Free summaries
American Literature — page 21
1,151 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 21 of 24.
The haunter of the dark
H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
A haunted church, a forbidden relic, and the creeping dread of an ancient cosmic entity converge in this tale of intellectual curiosity turned fatal. It is a chilling exploration of what happens when a mind reaches too far into the shadows of the unknown.
Bunner Sisters
Edith Wharton
In the quiet, dusty corners of old New York, two sisters discover that the fragile architecture of a lifelong bond can shatter under the weight of a single, ill-fated romance. This poignant exploration of devotion and isolation tracks the slow unraveling of two lives once defined by their shared solitude.
Flame and Shadow
Sara Teasdale
The lyrics gathered here offer a luminous, unflinching map of a woman’s interior life, tracing the beauty of the natural world against the encroaching shadows of mortality and loss. They capture the brief, shimmering intensity of human experience with a grace that feels both timeless and deeply vulnerable.
The Dwelling Place of Light
Winston Churchill
A young woman struggles to define herself against the crushing weight of an industrial city, finding only chaos in the promises of both her employer and the radical politics of a labor strike.
The Ways of Men
Eliot Gregory
This collection of essays offers a sharp-eyed, worldly critique of the manners, social aspirations, and national habits of Americans at the turn of the 20th century. It captures a restless, evolving society through the lens of a sophisticated observer.
The Best Policy
Elliott Flower
A young man’s marriage is the catalyst for his first life insurance policy, leading to a series of vignettes exploring the moral, financial, and personal consequences of the trade.
The Grandissimes
George Washington Cable
The volatile landscape of early nineteenth-century New Orleans serves as a crucible for personal honor and social reform in this panoramic study of a divided culture.
Of one blood
Pauline E. (Pauline Elizabeth) Hopkins
A brilliant young medical student discovers his true heritage in the ruins of ancient Ethiopia. This sweeping narrative weaves together psychological mystery, romance, and a profound re-examination of history.
The Preacher of Cedar Mountain: A Tale of the Open Country
Ernest Thompson Seton
The story of a man whose wild, untamed spirit finds a difficult, meaningful tether in the vastness of the American West. It is a portrait of a soul caught between raw instinct and the call of duty.
The Quickening
Francis Lynde
The industrial evolution of the American South serves as the crucible for one man’s spiritual and moral transformation. This novel chronicles a young man’s painful struggle to reconcile his traditional upbringing with the cold, modern machinations of corporate ambition.
Those Extraordinary Twins
Mark Twain
A strange, unruly experiment in fiction, this work documents the author’s attempt to untangle two conflicting stories that collided in his imagination: a farce about conjoined twins and a dark tragedy concerning switched identities.
English Hours
Henry James
This collection of travel essays captures a vanishing England through the observant, wandering eye of a master of prose. It is a meditation on the beauty of the old world seen by a visitor who is perpetually caught between the role of a detached observer and a romantic pilgrim.
Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time
Fanny Fern
HOOK A woman’s descent into poverty and her defiant rise as a writer, this story strips away the veneer of domestic stability to expose the cold, transactional reality of a society that abandons its most vulnerable.
The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
Bliss Perry
This chronicle traces the evolution of the American imagination from colonial settlement to the emergence of a modern, unified nation. It maps the shifting identity of a people through the literature that defined them.
The Job: An American Novel
Sinclair Lewis
Una Golden is a young woman who dreams of life beyond her stifling, small-town upbringing. Her journey from Panama, Pennsylvania, to the heart of the New York business world marks a struggle to balance professional ambition with the persistent, often conflicting, demands of the heart.
A Tramp Abroad
Mark Twain
Two travelers navigate the complexities of European tourism, finding that the grandeur of the Alps is frequently overshadowed by their own stubborn incompetence and circular arguments.
Black Beetles in Amber
Ambrose Bierce
This collection of biting, rhythmic verse skewers the pretensions and moral failings of late 19th-century public life. It is a razor-sharp exercise in social dissection, where local politicians, opportunistic poets, and corrupt businessmen are pinned like insects for posterity’s scrutiny.
Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion
Mark Twain
A weary traveler trades the grind of business for the idle freedom of the high seas, setting out on a voyage that proves as unpredictable as the tides themselves.
Tobias o' the Light: A Story of Cape Cod
James A. Cooper
A wily lighthouse keeper intervenes in the lives of his neighbors, orchestrating a series of clever deceptions to mend two fractured romances on the coast of Cape Cod.
V. V.'s Eyes
Henry Sydnor Harrison
A proud, fashionable young woman hides her role in a scandal, only to have her quiet world upended by a idealistic slum doctor whose uncompromising moral vision slowly forces her to confront her own vanity and shallow conscience.
Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel: and Selections from his Writings
F. G. (Frank Gibbs) Allen
A portrait of devotion and intellectual rigor, this volume traces a Kentucky minister’s passage from an unlettered youth to a powerhouse of rural American evangelism.
Round the Corner in Gay Street
Grace S. (Grace Smith) Richmond
A hard-working family moves in near a wealthy, isolated household, sparking an enduring cross-street friendship that transforms both lives.
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 01
Ambrose Bierce
A world without stability yields only mockery, violence, and the cold quiet of lost civilizations.
The Forbidden Way
George Gibbs
A ruthless financier discovers that his greatest rival in the worlds of high-stakes business and love is also the man who shares his own hidden, illegitimate bloodline.
Passages from the American Notebooks, Volume 1
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A solitary observer wanders through the coastal towns, mountain valleys, and bustling wharves of nineteenth-century New England, quietly collecting the raw fragments of reality that will later feed his imagination.
The Blue Flower
Henry Van Dyke
An elusive blue blossom symbolizes the eternal human desire for something divine, beautiful, and forever just beyond reach.
The Hungry Heart: A Novel
David Graham Phillips
A woman’s urgent need for intellectual equal partnership meets the cold reality of a conventional marriage, sparking a quiet domestic rebellion in turn-of-the-century Indiana.
Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America
George Santayana
An outsider’s affectionate yet unsparing gaze uncovers the hidden tensions animating the young, restless soul of early twentieth-century America.
Comrades: A Story of Social Adventure in California
Dixon, Thomas, Jr.
A wealthy young idealist surrenders his fortune to establish an egalitarian utopia on an isolated California island, only to discover how quickly absolute communal power turns to tyranny.
Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A visionary bonfire on a vast Western prairie promises to rid humanity of all its accumulated rubbish, but burning history, law, and art cannot cleanse the source of human flaw.
Mildred at Roselands: A Sequel to Mildred Keith
Martha Finley
When an invalid young woman travels south to recover her health, she finds herself navigating the social hazards of a wealthy plantation, where quiet moral choices shape every family dynamic.
Sea-gift: A Novel
Edwin W. (Edwin Wiley) Fuller
A young North Carolina man grows up along the coast, journeys to college in Chapel Hill, and sees his peaceful world shattered by the Civil War.
The horror at Red Hook
H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
Beneath the decaying brick facades of a Brooklyn waterfront, ancient occult horrors take root within the dark, crowded mazes of the city's criminal underworld.
The Terms of Surrender
Louis Tracy
A man driven into exile by love and betrayal seeks meaning in hard labor and far-flung lands, only to discover that the heaviest terms of surrender are those he must demand of himself.
Young Adventure: A Book of Poems
Stephen Vincent Benét
A young poet's vibrant exploration of adventure, love, and the human condition.
A Far Country
Winston Churchill
A ruthless corporate lawyer spends his career buying influence and carving out a fortune, only to discover that the empire he built has hollowed out his home, his soul, and his nation.
Phil, the Fiddler
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
An exploited street child plays his way across the frozen nineteenth-century Northeast to escape his ruthless captor, trading tunes for human kindness until a snowstorm changes his fate.
The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance
Mark Twain
In a sleepy medieval village frozen in time, a charming stranger appears who can build living worlds out of clay and alter human destinies with a single casual thought.
The Burial of the Guns
Thomas Nelson Page
Set against the lingering shadows of the American Civil War, six evocative tales explore the quiet tragedy of loss, the stubborn grip of memory, and the enduring dignity of the human spirit.
Helen of Troy, and Other Poems
Sara Teasdale
Women of legend and modern observers alike confront the quiet, overwhelming weight of love, discovering that devotion often exacts a devastating price.
The Enormous Room
E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings
A young American ambulance driver is arrested by French authorities under suspicion of treason and locked away in a chaotic internment camp.
The Monster and Other Stories
Stephen Crane
Small-town civility curdles into absolute ostracism when the hidden machinery of human fear and self-preservation is exposed by a single tragic act.
Hope Mills
Amanda M. Douglas
When economic panic shutters the factories of a New England mill town, a young man unites workers and idealists to rebuild their community through a daring experiment in industrial co-operation.
The Bravo: A Tale
James Fenimore Cooper
Venice maintains its total control not through open tyranny, but through the quiet horror of complete surveillance and stolen reputations.
The Breaking Point
Mary Roberts Rinehart
A young woman’s quiet suburban life fractures when the dedicated doctor she loves vanishes into his forgotten past.
Journal of a Residence in America
Fanny Kemble
This vivid, restless journal captures the internal turbulence of a young woman navigating the professional demands of the American stage while struggling with the stark cultural contrasts of a burgeoning new world.
Plague of Pythons
Frederik Pohl
An unseen force seizes normal citizens, driving them to commit horrific acts before leaving them to face the consequences.
Betty Zane
Zane Grey
When the ammunition inside Fort Henry runs out during its final, desperate siege, a young pioneer woman volunteers to sprint through enemy fire to retrieve a keg of gunpowder.