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American Literature — page 47
3,373 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 47 of 71.
A Chilhowee Lily: 1911
Charles Egbert Craddock
When rumor sweeps through a remote Appalachian gap that a forgotten chest lies buried beneath a wild white bloom, every idle hand takes up a pickaxe, and one young woman must decide whether her word is worth more than her lover's trust.
A Love Story Reversed: 1898
Edward Bellamy
A woman risks her dignity to confess her feelings to an ordinary man, launching a quiet social experiment that completely upends Victorian courting etiquette.
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.
Cambridge Neighbors (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
William Dean Howells
In the twilight of nineteenth-century New England, a young editor steps into an intellectual sanctuary where scholars dig among roses and conversation is treated as a high art.
Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man: (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A dying romantic faces the tragic irrelevance of a life spent avoiding real human bonds.
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.
Polly of Lady Gay Cottage
Emma C. Dowd
Polly is a selfless, spirited girl whose deep devotion to her adoptive parents and friends is tested by the sudden arrival of long-lost biological relatives. She navigates the complex demands of loyalty, sacrifice, and belonging with unwavering integrity.
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.
Riley Love-Lyrics
James Whitcomb Riley
A heart looks back through the haze of lost summers, finding that true devotion outlasts both youthful rapture and time itself.
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.
Stories by American Authors, Volume 3
Various
A shadow of unseen sound; a portrait painted so honestly it breaks the model's heart; a leap into darkness over a stolen promise; a home shattered by a midnight axe—human motives fracture under the lightest strain.
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 Statesmen Snowbound
Robert Fitzgerald
The snowbound train offers a peculiar, captive stage for the boisterous, self-important men of the American legislature, who pass the time by trading stories of personal failure, ghosts, and political ruin.
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.
What Can She Do?
Edward Payson Roe
When sudden financial ruin strips three pampered New York sisters of their Fifth Avenue home, they are forced into the country to face the cold realities of self-reliance, temptation, and survival.
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.
The Little Violinist
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
This narrative essay serves as a quiet, somber meditation on the cost of childhood fame. It contrasts the protected, imaginative lives of two young brothers with the exhausting reality of a child performer, ultimately grappling with the tragedy of a life cut short by the demands of the stage.
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.
Billy and the Big Stick
Richard Harding Davis
A resourceful electrical engineer relies on nerve, an empty threat of war, and a theatrical performance to extract his rightful wages from a volatile Caribbean dictator.
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.
Hepsey Burke
Frank N. (Frank Nash) Westcott
HOOK In a small, tradition-bound village, a spirited sixty-year-old widow becomes the unofficial guardian of the local clergy, maneuvering behind the scenes to mend broken spirits and challenge the town’s rigid social hierarchies.
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.
Introducing the American Spirit
Edward Alfred Steiner
The American spirit is a complex, often contradictory force that reveals itself most clearly when viewed through the critical eyes of an outsider. It is a portrait of a nation in constant, restless motion.
'Lena Rivers
Mary Jane Holmes
The journey of a young woman finding her place in a divided family, this novel captures the tension between social ambition and the quiet integrity of the heart. It is a story of resilience, inheritance, and the enduring search for belonging.
Lincoln & other poems
Edwin Markham
This collection of verse captures the tension between the idealism of a new American century and the grinding realities of industrial inequality. It serves as a stirring, rhythmic manifesto for human brotherhood, rooted in the dignity of the common laborer.
Little Annie's Ramble (From "Twice Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
This gentle, observant stroll through a nineteenth-century town captures the fleeting threshold between childhood innocence and the burdens of adult life. It is a meditative exploration of how a child’s perspective can briefly restore a weary spirit.
Midnight
Rutherford G. (Rutherford George) Montgomery
The story of a chestnut stallion born to the high, unforgiving ridges of the American West, this narrative tracks the life of a wild horse who must navigate a landscape filled with predators, natural disasters, and the constant, encroaching pressure of mankind.
Poems on Slavery
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This collection of verse serves as a stark, lyrical indictment of American chattel slavery. It uses the power of rhythmic storytelling to demand moral accountability from a nation that claimed to value both liberty and faith.
Rose O'Paradise
Grace Miller White
A young girl, a stolen inheritance, and a haunting melody weave together in a struggle for justice and belonging. Against the backdrop of a lonely, wind-swept farmhouse and the humble shacks of Paradise Road, a soul finds its worth in the most unlikely of places.
The Debtor: A Novel
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
The Carroll family arrives in the suburban village of Banbridge, projecting an air of genteel, aristocratic ease that masks a profound and crumbling insolvency. Their struggle to maintain appearances in a community that thrives on observation and gossip forms the core of this poignant, socially observant drama.
The Fortune of the Landrays
Vaughan Kester
A sweeping chronicle of the American West, this multi-generational saga explores the heavy cost of ambition, the fragility of fortune, and the enduring, often painful, ties that bind a family to its past.
An Old Woman's Tale: (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
This atmospheric sketch explores the thin, porous veil between the waking world and the dreamscape, where local history and the restless spirits of the past converge in a quiet New England village.
Elder Conklin and Other Stories
Frank Harris
A rugged, unvarnished portrait of the American frontier, this collection captures the moral friction between the lawless, the ambitious, and the idealistic in a developing landscape.
Jane Journeys On
Ruth Comfort Mitchell
The journey of a young woman from a stifling Vermont village to the vibrant, demanding streets of New York City, where she learns that true independence is found not in running away, but in choosing the right companion for the road ahead.
Miss Maitland, Private Secretary
Geraldine Bonner
A young woman’s poise and hidden history become the epicenter of a wealthy family’s unraveling in this atmospheric mystery. Caught between a failing marriage and a series of professional betrayals, a social secretary finds her integrity tested by a high-stakes investigation.
Sudden Jim
Clarence Budington Kelland
A young man, long adrift and aimless, must reinvent himself as a hard-nosed industrialist to save a failing mill and win the respect of a formidable, tradition-bound father.