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American Literature — page 48
3,373 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 48 of 71.
The Adventures of a Suburbanite
Ellis Parker Butler
The suburban life is often painted as a tranquil retreat, but for one eager couple, it proves to be a chaotic theater of mechanical mishaps, eccentric neighbors, and a relentless, unquenchable urge to travel just eleven miles down the road.
The Affable Stranger
Peter McArthur
A weary writer seeks a clean slate by purging his post-war disillusionment into a book, only to find that the journey reveals the enduring, quiet pulse of humanity beneath the noise of modern life.
The Bishop's Shadow
I. T. (Ida Treadwell) Thurston
A neglected street boy finds a new moral compass through a chance encounter with a revered bishop, transforming his own life by attempting to pass on that same grace to others.
The Bradys Beyond Their Depth
Francis Worcester Doughty
A pair of intrepid New York detectives finds themselves outmatched in a perilous Southern marsh, where a ruthless nephew’s plot to steal a fortune forces them to confront a deadly, hidden conspiracy.
The girl with the green eyes
Clyde Fitch
The girl with the green eyes is a turbulent portrait of a marriage nearly undone by the corrosive power of groundless jealousy. It captures the frantic, destructive energy of a woman who cannot trust her own happiness.
The Intelligence Office (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The bustling, chaotic city masks a quiet, somber office where a mysterious clerk records the deepest, most desperate, and often contradictory wishes of the human heart. Here, the tangible desires of the world collide with the infinite.
The lost hunter: A tale of early times
John Turvill Adams
A solitary figure living on the fringes of civilization becomes the catalyst for a community’s moral reckoning, forcing neighbors to confront their prejudices and the vanishing remnants of the past.
The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan: As Told in the Camps of the White Pine Lumbermen for Generations During Which Time the Loggers Have Pioneered the Way Through the North Woods From Maine to California. Collected from Various Sources and Embellished for Publication
William B. Laughead
A mythical giant of the North Woods, Paul Bunyan turns the daunting labor of the American frontier into a series of impossible, larger-than-life feats performed with a blue ox and a sense of humor.
The Soul Scar: A Craig Kennedy Scientific Mystery Novel
Arthur B. (Arthur Benjamin) Reeve
A pioneering professor-detective applies the budding science of psychoanalysis to solve a high-society murder, proving that even the most carefully guarded secrets are written on the soul.
A Fortnight of Folly
Maurice Thompson
HOOK A gathering of literary types at a remote mountain hotel provides the setting for a sharp, skeptical look at the vanity of writers and the absurdity of seeking truth in fiction.
American Architecture: Studies
Montgomery Schuyler
A sharp, discerning survey of late-nineteenth-century building, this collection examines how American cities struggled—and often failed—to reconcile utilitarian construction with lasting artistic merit.
General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems
Vachel Lindsay
A traveling poet wanders the American heartland, trading verse for bread and seeking the divine in the dust of the everyday.
Hildegarde's Harvest
Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
A young woman’s journey from the sheltered comforts of country life to the rigid expectations of city society, eventually finding her path through service, friendship, and an unexpected crisis.
Postscripts
O. Henry
The world is a stage where the actors are often caught in the crossfire of their own absurdities, and the best way to survive the spectacle is to laugh at the confusion. This collection of vignettes captures the fleeting, often ridiculous pulse of late 19th-century American life, where high-minded pretense is…
Scattergood Baines
Clarence Budington Kelland
A legendarily shrewd, barefoot storekeeper arrives in a quiet New England valley and quietly orchestrates the lives, businesses, and futures of everyone around him.
The Beautiful Lady
Booth Tarkington
A man forced by poverty to become a human billboard on the streets of Paris encounters an exquisite woman who offers him the only thing he has left: pity. Bound by shame and social station, he finds that romance and reality are rarely the same.
The Butterfly House
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
In the stifling confines of a self-important New Jersey village, a quiet young woman’s literary success becomes a battlefield for the vanity and hidden truths of her neighbors.
The Frame Up
Richard Harding Davis
The truth is rarely as simple as a confession, and in the high-stakes game of New York politics, the most dangerous lies are the ones wrapped in a grain of fact. A principled public servant finds himself walking into an elaborate trap, where his own reputation becomes the primary currency for blackmail.
The Madonna of the Future
Henry James
An artist living in Florence clings to the hope of creating a singular, perfect masterpiece, but he finds himself trapped in a life of endless preparation, unable to bridge the distance between his ideals and his work.
The Mothers Of Honoré: From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899
Mary Hartwell Catherwood
A young man and a girl, both burdened by the erratic romantic lives of their elders, find their own long-standing friendship tested by the looming pressure of marriage and the sudden, distant call of the Spanish-American War.
The Ordeal: A Mountain Romance of Tennessee
Charles Egbert Craddock
The mountains of Tennessee hold secrets of grief, crime, and long-buried affection, forcing a mother to confront the limits of her own resolve. A lost child becomes the center of a quiet, desperate struggle against an unforgiving wilderness.
The Tin Box, and What it Contained
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Harry Gilbert is a hardworking, principled youth who finds that honesty is not just a moral virtue, but a shield against the schemes of the wealthy and corrupt. This classic tale follows the fortunes of an impoverished boy whose life is upended by the arrival of a wealthy, unsympathetic relative and a series of…
Two Little Confederates
Thomas Nelson Page
Two boys navigate the encroaching chaos of the Civil War from the sanctuary of their Virginia plantation, discovering that conflict transforms childhood games into grim realities. Their story offers a intimate, unsettling look at a domestic world unraveling as the lines between play and peril dissolve.
A Romance of the Republic
Lydia Maria Child
The struggle for freedom and identity collides with the harsh legal realities of a divided nation, tracing the lives of two sisters caught in the machinery of an unforgiving society.
A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike
Charles King
Amidst the chaos of the 1894 Pullman Strike, a soldier and a working girl must navigate the rigid barriers of class and the dangerous machinations of a self-serving agitator.
Boston Neighbours In Town and Out
Agnes Blake Poor
These interconnected stories capture the quiet, often stifling rhythms of Boston’s upper-class social circles, where small-town gossip and rigid expectations define the boundaries of a life well-lived.
City Crimes
George Thompson
HOOK A wealthy young man abandons his life of luxury to explore the hidden, squalid underworld of a nineteenth-century metropolis, hoping to use his fortune to save the impoverished and expose the corrupt.
Coffee and Repartee
John Kendrick Bangs
A sharp-witted boarder turns every morning meal into a theater of verbal sparring, relentlessly baiting his pompous, educated companions with absurd logic and playful defiance.
Coming Attraction
Fritz Leiber
A chilling vision of a future ruined by fear and vanity, where the survival of the species is secondary to the pursuit of dominance. This narrative explores how a society masks its own decay.
Donald McElroy, Scotch Irishman
Willie Walker Caldwell
Born into the rugged independence of the Virginia frontier on the eve of the American Revolution, a young man finds his path to love and duty inextricably linked to the birth of a new nation.
Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus
Josephine Chase
A dedicated young alumna returns to her alma mater to manage a student residence, discovering that guiding a new generation of women requires as much courage as earning an education.
Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848
Various
This collection captures the mid-19th-century American literary pulse through a curated blend of historical biography, serialized fiction, and reflective poetry.
Jeff Briggs's Love Story
Bret Harte
The rugged, rain-lashed landscape of a California mountain pass serves as the stage for a dramatic collision between a weary, romantic innkeeper and a refined, wealthy traveler. This tale of social divides, hidden debts, and the transformative power of love captures the fading spirit of the American frontier.
Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes
E. E. (Emma Elizabeth) Brown
A beloved physician and literary wit, this figure serves as a bridge between the intellectual rigor of early American medicine and the blossoming of a uniquely local, optimistic, and deeply humanistic literature.
Literary Hearthstones of Dixie
La Salle Corbell Pickett
These essays preserve the vanishing domestic and creative worlds of nineteenth-century Southern writers, capturing the intimacy of their homes and the flickering spirit of their vanished era.
Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man
Sinclair Lewis
Our Mr. Wrenn is a gentle, imaginative clerk who longs to trade his desk for the romantic landscapes of his daydreams. His quest for a grander life reveals the quiet, often hilarious tension between the world we inhabit and the worlds we invent.
The Black Riders, and Other Lines
Stephen Crane
The struggle for meaning often leads to the discovery that the universe is indifferent, yet the human heart continues to beat with an irrepressible, if painful, defiance.
The Happy Venture
Edith Ballinger Price
When their mother falls ill, three siblings carve out a new life in an isolated farmhouse. Through resourcefulness and unexpected friendships, they discover that home is not a place, but the people you protect.
The Short Cut
Jackson Gregory
A man falsely accused of murder takes to the mountain wilderness, where he relies on a clever woman to help him dismantle the schemes of the men who orchestrated his downfall.
The snow-image: a childish miracle
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A cold winter’s day transforms into a quiet, impossible miracle when two imaginative children shape a playmate from the fallen snow, only to have their creation tested by the rigid logic of the adult world.
Unleavened Bread
Robert Grant
A woman of intense, unyielding conviction maneuvers her way through the shifting landscape of American social and political life, driven by a relentless hunger for status and a singular, inflexible moral code.
William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author
John Coleman Adams
A devoted artist and naturalist, William Hamilton Gibson bridged the gap between scientific precision and artistic wonder, teaching a generation to observe the hidden, luminous details of the natural world.
A Mountain Woman
Elia Wilkinson Peattie
These stories capture the stark, often unforgiving intersection of frontier hardship and the enduring complexities of the human heart. They offer a window into a rugged world where beauty and tragedy walk hand in hand.
A Song of a Single Note: A Love Story
Amelia E. Barr
A young woman navigates the divided loyalties of the American Revolution, finding that devotion to truth and love requires both courage and quiet, steadfast endurance.
America First
Frances Nimmo Greene
This is a story of young people finding their footing in a world at war, where courage is defined not by the absence of fear, but by the resolve to act in spite of it.
Betty Lee, Freshman
Harriet Pyne Grove
Moving to a new city and navigating the intimidating hallways of a massive high school, a young girl discovers that growing up is the most moving adventure of all.
Days in the Open
Lathan A. (Lathan Augustus) Crandall
The spirit of the wilderness and the quiet joy of the angling life call to those who appreciate the patience of the stream. This collection of sketches celebrates the profound, unhurried connection between the outdoors and the human heart.
Henry Is Twenty: A Further Episodic History of Henry Calverly, 3rd
Samuel Merwin
Henry Calverly is twenty, and the world is far too small to contain his ambition, his insecurity, and his erratic, surging genius. He is a young man struggling to find his footing in a town that expects him to be either a saint or a failure.