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American Literature — page 14
687 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 14 of 15.
John Barleycorn
Jack London
The struggle for self-possession unfolds against a backdrop of global adventure, as a man traces his lifelong, treacherous intimacy with alcohol. It serves as both a memoir of addiction and a philosophical inquiry into the human condition.
The Poems of Philip Freneau, Poet of the American Revolution. Volume 3 (of 3)
Philip Morin Freneau
A searing, often bitter chronicler of early American political life, this collection captures a poet’s transition from revolutionary firebrand to a cynical observer of a nation struggling to define its own identity.
The Letters of Ambrose Bierce, With a Memoir by George Sterling
Ambrose Bierce
The man behind the curtain of a legend emerges here, revealing a mind as sharp and unforgiving as the prose that defined his reputation. This collection offers an intimate, often biting look into the life of one of America’s most elusive literary figures.
Mark Twain
Archibald Henderson
This biographical study offers a contemplative look at the life and evolving mind of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. It traces his path from a frontier childhood to global renown, arguing that his humor masked a profound, often overlooked, sociological critique of humanity.
Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume II, Part 2: 1886-1900
Albert Bigelow Paine
This biography captures the final, often turbulent, decade of the nineteenth century as experienced by one of literature’s most restless figures, navigating personal catastrophe through the lens of a relentless, searching mind. It is a portrait of a man who, having conquered the world with his pen, finds himself…
Selected Stories of Bret Harte
Bret Harte
The frontier is a place of sudden reversals, where the gambler, the social outcast, and the wanderer find their lives rewritten by the unpredictable tides of the California gold rush.
Europe and elsewhere
Mark Twain
A collection of sharp-eyed observation and biting social commentary, these pieces capture a restless mind navigating the hypocrisies of the turn of the century. It serves as a bridge between the humorist’s wit and the elder statesman’s moral outrage.
Le Corbeau = The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe
A mourning scholar finds his solitude shattered by a spectral bird, whose relentless, single-word prophecy drives him into the depths of inconsolable despair.
Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans
Unknown
This collaborative inquiry captures the restless, critical spirit of early 1920s America, dissecting the perceived failures of a nation obsessed with material gain over intellectual and cultural depth. It remains a foundational document of American self-critique.
The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The wit of a physician meets the soul of a patriot in these pages, offering a portrait of an America finding its voice through humor, history, and the steady pulse of a shared national life.
Joan Thursday: A Novel
Louis Joseph Vance
A beautiful, ambitious young woman navigates the ruthless theater world of early 20th-century New York, discovering that her climb to stardom requires the cold sacrifice of her own heart.
Poems of James Russell Lowell: With biographical sketch by Nathan Haskell Dole
James Russell Lowell
The verses collected here offer a window into a nineteenth-century mind grappling with the demands of love, the weight of history, and the moral urgency of a nation in flux. They capture the transition from romantic idealism to the sharp, satirical edge of political engagement.
A Boy's Will
Robert Frost
A young poet’s inaugural collection, this work charts the transition from the solitary, brooding impulses of youth to a grounded, mature engagement with the world of work, love, and nature. It captures the quiet intensity of finding one's place in a landscape that is both indifferent and deeply resonant.
Prince or Chauffeur? A Story of Newport
Lawrence Perry
An American naval officer goes undercover as a chauffeur to stop a foreign prince from smuggling military secrets out of a Newport estate.
What Katy Did
Susan Coolidge
The story of a high-spirited girl who learns the weight of her own impulses, this chronicle captures the transition from a turbulent childhood to a grounded, purposeful maturity. It remains a poignant study of empathy, resilience, and the quiet labor of self-improvement.
Rolling Stones
O. Henry
A collection of stories and sketches that captures the restless spirit of a life lived on the move, these pieces offer a sharp, humorous, and sometimes melancholic window into the American frontier and beyond.
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Third Series
Emily Dickinson
HOOK This collection gathers the private, searching verses of a singular mind, exploring the heavy borders between the daily world and the infinite.
Three generations
Maud Howe Elliott
This memoir serves as a sprawling, intimate tapestry of late nineteenth-century cultural life, weaving together the personal growth of the author with the lives of the prominent figures who populated her world.
The Marble Faun
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The ancient shadows of Rome provide the backdrop for an inquiry into the nature of innocence and the heavy, irreversible transformation that follows a single act of violence.
Time Enough at Last
Lyn Venable
HOOK After a nuclear apocalypse leaves him the last survivor in a ruined city, a bookish man finally finds the solitude he has always craved—only to have his own fragility betray him at the moment of triumph.
Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O
Unknown
These collected addresses represent the formal, oratorical culture of the turn of the twentieth century, capturing the wit, gravity, and civic idealism of an era that treated public speaking as a high art.
Ragged Dick, Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A street-smart bootblack navigates the bustling, opportunistic landscape of mid-nineteenth-century New York, proving that a little ambition and an honest heart can transform a vagrant into a gentleman.
The Great Stone Face, and Other Tales of the White Mountains
Nathaniel Hawthorne
In these haunting tales of the White Mountains, individuals search for truth, greatness, and treasure against the backdrop of an unforgiving, majestic wilderness that reveals the folly of human ambition.
Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife
Marietta Holley
A sharp-witted American farm wife finds that traveling the globe provides as much opportunity for social commentary as it does for sight-seeing. She navigates foreign landscapes while measuring the world against her own unyielding common sense.
Renascence, and Other Poems
Edna St. Vincent Millay
This collection of poetry captures the sudden, sharp ache of existence—the dizzying realization of infinity and the quiet, heavy persistence of grief. It is a portrait of a heart trying to reconcile the vastness of the universe with the small, singular loss of a loved one.
His Family
Ernest Poole
HOOK A man grapples with the fading remnants of his old world as his daughters forge their own independent, modern paths in a rapidly changing, industrial New York.
The Hairy Ape
Eugene O'Neill
A brutal, existential collision between the iron-willed laborer and a world that sees him only as a beast. This is a journey into the dark heart of industrial isolation.
The Story of Mary MacLane
Mary MacLane
This is the raw, unvarnished diary of a nineteen-year-old girl in Butte, Montana, who declares herself a misunderstood genius and a companion to the Devil. It is a startling, honest, and abrasive exploration of profound adolescent alienation.
Little Visits with Great Americans, Vol. 2 (of 2): Or Success, Ideals and How to Attain Them
Unknown
This collection serves as a Victorian-era manual on the nature of ambition, framing the lives of prominent individuals as blueprints for personal and professional achievement. It documents the transition from early struggle to public influence through firsthand accounts and biographical sketches.
A History of American Literature
Percy Holmes Boynton
Tracing the development of American thought through its most significant voices, this survey maps the evolution of a national identity from the rigid sermons of the Puritans to the modern experiments of the twentieth century.
Shandygaff: A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters, interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to the Reader
Christopher Morley
The literary life is a grand, rambling walk through the city streets and the pages of favorite books. This collection celebrates the joy of reading, the quirks of writers, and the simple pleasures of an observant mind.
The Leavenworth Case
Anna Katharine Green
A wealthy merchant is found murdered in his library, drawing a young lawyer into a complex web of family secrets, hidden wills, and a race to save the innocent from the gallows.
Poems
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A soul trapped within narrow earthly boundaries seeks release through death, only to discover that the overwhelming beauty of the living world is the one thing it cannot bear to leave behind.
The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 3, October, 1851
Various
This collection serves as a vibrant, panoramic snapshot of mid-nineteenth-century intellectual life, capturing the era’s fascination with global travel, political upheaval, and the burgeoning arts.
The Man Without a Country, and Other Tales
Edward Everett Hale
A man’s rash curse to never hear his country’s name again becomes a lifetime of hollow, salt-sprayed exile. This collection gathers stories of ordinary men caught in the currents of history, duty, and impossible identity.
Parodies of the works of English & American authors, vol. VI
Unknown
A literary scavenger hunt through nineteenth-century verse and prose, this collection captures high Victorian culture at its most irreverent, laying bare the absurdities of popular icons and public life.
The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Frank Preston Stearns
This biographical study offers a measured, analytical assessment of a titan of American letters, grounding his complex interior life in the practical realities of his era. It seeks to reclaim the man from the myths of his own seclusion.
The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume 2: Jewish poems: Translations
Emma Lazarus
HOOK This collection captures a pivotal moment of cultural awakening, where one poet finds her voice in the history, suffering, and enduring spirit of her ancestors.
In His Steps
Charles M. Sheldon
A shabby, jobless stranger collapses in a respectable parish church after asking a minister what it truly means to follow Christ. His sudden death triggers a radical movement: a congregation promises to ask, before every action, "What would Jesus do?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
A young scholar sets out to prove that American life can nourish a magnificent national literature, using verse and gentle scholarship to build a quiet cultural revolution.
Emerson and Other Essays
John Jay Chapman
A sharp, unsparing intelligence interrogates the giants of nineteenth-century literature, dismantling institutional idolatry to rediscover the vital, erratic sparks of personal freedom and genuine artistic power.
Poems by Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
A bold voice rises from the American landscape, offering a wide, radical vision of human equality, physical beauty, and democratic solidarity.
Miscellanies
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the soul sheds its reliance on tradition, it awakens to a direct, original relationship with the universe, transforming every ordinary fact of daily existence into a doorway to divine truth.
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
Herman Melville
Gathering the dark forebodings of a drifting nation, this poetic chronicle traces the American Civil War from its premonitory shadows to its bloody conflicts and fragile, uncertain peace.
The Life of James McNeill Whistler
Elizabeth Robins Pennell
A life devoted to uncompromising art meets a world of resistant critics, shifting fortunes, and fierce personal battle.
The Scarecrow of Oz
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A plunge into an ocean whirlpool sweeps a young girl and an old sailor into a secret, subterranean world of strange beasts and tyrannical kings.
The World's Best Poetry, Volume 04: The Higher Life
Unknown
A weary heart finds quiet strength in spiritual verse that reaches across centuries to comfort, challenge, and elevate the soul.
Jack and Jill
Louisa May Alcott
Two young neighbors in a New England village suffer a disastrous sledding accident on a dangerous hill, turning a bright winter afternoon into months of painful confinement, slow recovery, and quiet moral growth.