Free summaries
American Literature — page 46
3,151 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 46 of 66.
Weeds
Edith Summers Kelley
A poignant tale of rural life in Kentucky, where the struggles of farm families are as persistent as the weeds in their fields.
Five O'Clock Tea: Farce
William Dean Howells
A snowy afternoon, an over-full parlor, and a relentless suitor turn a simple tea party into a high-stakes duel of wits.
Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It
Fannie Hurst
A child's prodigy bow meets the roar of a Manhattan crowd, while around the corner a young woman stumbles into the sharp, blinding light of the city's underbelly.
Jimmie Higgins
Upton Sinclair
A pacifist's journey through war, revolution, and personal turmoil in the early 20th century.
Martie, the Unconquered
Kathleen Thompson Norris
A tale of love, ambition, and self-discovery, following a young woman's journey from California to New York as she navigates family, marriage, and her own desires.
Neghborly Poems and Dialect Sketches
James Whitcomb Riley
A warm, plain-spoken window into nineteenth-century rural America, capturing the melodies, heartbreaks, and humble wisdom of ordinary country folks.
Not Under the Law
Grace Livingston Hill
The path of a young woman finding her own way through abandonment and prejudice remains a resonant study in personal integrity and faith.
The Bandbox
Louis Joseph Vance
Mistaken identities and a high-society jewel heist spark a breathless chase across the Atlantic and through the shadows of Manhattan.
The Bondwoman
Marah Ellis Ryan
A hidden heritage, a secret espionage mission, and a web of aristocratic deceit collide across European salons and plantation parlors as the American Civil War fractures the nation.
The Camerons of Highboro
Beth Bradford Gilchrist
When her father leaves for wartime duty in France, a self-absorbed city teenager expects to coast through a luxurious year with friends. Instead, she finds herself stranded on a remote Vermont farm, forced to trade her silk gowns for farm chores and learn what real courage looks like.
The Crucial Moment: 1911
Charles Egbert Craddock
A sudden argument over a flawed levee survey explodes into a fatal gunshot, launching a desperate fugitive across a flooded delta landscape.
The Fortunes of Oliver Horn
Francis Hopkinson Smith
Youthful ambition, artistic passion, and regional pride collision with old-world traditions as a young Southerner ventures North to pursue his dreams.
The Luck of the Dudley Grahams: As Related in Extracts from Elizabeth Graham's Diary
Alice Calhoun Haines
A fatherless family in turn-of-the-century New York tries to keep their household afloat through a series of chaotic misadventures and unexpected windfalls.
The Princess Pocahontas
Virginia Watson
Before history smoothed her life into a single dramatic moment, Pocahontas was a vibrant, restless girl navigating the dense forests and political fault lines of the Powhatan confederacy.
The Sister Years (From "Twice Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
On the moonlit steps of a Salem municipal building at midnight, two personified sisters exchange final thoughts on the human condition before one vanishes forever into history and the other steps into the mortal world.
Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.: Edited by His Daughter
Orville Dewey
A country boy rises through self-education and severe illness to become a central pulpit orator, reflecting deeply on human struggle, faith, and the nature of God across a long life.
Children of the Market Place
Edgar Lee Masters
A young Englishman arrives in nineteenth-century Illinois and witnesses the raw expansion of America through the life and political rise of Stephen A. Douglas.
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.
Eli: First published in the "Century Magazine"
Heman White Chaplin
An honest Cape Cod fisherman single-handedly holds out against a hostile jury to save an innocent neighbor from prison.
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.
Main Street: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Centuries of New England history unspool inside a single room as a determined showman turns the crank of a painted paper panorama.
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.
The Young Pitcher
Zane Grey
A young freshman endures relentless hazing and loneliness at a vast university, discovering his identity and purpose when he earns a spot on the school's struggling baseball team.
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 Drummer Boy
J. T. (John Townsend) Trowbridge
A fiery fourteen-year-old leaves his family sitting-room for the Union barracks, trading his dark curls for a recruit’s crop and a place at the front line of a nation tearing itself apart.
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.
Wayside Courtships
Hamlin Garland
Across dusty Western roads, cramped train cars, and quiet parlors, men and women encounter one another unexpectedly, forced to decide whether love can bridge the divides of class, ambition, and hard circumstance.
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.