secret, sacred patriotic trust.
Dear Enemy
Jean Webster
When an energetic socialite takes over a dreary orphanage, letters to her friends record the humor, heartbreak, and unexpected romance of transforming the institution.
The Lady, or the Tiger?
Frank R. Stockton
In a court where trial by ordeal is elevated to a public spectacle, a young lover's fate rests entirely on a subtle gesture from a jealous princess.
Drum-Taps
Walt Whitman
A city explodes into martial enthusiasm, only to watch its idealistic young men march away into a grinding, bloody war of unimaginable scale.
The Raven, and The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe
A grieving lover, a midnight visitor, and a mathematical dissection of literary terror collide in a single, perfectly calculated masterpiece.
The Song of Hiawatha: An Epic Poem
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A hero rises to unify the forest tribes, charting a path through legendary battles, deep sorrow, and the arrival of a changing world.
The Dreamer: A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe
Mary Newton Stanard
A boy's sensitive heart, kindled by tragedy and high ambition, seeks beauty across a landscape of bitter poverty, unrequited love, and relentless public judgment.
The Shuttle
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A quiet sisterly devotion sets out to undo twelve years of ruin in a magnificent, decaying English house.
The Big Trip Up Yonder
Kurt Vonnegut
When the discovery of anti-gerasone halts human aging, packed families are forced to spend decades jockeying for floor space and the whims of tyrannical, immortal patriarchs.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
A quiet afternoon along the Connecticut shore gives way to a sweeping consideration of mid-nineteenth-century thought, spanning intimate personal memories, classical philosophical debates, scientific evolution, and critical literary reviews.
The letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932
Hart Crane
An ambitious young poet battles financial precarity, commercial drudgery, and domestic discord while fighting to forge a visionary original voice in modern American poetry.
Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million
O. Henry
A million city lives collide, overlap, and trade places in twenty-three short stories where identity is fluid, romance is a gamble, and the metropolis always gets the last word.
The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington
A once-proud family's decline mirrors the changing American landscape in this poignant tale of pride, loss, and transformation.
The Land of Little Rain
Mary Austin
A lyrical exploration of California's arid landscapes, where nature, history, and human resilience intertwine.
From the Earth to the Moon, Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: and a Trip Round It
Jules Verne
A massive cannon built in the Florida dirt fires three men into the sky, sending them on a thrilling, mathematically precise journey to orbit the moon.
Skylark Three
E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith
Driven by runaway power and genocide across deep space, two Earthmen and their wives cross galaxies to stop an alien species that plans the total extermination of all other life in the universe.
Venus in Boston: A Romance of City Life
George Thompson
A innocent orphan girl struggles to maintain her virtue as she is hunted across mid-nineteenth-century Boston by corrupt politicians, cunning swindlers, and violent criminals.
Rural architecture
Lewis F. (Lewis Falley) Allen
A properly designed rural dwelling is neither a grand, empty palace nor a crude shelter, but a thoughtful harmony of proportion, utility, and natural setting. Lewis F. Allen offers a clear, practical vision for creating American farmsteads that balance everyday convenience with quiet, unpretentious beauty.
The Heart Line: A Drama of San Francisco
Gelett Burgess
Beneath the vibrant surface of pre-earthquake San Francisco, a charismatic palmist and a free-spirited bohemian girl navigate a web of spiritualist charlatans, high-society romance, and fatal choices.
The Life of David Belasco
William Winter
A titan of the American stage wages a fierce war for artistic control while engineering breathtaking, larger-than-life theatrical spectacles.
Tom Sawyer, Detective
Mark Twain
A spring-fever trip down the Mississippi entangles Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in a dark web of diamond thefts, mistaken identities, and a small-town murder trial.