Free summaries
American Literature — page 4
165 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 4 of 4.
The Reckoning
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
HOOK: A spy moves through burning country and divided loyalties, but the hardest battle is not in the woods or forts. It is in the heart, where love and duty keep changing sides.
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
A wedding feast opens into a city of traps, wages, and vanished hope, where every promise of work costs more than it gives. What begins as an immigrant dream hardens into an account of how a family is ground down.
That Affair Next Door
Anna Katharine Green
A death next door looks simple until everyone’s story begins to split apart. What starts as a neighbor’s late-night curiosity turns into a trap of mistaken identity, hidden marriage, and a detective’s cold certainty.
At Good Old Siwash
George Fitch
HOOK George Fitch’s classic collection captures the riotous, high-spirited absurdity of early twentieth-century Midwestern college life, where football is a religion, Greek life is a battlefield, and logic is the first casualty of youth.
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.