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American Literature — page 27
4,848 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 27 of 101.
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.
Out of the Hurly-Burly
Charles Heber Clark
Seeking an escape from city corruption, a suburban husband moves his family to a tranquil village, only to find that small-town life brings its own hilarious chaos, quirky neighbors, and unexpected mishaps.
Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus
George W. (George Wilbur) Peck
A boy and his father join the circus circus workforce, turning every city and menagerie into an arena for outrageous pranks, animal stampedes, and accidental chaos.
The Little Colonel at Boarding-School
Annie F. (Annie Fellows) Johnston
Leaving behind the ease of childhood is never simple, but doing it under the eyes of an entire boarding school makes every mistake feel magnified.
Tutt and Mr. Tutt
Arthur Cheney Train
In a bustling early-twentieth-century New York, a tall, cigar-smoking courtroom veteran and his cunning partner wield every legal trick and human sympathy to save ordinary people from an unfeeling, hypocritical justice system.
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes
Ella Cheever Thayer
A young telegraph operator finds her secluded workroom transformed into a stage for flirtation, identity confusion, and unpredictable nineteenth-century romance when a distant key taps back.
Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana
George Washington Cable
A quiet soul shapes his own destiny and transforms a whole parish through sheer devotion to learning, duty, and love.
Over Here
Edgar A. (Edgar Albert) Guest
A country's spirit reveals itself not on the distant battlefield, but in the quiet homes, empty bedrooms, and backyards left behind by those who went to fight.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
This Civil War–era periodical captures a nation in midstream through travelogues, social critiques, scientific treatises, and eyewitness accounts of a changing social order.
The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, and Other Stories
Bret Harte
California mining camps, Scottish estates, and haunted haciendas form the backdrop of these short stories, where rough-edged pioneers, eccentric lovers, and quiet hypocrites navigate love, deception, and sudden loss.
The Penalty
Gouverneur Morris
A maimed mastermind schemes in the New York underworld while a gifted young sculptress unwittingly offers him a path to transformation.
Adrienne Toner: A Novel
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
When an enigmatic American heiress steps into an aristocratic English family, her radiant self-certainty disrupts lives, dismantles marriages, and ultimately transforms the quiet London cynical scholar who set out to study her.
Anthem
Ayn Rand
A young man raised in a collectivist dystopia where even the word "I" is forbidden discovers electric light and flees into the wilderness to claim his own identity.
My Friend Annabel Lee
Mary MacLane
A miniature Japanese statue becomes a living companion and mirror for a young woman processing her sharp, unvarnished inner life.