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American Literature — page 19
918 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 19 of 20.
Pigs is Pigs
Ellis Parker Butler
A stubborn express agent and a furious customer lock horns over a simple shipping rate, unintentionally triggering a bureaucratic catastrophe of exponential proportions. This lighthearted tale explores how rigid adherence to rules can spiral into absurdity.
The Lost Wagon
Jim Kjelgaard
HOOK A Missouri farmer leads his family into the vast, untamed West, seeking freedom from debt and the promise of land. They face a solitary, perilous journey toward Oregon as their only path to a better life.
The Younger American Poets
Jessie Belle Rittenhouse
The landscape of early twentieth-century American verse is a vibrant, shifting territory, captured here through the close examination of the prominent voices defining its era.
Complete Project Gutenberg William Dean Howells Works
William Dean Howells
This expansive collection gathers the essential prose, travelogues, and social critiques of a definitive voice in American realism. It serves as a comprehensive gateway to an author who chronicled the quiet, moral complexities of nineteenth-century life.
Blue Bonnet in Boston
Caroline Elliott Hoogs Jacobs
This story follows a spirited, impulsive young woman as she transitions from the wide-open spaces of a Texas ranch to the structured, intellectual environment of a Boston boarding school, where she learns to navigate the delicate boundaries between youthful independence and the requirements of communal life.
Lulu's Library, Volume 3 (of 3)
Louisa May Alcott
A collection of earnest, moral fables, this final volume of a classic series explores the rewards of kindness, the virtue of industry, and the quiet dignity of caring for those in need.
The bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
When the finest bridge in Peru collapses, a scholar seeks to uncover why God chose those five specific victims to perish. This meditation explores whether life’s tragedies are random accidents or part of a divine plan.
Ann Boyd: A Novel
Will N. (Will Nathaniel) Harben
A woman hardened by decades of ostracism and betrayal finds an unlikely path to grace by choosing mercy over the revenge she has spent a lifetime planning.
Notes of a Son and Brother
Henry James
The past is a living room, meticulously furnished by memory, where brothers and kin gather in a light that never quite fades. This meditation on family serves as a luminous bridge between personal history and the American soul.
The Firing Line
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
A young man’s arrival at a wealthy, sun-drenched Florida estate sparks a complex entanglement of love, social artifice, and hidden histories. Beneath the shimmering palms, he finds himself drawn to a woman whose guarded secrets threaten their fragile future.
Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times
Alice Duer Miller
The struggle for the vote is rarely waged with such sharp, witty precision as it is in these verses, which dismantle the arguments of the era with effortless grace.
Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & Barrelhouse
Philip Wylie
A bracing, sardonic tour of the human condition, this narrative navigates the anxieties of the early Atomic Age through the lens of a man confronting his own mortality.
Si Klegg, Book 5: The Deacon's Adventures at Chattanooga in Caring for the Boys
John McElroy
The war is not just a matter of grand maneuvers and distant generals; it is a series of gritty, often absurd encounters defined by hunger, exhaustion, and the stubborn loyalty of men bound together by fire.
Poems of Passion
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
This collection of verse captures the turbulence of the human heart, speaking with a candor that once scandalized polite society. It offers a raw, unvarnished look at the intensity of desire and the inevitable ache of living.
The Man Who Couldn't Sleep
Arthur Stringer
The sleepless protagonist wanders the dark, mysterious streets of New York, uncovering a hidden world of crime, stolen codes, and elaborate deceptions.
Remember the Alamo!
T. R. Fehrenbach
A time traveler arrives in 1836 expecting to witness a heroic stand, only to find himself trapped in a nightmare of alternate history where the Alamo is abandoned without a shot.
Cast Upon the Breakers
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Cast out from his school and stripped of his inheritance, a young man must navigate a world of city streets, dishonest guardians, and rugged frontier landscapes to forge his own destiny.
The Spinners' Book of Fiction
Spinners' Club
A collection of short stories written by California authors, this volume captures a period of literary transition at the dawn of the twentieth century. Through diverse tales ranging from historical drama to psychological realism, it reveals the rugged and romantic landscapes of the American West.
Tales of Trail and Town
Bret Harte
The remnants of the California frontier collide with the rigid expectations of the Victorian world in this collection of stories. These narratives observe the collision between raw, impulsive western life and the stifling codes of civilized society.
The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas
Margaret Hill McCarter
A sprawling testament to the early Kansas frontier, this story traces the lives of settlers who trade their comfort, safety, and youth for the promise of a peaceful life on the open prairie.
Equality
Edward Bellamy
This visionary sequel to a landmark utopian novel explores the mechanics of a transformed society, where the radical notion of economic equality replaces the competitive struggle of the nineteenth century.
How Private George W. Peck Put Down the Rebellion
George W. (George Wilbur) Peck
This account captures the absurd, hungry, and often surreal life of a common soldier during the Civil War. It favors the irreverent spirit of a storyteller over the rigid formality of military history.
John Marr and Other Poems
Herman Melville
This collection captures the restless, meditative spirit of a writer looking backward from the twilight of his life. It gathers verses that find their strength not in polished grace, but in the rugged, haunting echoes of a long career spent confronting the indifference of the sea and the fractured soul of a nation.
Main-Travelled Roads
Hamlin Garland
The main-travelled road is a dusty, wearying path that leads from a dull town to a life of relentless toil. It carries the poor and the broken through the vast, indifferent expanse of the American West.
Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships: Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields
Annie Fields
The vibrant intellectual currents of nineteenth-century Boston come alive through the private journals of a woman who stood at the center of an extraordinary literary circle.
The Marble Faun
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A group of expatriate artists in Rome finds their innocence shattered by a sudden, impulsive act of violence that binds them together in a web of guilt, transformation, and moral reckoning.
Bill Nye and Boomerang
Bill Nye
This collection of sketches and observations offers a dry, irreverent look at the American frontier, framed by a narrator who finds absurdity in everything from malfunctioning stoves to the solemnity of marriage. It is a portrait of a restless mind finding humor in the harsh, unpredictable edges of Wyoming life.
The Copy-Cat, and Other Stories
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
These stories capture the hidden, often stubborn lives of New England villagers, revealing how quiet defiance and secret burdens shape the people behind their respectable lace-curtain facades.
The Columbiad: A Poem
Joel Barlow
A grand, ambitious epic that envisions the dawn of a new world, this poem frames the discovery of the Americas as the catalyst for human progress and the ultimate triumph of liberty over tyranny.
A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches
Sarah Orne Jewett
A woman’s singular devotion to the study of medicine becomes a transformative force, challenging the rigid social hierarchies and gender expectations of a quiet, tradition-bound New England landscape.
Paul the Peddler
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A resourceful street boy struggles to support his widowed mother and crippled brother in 19th-century New York. Through grit and a stroke of luck, he transforms his precarious life into a model of success.
Satanstoe
James Fenimore Cooper
A young colonial landowner navigates romance, wilderness peril, and military conflict in mid-eighteenth-century New York while unknowingly laying the groundwork for future generational disputes over land ownership.
The Crayon Papers
Washington Irving
The traveler’s eye, sharpened by a lifetime of wandering, finds as much wonder in the quiet corners of a Dutch village as in the dramatic fall of a Spanish dynasty. Here, history is not a static record, but a collection of sketches gathered from the road, revealing the restless spirit of humanity.
Quotations from the Project Gutenberg Editions of the Works of Mark Twain
Mark Twain
The man who famously remarked that man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to—remains one of the most enduring voices in American literature. This collection serves as a sprawling, multifaceted map of his career, gathering the essential spirit of his work into a single, accessible volume.
The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales
Frank R. Stockton
A world of dryly logical absurdities unfolds across nine fairy tales, where monstrous griffins seek companionship and stubborn travelers march strictly in straight lines.
King Coal
Upton Sinclair
A privileged young man enters a brutally exploitative coal town under an assumed name, only to have his eyes opened to the dark, hidden machinery of industrial slavery.
The Diamond Lens
Fitz James O'Brien
A monomaniacal scientific obsession drives a young man to commit murder for a flawless diamond, through which he discovers an ethereal, microscopic woman living inside a single drop of water.
Clover
Susan Coolidge
For a sister who never intended to leave her family, a brother's failing lungs make a journey west the only choice—and a turn of fate she never planned for.
She Buildeth Her House
Will Levington Comfort
A young woman navigates the psychological snares of a sinister mesmerist and the volatile pasts of her lovers to forge a spiritual union.
The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary
Anne Warner
A wealthy, iron-willed country aunt threatens to disinherit her wild college nephew, only to be completely won over when his friends lure her into a whirlwind week of New York nightlife.
The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States
Benjamin Griffith Brawley
A rigorous literary study details how African American creators built an enduring cultural heritage across poetry, prose, drama, fine arts, and music.
Turns about Town
Robert Cortes Holliday
An observant flâneur wanders through early twentieth-century cities, capturing the quiet comedy, eccentric personalities, and overlooked rhythms of daily life.
James Fenimore Cooper
Mary Elizabeth Phillips
Before the fame of his frontier adventures and high-seas tales captured the nineteenth century, an impulsive young American sailor transformed his real-world voyages into a vibrant new literary tradition.
Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks: A Picture of New England Home Life
Charles Felton Pidgin
A wealthy young gentleman from Boston arrives in a rural country village, setting off a chain of local gossip, small-town rivalries, and unexpected courtships.
The Vanishing of Betty Varian
Carolyn Wells
An isolated cliffside estate, a father murdered behind locked doors, and a daughter who vanishes without a trace—only to reappear months later in a silent movie reel.
Gladiator
Philip Wylie
A biological experiment grants a man superhuman strength, but his ultimate struggle becomes finding any meaningful purpose in a world of fragile mortals.
Peck's bad boy abroad
George W. (George Wilbur) Peck
A chaotic global tour through the eyes of an incorrigible American prankster and his long-suffering father.
Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man
Marie Conway Oemler
When an injured safe-cracker wakes in a South Carolina parish house to find his leg amputated, an eccentric priest redirects the burglar’s nimble fingers toward collecting butterflies, setting off a quiet, transformative rebirth.