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American Literature — page 27
3,151 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 27 of 66.
The Cabala
Thornton Wilder
The story of an impressionable young American finding his footing among the ruins and high society of post-World War I Rome, this novel explores the fragile intersection of ancient tradition and human frailty.
The Mayor's Wife
Anna Katharine Green
A young woman seeking employment enters a household shrouded in secrets, only to discover that the greatest mysteries are not ghostly hauntings, but the hidden sins of the living.
A Dream of Empire
William Henry Venable
This historical novel dramatizes the downfall of a visionary aristocrat and the seductive, ruinous ambition of a political outcast. It is a story of how grand designs, when detached from reality, collapse into the ashes of private lives.
Alice Wilde: The Raftsman's Daughter. A Forest Romance
Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
A young woman’s quiet life in the Michigan wilderness is shattered by the arrival of a city-bred stranger and the dangerous, obsessive jealousy of a local woodsman.
Clotel
William Wells Brown
The tragedy of systemic enslavement is laid bare through the fractured lives of those seeking freedom, revealing a nation haunted by the contradiction between its professed Christianity and its brutal commerce in human bodies.
Openings in the Old Trail
Bret Harte
This collection offers a series of vignettes from the American West, capturing the intersection of rugged, high-stakes frontier life and the fragile, often absurd, social aspirations of its inhabitants. It portrays a world where men and women, isolated by the vastness of the Sierras, navigate sudden fortunes,…
Pembroke: A Novel
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
This study of stubbornness in a remote New England village explores how the human will, when pushed beyond the bounds of reason, can act like a slow-moving disease. It suggests that the only cure for such rigidity is a love so unselfish that it forces the individual to drop their defenses and reclaim their humanity.
The Circular Study
Anna Katharine Green
A seasoned detective finds his waning enthusiasm reignited by a bizarre, high-stakes murder in a historic mansion, thrusting him into a labyrinthine plot of familial vengeance. This atmospheric mystery challenges an aging investigator to reconcile his traditional methods with the volatile secrets of a younger…
The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, as Told by Herself
Dorothy Richardson
This is an unvarnished account of survival in the industrial belly of early 20th-century New York. It chronicles the grinding reality of a young woman who trades her autonomy for a grueling, precarious existence as a wage-earner.
The Rival Pitchers: A Story of College Baseball
Lester Chadwick
The diamond is groomed, the air smells of spring, and the freshman must decide whether to fight for his place on the mound or fold under the pressure of a bitter rival.
The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln
Dixon, Thomas, Jr.
The tall, weary figure of the Civil War’s most enigmatic leader finds his soul tested by the crushing weight of a fracturing nation. This historical novel reimagines the President’s private struggles as he navigates the chasm between war-torn North and South.
The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish
James Fenimore Cooper
This story of the American frontier captures the stark, heavy tension of life in a Puritan settlement during the terror of King Philip’s War, where faith and survival are inextricably linked. It is a somber, meditative examination of how violence reshapes identity and leaves behind only the ghosts of what once was.
Whitefoot the Wood Mouse
Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess
A tiny mouse navigating the vast, predator-filled Green Forest finds that survival requires more than just sharp senses—it demands a capacity for joy and the resilience to build a home in the most unexpected places.
Wounds in the rain: War stories
Stephen Crane
This collection of war stories captures the chaotic, unglamorous reality of the front lines through the eyes of those who endure them, stripping away the pageantry of combat to reveal the strange, ragged dignity of the soldier.
Ruggles of Red Gap
Harry Leon Wilson
A refined English valet finds himself traded in a poker game to an American rancher, an accident of fate that forces him to navigate the peculiar social wilderness of the Western frontier.
The Enchanted Barn
Grace Livingston Hill
A young stenographer’s desperate search for a home for her struggling family leads to a dilapidated barn and an unexpected romance that changes their lives forever.
The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge, and Other Stories
Charles Egbert Craddock
These tales illuminate the rugged, isolated existence of the Cumberland Mountains, where folk superstitions, long-standing grudges, and the quiet persistence of nature shape the lives of people living on the edge of the world.
The Store Boy
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Ben Barclay is a resilient youth who rises from the struggle of supporting his widowed mother in a country town to finding success in the wider world, all while navigating the schemes of jealous neighbors and dishonest men.
Those Times and These
Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb
These stories trace the fading echoes of a vanishing American landscape, where the weight of the past sits heavily on the shoulders of those lingering in the present.
Worldly Ways & Byways
Eliot Gregory
The observer of a changing century finds that manners, travel, and social ambition reveal the true character of a nation struggling to balance its newfound wealth with the weight of its own provincialism.
Contrary Mary
Temple Bailey
HOOK A young woman navigates the tension between her desire for an independent life and the pressure to conform to societal expectations. She finds an unlikely anchor in a mysterious man living in her attic.
Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason Corner Folks
Charles Felton Pidgin
A saga of familial reconciliation and professional intrigue, this novel traces the lives of the Sawyer family as they navigate the complexities of class, morality, and the long-reaching effects of past secrets.
Idolatry: A Romance
Julian Hawthorne
The pursuit of worldly perfection often masks a deeper spiritual hunger, leaving the seeker to grapple with the hollow idols of his own making.
Jewel: A Chapter in Her Life
Clara Louise Burnham
A lonely child brings warmth and Christian Science to her cold grandfather’s estate, quietly transforming a divided family through unyielding cheer and gentle faith.
Millbank
Mary Jane Holmes
An innocent child, a lost inheritance, and a house filled with secrets shape the fate of a resilient young woman struggling to reclaim her name, her home, and her heart.
Money Magic: A Novel
Hamlin Garland
A mountain town's rough charm yields to sudden, boundless fortune, forcing a sharp young clerk to choose between the life that made her and the wider world her husband's wealth unlocks.
Rivers to the Sea
Sara Teasdale
An aching heart seeks fulfillment through urban streets and quiet waters, turning everyday encounters into monuments of longing.
The adventuress
Arthur B. (Arthur Benjamin) Reeve
A corporate titan dies, a deadly invention vanishes, and a trail of blackmail leads straight into the glittering night-world of Jazz Age New York.
The Wheat Princess
Jean Webster
An heiress seeking a life of quiet luxury in Italy finds her idyllic world upended when she discovers that her father's wealth was built on grain speculation that is actively starving the local populace.
Across the Years
Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
Under heavy coats and wrinkled brows, aging hearts still burn for independence, dignity, and a small taste of joy.
Black no more
George S. (George Samuel) Schuyler
A satirical masterpiece of identity and absurd racial politics, this biting fable exposes the folly of bigotry when a scientific miracle erases the color line overnight.
Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches
Sarah Orne Jewett
Two city women spend a summer in a sleepy New England haven, discovering that the quietest places hold the richest human stories.
I and My Chimney
Herman Melville
A quiet rural domesticity turns into a battlefield when an aging husband vows to protect his massive central chimney against his relentless wife's modern renovations.
In the Sixties
Harold Frederic
A boy watches his home town fracture as the American Civil War tears through upstate New York, turning neighbors into enemies and quiet farms into battlegrounds for the human soul.
Is 5
E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings
A streetwise, brilliantly erratic, and deeply tender defense of pure invention over mechanical routine.
My Musical Life
Walter Damrosch
A life spent building the musical architecture of a young nation brings standard orchestral scores to life through tireless devotion, fierce rivalries, and unyielding discipline.
The Breitmann Ballads
Charles Godfrey Leland
A boisterous, beer-soaked comic epic that follows an unbeatable German-American wanderer through civil wars, political backrooms, high-society parlors, and European taverns.
Comrade Yetta
Albert Edwards
An orphaned immigrant girl rises from a Lower East Side garment workshop to become a fearless union organizer and Crusading journalist in Gilded Age New York.
In the Bishop's Carriage
Miriam Michelson
A sharp-tongued orphan navigates the high-wire act between petty street crime and the glare of the footlights. In a world driven by hustle, she must learn whether a reformed thief can ever truly step out of the shadows.
Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli)
Julia Ward Howe
A life driven by rigorous self-culture and radical intellectual devotion confronts societal limitations, leading from New England's transcendentalist circles to the bloody battlefields of revolutionary Italy.
Memories of Hawthorne
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
Letters, intimate journals, and daughterly recollections weave a vivid tapestry of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s domestic world, revealing the quiet warmth, literary devotions, and enduring quietude behind a master story-teller’s public genius.
The Autobiography of a Quack, and The Case of George Dedlow
S. Weir (Silas Weir) Mitchell
Fraudulent doctors and phantom limbs collision course in this double bill of medical oddities from the nineteenth century.
The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers, Series 2
R. H. (Robert Henry) Newell
A satirical correspondent sends absurd dispatches from the front lines and Washington, sending up military bungling, press censorship, political hypocrisy, and literary melodrama.
The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted
Katharine Ellis Barrett
A summer of ambition turns into a year of deepening ties as four young women navigate small-town projects, international travel, and the shared joys of early adulthood.
Under the Redwoods
Bret Harte
Rough-hewn mining camps, coastal solitudes, and urban shadows frame a striking gallery of California originals, where sudden shifts of fate constantly test the limits of human resilience, affection, and pride.
Vandover and the Brute
Frank Norris
A young artist's soul slowly dissolves as he trades his talent and moral compass for the fleeting pleasures of San Francisco’s gilded nightlife.
Wanted: A Husband. A Novel
Samuel Hopkins Adams
A plain, forgotten woman uses sheer grit, a fictional British fiancé, and a physical makeover to transform her life, finding unexpected love in the process.
Washington Irving
Charles Dudley Warner
A boy touched on the head by his presidential namesake grows into the first American writer to charm Europe without sacrificing his quiet national pride.