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American Literature — page 23
1,151 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 23 of 24.
Stories in Light and Shadow
Bret Harte
These tales explore the shifting boundaries between the American frontier and the wider world, tracing lives caught in the tension between rugged independence and the weight of history.
Cobwebs from an Empty Skull
Ambrose Bierce
This collection of sketches and fables delights in subverting expectations, offering a dark, witty, and deeply skeptical tour through the absurdities of life and language.
London Films
William Dean Howells
An aging traveler arrives in London, seeking to capture the shifting, atmospheric impressions of a city that feels both intimately familiar and eternally beyond his full comprehension.
Stepping Heavenward
E. (Elizabeth) Prentiss
A woman tracks her lifelong journey toward spiritual maturity, documenting the friction between her impulsive nature and her desire for a quieter, more sanctified life. This intimate diary reveals the private struggles behind the domestic ideal.
The Book of Susan: A Novel
Lee Wilson Dodd
The life of an orphan is rarely a fairy tale, but for one young girl, a chance encounter with a lonely man in a New Haven garage marks the beginning of an extraordinary, self-made education.
The Function of the Poet, and Other Essays
James Russell Lowell
The poet acts as a vital interpreter of human nature, reclaiming the lost innocence of our childhood and transforming the dusty, ordinary path of daily life into a landscape of enduring beauty.
The Man in Lower Ten
Mary Roberts Rinehart
A man’s quiet, predictable life is shattered when a gruesome murder occurs in the sleeper car where he is traveling. This classic mystery follows his desperate struggle to prove his innocence against a mounting pile of damning circumstantial evidence.
Vision House
C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson
Marriage as a high-stakes transaction leads two unlikely partners into a web of ambition, pride, and hidden motives. Beneath the veneer of British aristocratic society and the dramatic atmosphere of the American West, a young actress and a "bounder" of a soldier fight to redefine their futures.
A Traveler at Forty
Theodore Dreiser
An American writer sets out to encounter the Old World, armed only with a notebook, an insatiable curiosity, and a companion who serves as his worldly guide through the intricate, often melancholic landscapes of early 20th-century Europe.
Bunch Grass: A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch
Horace Annesley Vachell
HOOK This collection captures the vanishing spirit of the California frontier, where the law was often a matter of personal resolve and the landscape itself demanded a brutal kind of survival.
Queed: A Novel
Henry Sydnor Harrison
A socially inept, reclusive scholar is forced to abandon his self-imposed isolation and rigid schedule when he enters the messy, demanding, and ultimately transformative world of human relationships.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 60, October, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
The American autumn holds a singular, haunting brilliance that remains largely absent from the literature of the Old World. These pages capture the seasonal transition, blending observations of the natural world with the urgent realities of a nation at war.
The Red Cross Girl
Richard Harding Davis
A collection of spirited tales following the lives of journalists, dreamers, and men of action, capturing the restless, romantic energy of early twentieth-century American life.
A Top-Floor Idyl
George Van Schaick
In this quiet, gentle story, a struggling novelist and a fiercely talented artist find companionship in a New York boardinghouse, navigating the complexities of lost love, war, and the slow bloom of long-hidden affection.
The Girl at Central
Geraldine Bonner
A switchboard operator finds herself the unlikely center of a high-society murder investigation when she overhears a cryptic telephone call that links a missing heiress to a lethal conspiracy.
The Valley of Decision
Edith Wharton
The young heir of a crumbling Italian principality struggles to reconcile his enlightenment ideals with the stifling, ancient traditions of his station.
A Poor Wise Man
Mary Roberts Rinehart
The city sleeps under a smoke-laden shroud, but beneath the quiet surface, a battle for the soul of the country rages between the old guard of industry and the new, radical forces of revolt. In this volatile climate, one young woman must navigate the wreckage of her family’s legacy to find her own path.
Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway
Effie Price Gladding
The open road of 1915 offers a window into a changing America, where the dust of the frontier meets the dawn of the automobile age. This travelogue invites readers to rediscover the vast, unfolding landscape of a nation before the modern interstate redefined the journey.
Helping Himself
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A young man’s decision to pursue work rather than college sets him on a path of financial independence, moral integrity, and unexpected adventure in the bustling streets of 1850s New York.
Narcissus
Evelyn Scott
The tragedy of the self is that it can never truly leave its own reflection. This story traces the quiet, suffocating orbit of people who mistake their own mirrored projections for the souls of those they love.
Seekers in Sicily: Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica
Elizabeth Bisland
Two women travel through the sun-drenched landscapes of Sicily, seeking the remnants of ancient myth and the elusive spirit of Persephone. Their journey is a lyrical blend of classical scholarship and the sensory delights of Italian life.
A Hoosier holiday
Theodore Dreiser
A restless traveler wanders back to the heartland of his youth, searching for the ghosts of a simpler existence amidst the changing landscape of early twentieth-century America.
Elmer Gantry
Sinclair Lewis
A profane, brawling athlete stumbles into the pulpit and discovers that holiness is the most lucrative and exhilarating racket in America. This scathing portrait of a charlatan follows the rise of a man who masterfully exploits the public’s desperate hunger for spiritual certainty.
The Arena, Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891
Various
This periodical offers a vital snapshot of late nineteenth-century American thought, capturing a nation grappling with industrial strife, social reform, and the shifting boundaries of religious and political identity.
The William Henry Letters
Abby Morton Diaz
A boy finds his moral compass while navigating the scrapes and friendships of school life, sharing his growth through candid letters home to his grandmother.
The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.)
Unknown
This collection serves as a vibrant, kaleidoscopic snapshot of early twentieth-century American temperament, capturing the nation’s shifting moods through the lens of its most popular humorists and storytellers.
The Woman Gives: A Story of Regeneration
Owen Johnson
In the bustling, art-strewn corridors of a New York City tenement, a fallen painter finds his soul through a mysterious, selfless woman. Their collision of lives illuminates the fragile line between artistic genius and human connection.
A Man's World
Albert Edwards
This autobiographical narrative traces a young man's maturation through the lens of early twentieth-century social reform, offering an unvarnished look at the intersections of poverty, idealism, and human frailty. It serves as a candid record of a life spent witnessing the harsh realities of urban struggle while…
A Voyage of Consolation: (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An American girl in London')
Sara Jeannette Duncan
A young woman and her parents set out on a grand tour of Europe to mend a broken heart, only to find that the Old World—and their fellow travelers—are far more complicated than any guidebook suggests.
Ishmael
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
The journey of a self-made man rises from the humblest of origins to the heights of legal triumph, proving that nobility is a matter of character rather than birth.
Mr. Spaceship
Philip K. Dick
A dying professor merges his consciousness with a spaceship to escape a war-torn system, ultimately kidnapping his former student and the student's estranged wife to seed a peaceful new colony in the stars.
The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
In a kingdom where heads are made of wood and rivers flow with root beer, a benevolent ruler navigates the peculiar consequences of his own magic.
The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.)
Unknown
This collection captures a fleeting, boisterous era of American life, gathering short stories, sketches, and verses that revel in the absurdities of human nature. It presents a mosaic of a country in the midst of rapid transformation, balancing sharp social critique with the gentle, rhythmic vernacular of the time.
Meadow Grass: Tales of New England Life
Alice Brown
This collection of stories captures the quiet, interior lives of a rural New England village, where the weight of long-held tradition and the stirrings of personal desire pull against one another in constant, gentle friction.
The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
A celebrated author retreats to an ancestral English estate only to find his life haunted by a child who mirrors a ghost from the past.
The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor
Russell H. Conwell
This biography traces the journey of a restless American spirit, from the quiet Pennsylvania countryside to the far reaches of the globe, capturing the life of a poet and traveler dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
An elderly man sits by his fireside, weaving a vibrant, ghostly memory of his youth as a fisherman and his long, contented marriage to a woman he once likened to a mermaid.
The Whirl: A Romance of Washington Society
Foxcroft Davis
In the glittering, high-stakes arena of Washington, D.C., a British diplomat finds his carefully calculated life—and his disdain for American marriages—upended by an unexpected love.
An Arrow in a Sunbeam, and Other Tales
Sarah Orne Jewett
This collection gathers gentle, moralistic stories centered on the lives of ordinary people, emphasizing the quiet, transformative power of kindness and personal reflection in late 19th-century society.
Philo Gubb, Correspondence-School Detective
Ellis Parker Butler
A small-town paper-hanger attempts to solve complex mysteries by applying the rigid, often absurd lessons of a mail-order detective course. He proves that professional intuition is no match for earnest, literal-minded persistence.
Soldiers of Fortune
Richard Harding Davis
HOOK A determined mining engineer, a high-society beauty, and the volatile politics of a fictional South American republic collide in this classic tale of ambition, loyalty, and romance.
The Plastic Age
Percy Marks
College is a promise of discovery that often delivers a bewildering clash of high-minded tradition and hollow, performative social ritual. The transition into adulthood is rarely the clean, noble journey one expects.
William E. Burton: Actor, Author, and Manager: A Sketch of his Career with Recollections of his Performances
William L. (William Linn) Keese
This archival portrait reconstructs the life and theatrical dominance of an influential nineteenth-century actor-manager, whose comedic genius and scholarly devotion to the stage defined a golden era of New York performance.
Cinderella Jane
Marjorie Benton Cooke
A quiet, independent woman finds her secret ambitions tested by a marriage built on convenience and a society shifting beneath her feet.
Dr. Sevier
George Washington Cable
The struggle of a young couple to maintain their dignity and love amidst the crushing poverty and shifting tides of Civil War-era New Orleans serves as the backdrop for an unlikely, redemptive friendship.
Men, Women, and Boats
Stephen Crane
Human existence is a fragile vessel tossed upon an indifferent sea, where the only certainty is the struggle against the elements and one’s own mortality. These stories capture the stark, unvarnished truth of men caught in the grip of forces far greater than themselves.
Samantha at the World's Fair
Marietta Holley
This observant narrative chronicles a sharp-witted woman’s excursion to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, blending wide-eyed wonder at technological marvels with a fierce, iron-willed defense of human rights and social justice.
The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain
A group of earnest, often baffled Americans departs on a steamship for a grand tour of the Old World, armed with nothing but their own prejudices and a relentless sense of humor.