Free summaries
American Literature — page 4
3,373 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 4 of 71.
Alonzo and Melissa
I. (Isaac) Mitchell
A lovers’ promise is tested by war, family cruelty, superstition, and a long disappearance that turns longing into obsession. What begins as pastoral hope becomes a tale of prisons, graveyards, and a mystery that keeps returning.
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son: Being the Letters written by John Graham, Head of the House of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known on 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known to his intimates as "Piggy."
George Horace Lorimer
HOOK A titan of the Chicago meatpacking industry mentors his son through a series of sharp, unsentimental letters, revealing the ruthless pragmatism and homespun wisdom required to survive the Gilded Age business world.
At Plattsburg
Allen French
HOOK A group of civilian men trades their everyday lives for military discipline and camaraderie at a summer training camp, discovering the challenges and unexpected bonds forged in preparation for war.
The Innocents: A Story for Lovers
Sinclair Lewis
A retired clerk and his practical wife trade city respectability for a wild idea, then discover that adventure is not where they expect it to be. Their journey turns a joke into a hard, comic, unexpectedly tender education.
The Making of Bobby Burnit: Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man
George Randolph Chester
A rich young idler is forced into business, and the people around him are too clever, too crooked, or too loyal by half. What starts as a joke turns into a contest over money, power, and the harder work of becoming adult.
The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
John Trotwood Moore
HOOK A tale of hardship and hope in the Southern cotton mills, where war’s ruin, poverty, and the struggle for dignity shape lives caught between despair and renewal.
The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Sinclair Lewis
A boy from a tidy Minnesota home longs for motion, risk, and a life larger than duty. Each new ambition promises freedom, then tests what freedom costs.
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
Gerald Stanley Lee
A nation’s spirit is a ghost haunting the White House—how can millions make that ghost a living, powerful presence shaping democracy and leadership?
Flamsted quarries
Mary E. (Mary Ella) Waller
HOOK A sprawling tale of conscience and community, this novel follows Aileen Armagh from New York’s tenements to the granite heart of Flamsted, where social hierarchies and personal sins are tested against the weight of human dignity.
Erik Dorn
Ben Hecht
A restless man drifts through the shadows of postwar Chicago and Europe, caught between love, ambition, and the haunting void of modern life.
Joan of Arc of the North Woods
Holman Day
A timber war turns on pride, money, and one woman who refuses to stay where others place her. In the north woods, a single lie can wreck a drive; a single truth can change who stands with whom.
Children of the Tenements
Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis
These stories turn the tenement district into a place of alarm, tenderness, and rescue, where children learn hunger early and kindness arrives late but unmistakably.
Left Guard Gilbert
Ralph Henry Barbour
A school football season turns into a test of nerve, loyalty, and self-respect, where one boy’s supposed weakness matters less than the courage to face it.
The Coast of Bohemia
William Dean Howells
A young woman from a small Pennsylvania town journeys to New York to pursue art, confronting the harsh realities of ambition, love, and self-discovery in a world both inspiring and unforgiving.
The Forbidden Trail
Honoré Morrow
A young inventor’s relentless dream to harness solar power leads him deep into the unforgiving American desert, where ambition, hardship, and unexpected alliances shape a vision of transformation and survival.
Ride Proud, Rebel!
Andre Norton
A boy runs toward glory and a man tries to stop him; both are carried instead into a war that grinds away certainty, pride, and youth.
The Lady Doc
Caroline Lockhart
HOOK A determined woman doctor carves out her place in a rugged Western town, facing social snobbery, professional challenges, and personal betrayals in a world where money and power shape justice and survival.
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
A tale of love, duty, and societal constraints in Gilded Age New York.
Theft: A Play In Four Acts
Jack London
In the backrooms and drawing rooms of turn-of-the-century Washington, political power is not voted upon—it is bought, packaged, and traded like raw livestock.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Disillusioned expatriates drift across Europe, seeking purpose in alcohol, spectacle, and fleeting passions while nursing the invisible wounds of a shattered world.
The Varmint
Owen Johnson
HOOK A spirited tale of boyhood at a New Jersey boarding school, capturing the trials, friendships, and growth of a mischievous youth finding his place.
The Finer Grain
Henry James
A country of debts, pride, and late-in-life reckonings narrows to a few charged encounters. Henry James turns social rescue into an inquiry about who owes whom, and what love becomes when money and memory cannot be separated.
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
Isolation, emotional starvation, and the crushing weight of duty converge in a bleak New England village, where a trapped man’s desperate bid for warmth ends in a tragic, permanent imprisonment.
Master of the Vineyard
Myrtle Reed
A quiet, small-town young woman bound by iron circumstance finds her world altered when an upper-class visitor enters her rural valley, sparking a tangled exploration of duty, sacrifice, and spiritual devotion.
A dictionary of American authors
Oscar Fay Adams
A quiet ledger of early American thought captures the vast array of nineteenth-century minds, preserving thousands of brief literary lives alongside their long-forgotten works.
A Little Girl in Old Boston
Amanda M. Douglas
A child of transatlantic ties steps onto the cobblestones of a post-Revolutionary city, finding that warmth, kin, and quiet grace can soften even the sternest inherited traditions.
The Youth of Jefferson
John Esten Cooke
Before he drafted the Declaration of Independence or governed Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was a college student in Williamsburg, getting into scrapes, pining over young women, and avoiding his books.
The Blood of the Conquerors
Harvey Fergusson
An old Spanish land-grant dynasty crumbles in the New Mexico sun as its proud heir wages a doomed war against gringo capital, his own heritage, and a love he cannot win.
The Free Range
Francis William Sullivan
Two stubborn factions battle for grazing rights along the Wyoming range, where an unyielding sheepman and a hardened cattle baron collide over territorial pride, hidden blackmail, and a daughter caught between competing loyalties.
Rufus and Rose
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A street-smart newsboy in post-Civil War New York fights to build a legitimate future while protecting his little sister from a scheming, opportunistic stepfather.
Marjorie's Busy Days
Carolyn Wells
Imaginative games and high-spirited blunders transform small-town domestic routine into a lively chronicle of childhood innocence and energetic mischief.
The Thing from the Lake
Eleanor M. (Eleanor Marie) Ingram
A newly bought Connecticut farmhouse becomes the arena for a desperate, midnight struggle between a modern man's love and a centuries-old, formless terror.
Polly's Business Venture
Lillian Elizabeth Roy
A cheerful pair of young women tackle the New York interior decoration scene, proving that sharp eyes for rural antiques and patience with suitors can turn girlhood friendships into real commercial enterprise.
The Merry-Go-Round
Carl Van Vechten
A restless critic sweeps through the cultural landscape, dismantling rigid orthodoxies to elevate raw artistic vitality wherever it spins into view.
Spring Street: A Story of Los Angeles
James Hugh Richardson
Driven by the restless pulse of 1920s Southern California, a green newspaper reporter and an idealistic young woman navigate a maze of political corruption, underworld intimidation, and romantic longing.
Country Neighbors
Alice Brown
Quiet dignity, suppressed longings, and subtle humor run through a small New England town, where ordinary men and women navigate late-blooming romances, unspoken griefs, and the quiet ties that bind neighbors together.
The Squirrel-Cage
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Trained only to look sweet, marry well, and display her husband’s wealth, a young woman in turn-of-the-century Ohio finds herself trapped in a world where material ambition eclipses human connection and spiritual purpose.
Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810
Edward Ziegler Davis
Early American literary culture took root through a quiet, steady borrowing of European ideas, captured in the fragile pages of eighteenth-century periodicals.
The Four-Pools Mystery
Jean Webster
Secrets and fear stalk a Virginia plantation when a mysterious figure haunts the grounds, a safe is robbed, and a tyrannical patriarch is found brutally murdered inside a dark subterranean cavern.
Essays
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All human history preexists as potential laws within a single universal mind, waiting for individual souls to cast off social conformity, claim their native spiritual power, and continuously draw wider circles around every established truth.
Dwellers in Arcady: The Story of an Abandoned Farm
Albert Bigelow Paine
A city family stumbles upon an overgrown eighteenth-century Connecticut homestead, buys it for nine hundred dollars, and spends twelve years rebuilding both the fallen farm and their own lives.
The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain
A vast, hilarious journey across the Old World lays bare the gap between romantic travelogues and unvarnished reality, dissecting foreign sights and American pretensions alike.
Shorty McCabe on the Job
Sewell Ford
Dive into the humorous misadventures of Shorty McCabe, a clever New Yorker navigating the city's quirky characters and schemes.
The Man Next Door
Emerson Hough
A Wyoming cattle baron sells his ranch for millions and moves his daughter to Chicago, where an escalating neighborhood feud with a wealthy industrialist tests their rustic values against high-society snobbery.
The Indifference of Juliet
Grace S. (Grace Smith) Richmond
A captivating tale of love, family, and self-discovery set in early 20th-century America.
Prudence Says So
Ethel Hueston
A heartwarming tale of family, love, and growth in a small-town parsonage.
Susan Clegg and a Man in the House
Anne Warner
A spinster's orderly life dissolves into manageable chaos when she takes in a young relative, an ambitious printing press, and a town's worth of endless small-town opinions.
Her mother's secret
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
A young woman faces an impossible choice between her heart’s desire and the dark, hidden history of her family. Only an unwanted, truth-telling stranger can break the chains of a looming scandal.