Free summaries
American Literature — page 5
217 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 5 of 5.
The Man Next Door
Emerson Hough
A Wyoming cattle baron sells his ranch for millions and moves his daughter to Chicago, where an escalating neighborhood feud with a wealthy industrialist tests their rustic values against high-society snobbery.
The Indifference of Juliet
Grace S. (Grace Smith) Richmond
A captivating tale of love, family, and self-discovery set in early 20th-century America.
Prudence Says So
Ethel Hueston
A heartwarming tale of family, love, and growth in a small-town parsonage.
Susan Clegg and a Man in the House
Anne Warner
A spinster's orderly life dissolves into manageable chaos when she takes in a young relative, an ambitious printing press, and a town's worth of endless small-town opinions.
Her mother's secret
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
A young woman faces an impossible choice between her heart’s desire and the dark, hidden history of her family. Only an unwanted, truth-telling stranger can break the chains of a looming scandal.
Janet of the Dunes
Harriet T. (Harriet Theresa) Comstock
A wild coastal storm, a long-hidden family secret, and a spirited young woman navigating love and duty define this classic tale of the Long Island shore.
Glory of Youth
Temple Bailey
A sheltered, mourning girl and a wealthy aviator yield to impulsive romantic choices, only to discover that true devotion demands sacrifice, self-knowledge, and the courage to face life's storms together.
A Small Boy and Others
Henry James
Memory converts the fleeting noise of a nineteenth-century Manhattan boyhood into the vast, luminous architecture of an artist’s conscious beginning.
Americans All: Stories of American Life of To-Day
Unknown
A rich portrait of early twentieth-century America unfolds across a collection of short stories that celebrate the humor, hardship, and common humanity uniting a diverse nation.
Anthem
Ayn Rand
A young man risks his life in a dark, collective future where even the word "I" has been erased from human memory.
Otherwise Phyllis
Meredith Nicholson
Phyllis Kirkwood navigates small-town scandal, fractured families, and local financial schemes in turn-of-the-century Indiana with unflagging wit, resourcefulness, and independence.
An American Suffragette
Isaac Newton Stevens
A woman’s march through Manhattan sparks a romance that soon becomes bound up in a high-stakes murder trial, testing both political ideals and human devotion.
Rip Van Winkle
Washington Irving
A genial, lazy villager wanders into the misty Catskill Mountains to escape his wife's sharp tongue, only to fall into a magical twenty-year slumber that spans a revolutionary transformation of his entire world.
Patty's Success
Carolyn Wells
A wealthy young woman returning from an idyllic European tour faces the quiet discomfort of her own privilege and vows to earn her own wages to aid an impoverished artist.
Skippy Bedelle: His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete Man of the World
Owen Johnson
A fifteen-year-old prep school student navigates the agonizing transition from a woman-hating urchin into a self-proclaimed man of the world through a series of grand inventions, romantic disasters, and absurd social rivalries.
The Short-story
Unknown
A beginner's window into American and British fiction, this anthology traces the evolution of short prose from fireside folk legend to the psychological, moral, and suspenseful narratives of the nineteenth century.
Mr. Opp
Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
A small-town dreamer with grand ambitions steps up to carry a heavy burden of family duty, refusing to lose his optimism or his dignity even as his wild enterprises collapse around him.
Clematis
Bertha B. (Bertha Browning) Cobb
A neglected city child runs away from her sterile surroundings, only to find that an unexpected journey into the country unlocks the hidden truth of her heritage.
East of Eden
Isa Glenn
A fragile talent destroyed by the crushing friction between artistic ambition and societal expectations.
In The Boyhood of Lincoln: A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk
Hezekiah Butterworth
Set across the rugged frontier of early nineteenth-century Indiana and Illinois, this historical romance traces how the compassionate principles of a wandering schoolmaster and the quiet integrity of a young, unpolished Abraham Lincoln shape a frontier community.
The Beloved Woman
Kathleen Thompson Norris
A spirited young woman, lifted from working-class obscurity into New York’s elite society, must choose between an alluring married lover and the quiet integrity of her true home.
The Flaw in the Sapphire
Charles M. Snyder
A eccentric young man who buys sold-clothes finds serialized pages of a oriental mystery on discarded shirt collars, setting off a dual story that moves between a Philadelphia boarding house and an Indian palace.
The Escape of Mr. Trimm: His Plight and other Plights
Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb
An unpunished crime, a desperate flight, and an inescapable set of steel shackles test the absolute limits of human endurance.
Peak and Prairie: From a Colorado Sketch-book
Anna Fuller
Against the dramatic backdrop of Pikes Peak, Eastern health-seekers and local pioneers cross paths in a frontier town where high mountain air reshapes ambitions, romances, and moral resolve.
The Fire People
Ray Cummings
An invading force arrives in silver vessels, wielding a light that burns whole towns to ash and forcing humanity to fight for its very home.