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American Literature — page 22
1,151 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 22 of 24.
The Hoosier Schoolmaster: A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana
Edward Eggleston
A young schoolmaster arrives in a rugged nineteenth-century Indiana settlement, where he must win over a hostile backwoods community and clear his name after being framed for a local robbery.
Carolina Lee
Lilian Bell
A proud young heiress loses her family fortune, her mobility, and her faith in God, only to rebuild all three through an unshakeable conversion to Christian Science and a return to her ancestral Southern soil.
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850
Various
Nineteenth-century print culture comes alive in a wide-ranging, ambitious collection designed to educate, move, and entertain a rapidly growing reading public.
John Ermine of the Yellowstone
Frederic Remington
A white boy raised as a Crow warrior enters the nineteenth-century American military world, only to find that neither frontier culture can fully bridge his divided identity.
Lonesome Town
E. S. (Ethel Smith) Dorrance
A lone Montana cowboy rides into Manhattan to settle a score with Wall Street financial shearers, only to find himself entangled in a high-society mystery of stolen heirlooms, family betrayals, and hidden treasure in Central Park.
My Wife and I
Harriet Beecher Stowe
A young journalist navigates love, career, and radical social change in Gilded Age New York.
The Sport of the Gods
Paul Laurence Dunbar
When a respectable Black family in the Jim Crow South is shattered by a false accusation, their search for a fresh start in Harlem exposes them to the ruinous temptations of the big city.
Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Volume 1 (of 2)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A quiet, intense intimacy glows through a set of private letters, revealing a side of a famous writer hidden from the public eye.
The blue wall
Richard Washburn Child
A physician peers past a physical partition and into the troubled human minds hidden behind it, uncovering a web of secret obsession, addiction, and long-buried guilt.
The Girls of Silver Spur Ranch
Grace MacGowan Cooke
Courageous sisters, an absent soldier father, and a neighbor's relentless pride converge in a spirited tale of rural Texas resolve during the Spanish-American War.
A Study of Hawthorne
George Parsons Lathrop
An elusive American master is brought into focus by a fellow writer who balances psychological insight, literary genealogy, and historical context to illuminate the genius behind New England's most enduring, dark-hued romances.
Perkins of Portland: Perkins The Great
Ellis Parker Butler
An eccentric copywriter and a pragmatic partner hawk ridiculous products across America, turning raw enthusiasm and relentless catchphrases into a booming empire.
Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions
Slason Thompson
A genius of absurd humor and tender verse lives a life as unpredictable, contradiction-filled, and utterly rebellious as his own stories.
Dawn O'Hara: The Girl Who Laughed
Edna Ferber
A spirited journalist navigates love, loss, and self-discovery in the charming chaos of boarding house life.
The Humour of America: Selected, with an Introduction and Index of American Humorists
Unknown
A sprawling, kaleidoscopic tour through early American comic literature captures the raw, self-deprecating wit and vivid regional accents of a growing nation.
The Flirt
Booth Tarkington
A captivating tale of love, deception, and societal intrigue set in early 20th-century America.
The Lions of the Lord: A Tale of the Old West
Harry Leon Wilson
A soul's desperate search for grace yields to the cold demands of fanatical obedience along the trail to Zion.
Mam'selle Jo
Harriet T. (Harriet Theresa) Comstock
A woman of quiet strength discovers an orphaned girl and protects her from a haunting past, ultimately finding that the road of life leads to unexpected, late-blooming companionship.
Miss Billy's Decision
Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
An engagement meant to usher in a lifetime of harmony founders when a young woman mistakes her fiancé’s artistic focus for growing indifference and decides that true love requires sacrificing her own happiness to set him free.
Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty
John William De Forest
A Southern belle’s fiery allegiance to the Confederacy is tested when war uproots her life, forcing a choice between the dazzling promises of a dashing officer and the steady devotion of a quiet Northern soldier.
Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)
Carl Van Doren
An ambitious attempt to chart the modern novel as it moves from sentimental regionalism into the raw, unsparing grip of naturalism.
Enough rope: poems
Dorothy Parker
Underneath a veneer of shimmering light verse and jaunty meter lies a sharp, unyielding inventory of human romantic disillusionment, self-mockery, and emotional survival.
Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Literary portraits drawn from personal memory illuminate the eccentricities, sudden laughter, and quiet discipline of the nineteenth century’s most vital authors.
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 2, August 1852
Various
This nineteenth-century miscellany gathers the voices of poets, storytellers, and observers, offering a panoramic view of the Victorian era’s artistic and intellectual preoccupations.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
This curated collection of essays, fiction, and cultural commentary captures the intellectual pulse of the United States at a volatile moment in the mid-nineteenth century. It serves as a sophisticated time capsule of the post-Civil War American mind.
The Business of Life
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
Wealth, independence, and the quiet weight of old mistakes collide in this lush Gilded Age romance.
The Amazing Interlude
Mary Roberts Rinehart
The stage of life is rarely as permanent as it seems, and for one quiet woman, the upheaval of a global conflict reveals that her true purpose lies not in the safety of home, but in the heart of the storm.
The Conquest of America: A Romance of Disaster and Victory, U.S.A., 1921 A.D
Cleveland Moffett
A chilling vision of a defenseless nation forced to its knees, this work serves as a frantic, cautionary call for the United States to abandon its isolationism and embrace military preparedness.
The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange
Anna Katharine Green
A young socialite moonlights as a brilliant private investigator, navigating the shadows of New York’s elite to solve crimes that the police cannot touch.
Songs of the Sea and Lays of the Land
Charles Godfrey Leland
This collection of verse captures the vanishing spirit of the nineteenth-century sailor, blending authentic maritime folklore with the tall tales of a wandering adventurer. It preserves the salty, cynical, and superstitious voice of the men who once powered the world’s sailing ships.
Margaret Smith's Journal, and Tales and Sketches, Complete: Volume V of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier
Colonial New England emerges from the shadows of history through a young woman’s observant eyes, blending the austere realities of Puritan life with the lyrical beauty of an untamed wilderness.
Memoirs of an American Prima Donna
Clara Louise Kellogg
A celebrated American opera star recounts her rise from a sheltered upbringing to international stages, offering a candid, firsthand look at the rigors and eccentricities of the nineteenth-century musical world.
The Third Circle
Frank Norris
This collection of short stories captures the raw, kinetic energy of turn-of-the-century life, moving restlessly between the foggy wharves of San Francisco and the mythic, wind-swept cliffs of ancient Iceland.
Aunt Phillis's Cabin
Mary H. (Mary Henderson) Eastman
This work offers an intentional counter-narrative to the abolitionist literature of the mid-nineteenth century, presenting a defense of the Southern social order through the lens of domestic fiction. It serves as a significant historical artifact, illustrating the arguments used by slaveholders to justify the…
Confession
William Gilmore Simms
HOOK A man’s corrosive pride and agonizing insecurity lead him to destroy the very domestic peace he most deeply craves. This is a harrowing portrait of the ruinous power of a suspicious mind.
The Children's Longfellow: Told in Prose
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This collection breathes new life into classic American verse by recasting iconic narrative poems as accessible, evocative stories. It invites readers to experience the sweeping reach of legend and the quiet depth of human endurance through prose.
'Charge It': Keeping Up With Harry
Irving Bacheller
A young man’s reckless indulgence in foreign vanities and mounting debt prompts a rural lawyer to stage an intervention, forcing the community to rediscover the dignity of honest, grounded labor.
The Song of the Wolf
Frank Mayer
This novel depicts a rugged, high-stakes collision between the refined sensibilities of the East and the raw, dangerous code of the Colorado frontier. It is a story of obsession, transformation, and the eventual surrender to a simpler, more profound existence.
Toward the Gulf
Edgar Lee Masters
This collection of verse is a restless, intellectual pilgrimage through the American landscape and the history of human longing. It is a work of candid observation, tracing the arc from the simple joys of a summer boat trip to the existential weight of a mind confronting its own limitations.
Europe Revised
Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb
** Eschewing the dry, fact-laden approach of traditional guidebooks, this account offers a humorous, irreverent, and deeply personal exploration of European travel at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Buttered Side Down: Stories
Edna Ferber
Life rarely concludes with the neat, fairy-tale resolution of a storybook ending. These vignettes capture the quiet, unvarnished reality of ordinary people navigating the friction between their dreams and the world they actually inhabit.
Coniston
Winston Churchill
A master of backroom influence meets his match in the purity of a young woman’s integrity. This sprawling, atmospheric portrait explores how the machinery of power operates in the shadows of a changing nation.
Sweet Cicely
Marietta Holley
A sharp-witted farm wife navigates the absurdities of nineteenth-century politics while witnessing the heartbreaking toll that legal injustice takes on a young mother.
The Moneychangers
Upton Sinclair
A young Southern lawyer arrives in New York City, only to find himself ensnared in the ruthless machinery of Wall Street, where the lines between high finance and high crime vanish.
'Me--Smith'
Caroline Lockhart
A rugged, enigmatic drifter finds his solitary life upended when he infiltrates a remote ranch, only to realize that his attempts to command his own destiny are colliding with forces beyond his control.
When a man's a man
Harold Bell Wright
The definition of manhood is tested against the unforgiving landscape of the American West. A stranger sheds his past to find redemption, proving that true strength lies not in social status, but in character and service.
Current superstitions
Unknown
The wisdom of the past lives on in the casual habits and whispered warnings that still shape our daily lives. These fragments of folklore capture the echoes of an older world, preserved before they vanish from modern memory.
Much Ado About Peter
Jean Webster
Peter, an observant and quick-witted groom at the sprawling Willowbrook estate, navigates the social hierarchies of a bustling early 20th-century household while orchestrating the lives of his employers and peers with equal parts meddling and charm.