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American Literature — page 44
4,848 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 44 of 101.
Cobb's Bill-of-Fare
Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb
A humorist's battle against cold-storage turkeys, impenetrable opera, and modern art proves that simple, old-fashioned pleasures beat pretension every single time.
Hetty's Strange History
Helen Hunt Jackson
Love can sacrifice every claim except the truth, yet a mistaken heart will sometimes throw even life away to prove its devotion.
Home Fires in France
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Ordinary people, caught in the devastating gears of World War I France, quietly rebuild destroyed lives, hold families together, and confront catastrophic losses through quiet acts of everyday resilience, courage, and unexpected human solidarity.
Jack's Ward
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A lost child, a pair of counterfeiters, and a young lad's sheer grit collision course through nineteenth-century New York and Philadelphia in this classic tale of street-level virtue and sudden fortune.
Janice Day
Helen Beecher Long
When a spirited girl from the Midwest arrives in a drowsy Vermont village, her quiet determination slowly stirs an entire community out of its stubborn rut.
Old Friends and New
Sarah Orne Jewett
Quiet coastal villages and lonely interior homes set the backdrop for these subtle studies of nineteenth-century New England life, where quiet daily routines yield to sudden moments of vulnerability, remembrance, and unexpected connection.
On Picket Duty, and Other Tales
Louisa May Alcott
Behind military encampments and quiet New England homes, ordinary men and women endure the quiet trials of devotion, temptation, and sacrifice during wartime.
Other Main-Travelled Roads
Hamlin Garland
Life on the nineteenth-century American prairie is a hard-bitten round of unremitting toil, where human devotion must constantly contend against isolation, stubborn pride, and the grinding drudgery of the soil.
The Abysmal Brute
Jack London
An innocent giant leaves the mountains to dominate professional boxing, only to abandon the ring after exposing its deep corruption to the public.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
This mid-nineteenth-century literary miscellany captures a nation in rapid transition, balancing the dark shadows of recent war with a fiery intellectual curiosity.
The Colonel's Dream
Charles W. (Charles Waddell) Chesnutt
An idealist returns to his sleeping Southern hometown to build a better future, only to find that the roots of racial hatred and entrenched power are far deeper than his wealth can reach.
The Girl from Arizona
Nina Rhoades
An abandoned girl with no memory of her past enters a rancher’s home, setting off a chain of discoveries that bridges Western ranges and New York drawing rooms.
The Gold Bag
Carolyn Wells
A rich, gilded accessory left on a dead man's desk pulls a young investigator into a web of small-town secrets, hidden wills, and romantic entanglements.
The Snow-Burner
Henry Oyen
A brutal lumber boss rules a frozen wilderness through terror and sheer force of will until an All-American football star and a defiant frontier woman break his monstrous hold.
Bill Nye's Sparks
Bill Nye
A sharp, self-deprecating wit transforms the mundane struggles of nineteenth-century American life into an art form of deadpan satire and unvarnished truth.
Old Caravan Days
Mary Hartwell Catherwood
When an elderly matriarch packs up her Ohio homestead in 1857 to move west, she transforms a simple journey into a grand, unhurried adventure across the changing American landscape.
Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 3 (of 7)
Theodore Roosevelt
Governing a rapidly expanding industrial power demands a firm balance between absolute national strength and self-restrained moral civic duty.
The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel
Edgar Fawcett
A young, wealthy widow attempts to build a serious intellectual salon in Gilded Age New York, only to find herself caught between shallow high society and the vanity of self-absorbed Bohemians.
The Ancient Law
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
A disgraced man wanders into a small Virginia town under an assumed name, seeking redemption through humble labor, only to learn that escaping his past requires a far deeper sacrifice.
The Film of Fear
Frederic Arnold Kummer
A famous screen star receives terrifying threats targeting her face, forcing a famed detective to race against time.
The four Corners
Amy Ella Blanchard
In a quiet Virginia mountain town, four sisters navigate small-town routines, family rivalries, and sudden financial strain while their mother travels to recover her health.
The Lilac Girl
Ralph Henry Barbour
A chance meeting in the mountains leaves a lone prospector haunted by the fleeting sight of a woman in a lilac-scented garden, sparking a gentle quest through an old New England town to find her.
The Parenticide Club
Ambrose Bierce
A dark, satirical masterpiece of patricide, matricide, and legal absurdity, this collection dismantles the sanctity of the American family through cold, deadpan comedy.
The Reverberator
Henry James
Unvarnished American innocence collides with rigid Parisian aristocratic decorum when a young woman unwittingly exposes a family's private secrets to a tabloid journalist.
Woven with the Ship: A Novel of 1865: Together with certain other veracious tales of various sorts
Cyrus Townsend Brady
A stranded wooden vessel on a lonely point holds an old admiral, a devoted sailor, and a young woman whose rescue of a stranded officer sets off a flurry of romantic and dramatic complications.
A Breath of Prairie and other stories
Will Lillibridge
These tales of the American prairie capture the raw, desperate, and often tragic intersections of ambition, isolation, and the stubborn persistence of the human heart.
A Man: His Mark. A Romance: Second Edition
W. C. Morrow
A man and a woman, strangers to each other, are trapped in a mountain cabin after a devastating avalanche.
Black Jack
Max Brand
A young man raised under an assumed name discovers he is the son of an infamous outlaw and runs wild to embrace his violent inheritance.
Gullible's Travels, Etc
Ring Lardner
A middle-class Chicago couple spends every spare dime chasing high society, only to find that every velvet rope leads to an even more expensive room.
Kings in Exile
Roberts, Charles G. D., Sir
A collection of short narratives, this volume chronicles the lives of wild creatures forced into captivity. It offers an unflinching look at the collision between the untamed instincts of the wilderness and the rigid constraints of human confinement.
Modern American Prose Selections
Unknown
A nation is held together not by blood or ancient borders, but by the quiet choices of its people as they adapt to a changing world. Through speeches, essays, and personal narratives, this collection maps the living soul of American democracy.
Poems of Pleasure
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Love is a fiery, cosmic force that transforms human souls, elevating the faithful to angelic heights while threatening to drag the careless into despair.
Quill's Window
George Barr McCutcheon
A smooth-talking stranger comes to an Indiana farming community under false pretenses, manipulating its people and charming its wealthiest heiress while hiding a history of deceit that eventually catches up to him.
Sketches New and Old, Part 1
Mark Twain
Absurdist bureaucracy, small-town posturing, and everyday misadventures collide in a world where good intentions prompt immediate disaster and sheer villainy reaps full social prestige.
The hindered hand
Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert) Griggs
A young African American woman faces a monstrous white loan shark, choosing between lifetime domestic servitude and sending her destitute mother to prison.
The Readjustment
Will Irwin
The Readjustment is a quiet, observant study of social migration and the friction between youthful ambition and internal character. It captures the transition of a young man and two women as they navigate their places in early twentieth-century San Francisco.
The River's Children: An Idyl of the Mississippi
Ruth McEnery Stuart
The Mississippi River acts as a silent, powerful guardian over the lives of those who dwell along its banks, binding together a fractured society through the dual forces of danger and grace.
The Treasure-Train
Arthur B. (Arthur Benjamin) Reeve
A high-society heiress overhears a conspiratorial whisper behind a palm tree in a hotel tearoom, sparking a chain of encounters with modern crime.
Dandelion Cottage
Carroll Watson Rankin
Four young girls turn a neglected, weed-choked shed into a beloved sanctuary, discovering that their efforts to create a home bring unexpected connections to the lonely adults in their small Michigan town.
Frontier Ballads
Joseph Mills Hanson
The American West comes alive through the rhythm and grit of the common man, capturing a vanished era of frontier expansion, rugged steamboats, and hard-won morality. These verses preserve the spirit of a transitional frontier, where the raw, unforgiving landscape forged a unique code of human resilience and quiet,…
Futuria Fantasia, Fall 1939
Ray Bradbury
A vibrant, chaotic snapshot of early science fiction fandom, this amateur magazine captures the boundless energy and sharp-tongued camaraderie of a young writer discovering his voice among the genre’s pioneers.
The Business of Being a Woman
Ida M. (Ida Minerva) Tarbell
The modern woman’s search for meaning often leads her away from her most vital influence, yet the path to true fulfillment lies in reclaiming the dignity of her essential, home-centered work.
An American Girl in London
Sara Jeannette Duncan
This narrative follows a young, observant American woman as she navigates the rigid social hierarchies of late Victorian London, armed only with her sharp wit and a complete lack of deference for established traditions.
Autumn Leaves: Original Pieces in Prose and Verse
Unknown
This collection of domestic reflections and gentle verse captures the quiet, observant spirit of a mid-19th-century New England circle. It offers a window into the everyday joys, small frustrations, and evolving affections of a thoughtful, close-knit community.
Bricks Without Straw: A Novel
Albion Winegar Tourgée
HOOK A gripping, unsentimental portrait of the post-Civil War South, where the promise of liberty confronts the crushing weight of legacy and the violent resistance of a defeated social order.
Chiquita, an American Novel: The Romance of a Ute Chief's Daughter
Merrill Tileston
HOOK A young man’s fortune-seeking journey into the American West becomes irrevocably intertwined with the life and tragic aspirations of a Ute chief’s daughter, navigating the harsh divide between two worlds.
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, January 1849
Various
This nineteenth-century anthology captures the fading echoes of a literary era, blending sentimental fiction, travel writing, and moral philosophy into a singular, sprawling portrait of American intellectual life in 1849.
In Exile, and Other Stories
Mary Hallock Foote
The American frontier is not a monolith of masculine triumph, but a landscape of quiet, crushing isolation where the endurance of the human spirit is tested by the silence of the hills.