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American Literature — page 88
4,619 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 88 of 97.
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 Sun of Saratoga: A Romance of Burgoyne's Surrender
Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler
A young American soldier struggles with the heavy burden of guardianship during the decisive Saratoga campaign, balancing the fate of the colonies against the quiet tug of a forbidden romance.
'way down in Lonesome Cove: 1895
Charles Egbert Craddock
The rugged, isolated life of a mountain ranger and his family is shattered when a long-simmering grudge over a missing horse turns a quiet community into a powder keg of suspicion and impending violence.
"Who he?"
Alfred Bester
The frantic, neon-lit hustle of 1950s Manhattan serves as the stage for a man living a life he no longer recognizes. This is a story about the terrifying, fragile boundary between our public personas and the hidden darknesses we try to outrun.
Year of the Big Thaw
Marion Zimmer Bradley
An ordinary Connecticut farmer faces an extraordinary choice when a visitor from the stars crash-lands on his property. This gentle, rustic account explores the quiet intersection of small-town life and the vast, unknown heavens.
A Hazard of New Fortunes
William Dean Howells
This panoramic social novel captures the volatile energy of Gilded Age New York, where the collision of sudden wealth, industrial unrest, and artistic ambition upends the lives of an ordinary family. It is a masterful, compassionate study of how easily "comfortable people" are swept into the currents of history.
A patriot lad of old Boston
Russell Gordon Carter
Young Donald Alden navigates the perils of occupied Boston, balancing loyalty to his rebellious family with the complexities of war, ultimately finding a way to serve the American cause right under the noses of the British.
A Proposal Under Difficulties: A Farce
John Kendrick Bangs
A nervous young suitor rehearses his marriage proposal to an empty room, only to be overheard by the housemaid—setting off a snowball of misunderstandings, jealous rivalries, and absurd domestic entanglements.
Carolyn of the sunny heart
Ruth Belmore Endicott
A sunny-natured girl and her loyal, intelligent dog navigate the complexities of city life and coastal summers, inadvertently untangling mysteries that touch the lives of those around them.
Ellen Walton
Alvin Addison
Driven by obsession and thwarted pride, a relentless villain pursues an innocent heiress across the American frontier, invoking deception and violent schemes to bend her will.
From the Land of the Snow-Pearls: Tales from Puget Sound
Ella Higginson
These stories capture the rugged, quiet intensity of life in the Pacific Northwest, where the vast beauty of the Puget Sound landscape mirrors the hidden emotional depths of the people dwelling within it.
Rollo in the Woods
Jacob Abbott
A young boy’s day in the woods becomes a moral testing ground, where the building of a simple hut reveals the true weight of pride, impatience, and the necessity of reconciliation between cousins.
Short Stories. Early October, 1923
Various
This collection serves as a vibrant time capsule of 1923, offering a diverse array of pulp adventures, western dramas, and period advertisements that defined the popular fiction market of the early twentieth century.
Stephen H. Branch's Alligator, Vol. 1 no. 10, June 26, 1858
Unknown
This erratic, self-published periodical serves as a volatile dispatch from the mid-nineteenth-century New York City underworld, blending personal memoir with sharp, often brutal, political commentary.
The Late Mrs. Null
Frank R. Stockton
Midbranch plantation serves as the improbable stage for a comedy of errors, where tangled romances, stubborn ancestral feuds, and persistent misunderstandings dictate the fate of its residents.
The Parlor Car
William Dean Howells
A young woman’s dramatic escape from her engagement turns into a farcical entrapment when she and her former suitor are left stranded in a solitary railroad car. This witty, tightly contained comedy of manners captures the friction of courtship in the late nineteenth century.
The Romance and Tragedy of a Widely Known Business Man of New York
William Ingraham Russell
The life of a New York businessman becomes a cautionary meditation on the fragility of fortune, the coldness of fair-weather friends, and the enduring, singular power of a devoted marriage.
Widger's Quotations from the Project Gutenberg Editions of the Works of William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells
This collection serves as a vast, curated map to the expansive literary terrain of a foundational American realist, organizing his novels, essays, and personal reflections into a treasury of sharp, observational prose.
Winner Take All
Larry Evans
A young drifter with a moral code as unyielding as the Western plains finds himself pitted against the corrupt, cynical machinery of the Eastern boxing world. His journey is a collision between grit and greed, where the only prize worth winning is his own integrity.
With The Eyes Shut: 1898
Edward Bellamy
A weary traveler falls asleep on a train, only to wake in a future where the printed word has been entirely supplanted by the phonograph. This dream-like satire explores a society that has traded literacy for convenience.
A Bell's Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The iron tongue of a historic bell narrates its own long, turbulent life, bridging the gap between colonial wilderness and the modern city. This meditation on time and mortality reveals how inanimate objects observe humanity’s transient joys and sorrows.
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 Message From Our Sponsor
Henry Slesar
This satire explores the quiet collapse of human industry, showing how a haunting Martian melody and a general lack of ambition quietly dismantle Earth’s workforce, replacing productivity with a pervasive, global lethargy.
A winter in retirement
Hannah Blaney Washburn
A family finds spiritual fortitude during a secluded New England winter by reading tales of ancient Roman faith and local tradition, ultimately discovering that resilience is a shared inheritance across time and geography.
Avery
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
When a self-absorbed husband faces the imagined terror of his sick wife's death during an ether-induced hallucination, he awakens to a second chance at devotion.
Chippings with a Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A meditative wanderer observes the peculiar work of a village tombstone carver, discovering that the blunt business of marking the dead reveals more about the living than it does about those beneath the soil.
Christmas at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson
Helen Topping Miller
The life of a founder often ends not in the halls of power, but in the quiet, demanding embrace of home. Here is a portrait of a man reconciling his public legacy with his private heart.
Hiram in the Middle West
Burbank L. Todd
A young, ambitious farmer arrives in the Midwest to transform a neglected property into a model of modern agriculture. Through grit and scientific ingenuity, he turns soil into profit and discovers the value of community.
Lydia of the Pines
Honoré Morrow
The daughter of a displaced, struggling family grows to womanhood in a frontier town, eventually choosing a life of principled stewardship over the cold, hollow greed that defines the men around her.
Marriage à la mode
Ward, Humphry, Mrs.
This is a somber, psychological study of a high-stakes cultural clash between an impulsive American heiress and an English gentleman. It explores the inevitable fraying of a marriage built on mutual misunderstanding and the irredeemable nature of betrayal.
Mary Louise Stands the Test
Emma Speed Sampson
A young bride must navigate the sudden loss of both her family fortune and her husband, only to discover that the mysteries surrounding her grandfather’s estate are far deeper than a simple missing inheritance.
Paul Bunyan and His Loggers
Otis T. Howd
In the snowbound bunkhouses of the Lake States, lonely lumberjacks forged a giant to match the overwhelming wilderness they were sent to conquer.
QRM-Interplanetary
George O. (George Oliver) Smith
The vast silence of space is bridged by a fragile, man-made link, where a single bureaucratic misstep threatens to extinguish the life of those keeping the signals alive.
Samantha among the Brethren
Marietta Holley
The struggle for women’s voices in the church is a comedy of manners and a serious debate over who holds the keys to authority. It captures the clash between domestic devotion and the rigid structures of institutional power.
The Bright Shawl
Joseph Hergesheimer
A young man travels to Cuba with a romantic, singular purpose: to sacrifice his life for the cause of national freedom. He soon discovers that the true cost of heroism is not a glorious death, but a long, soul-eroding deception.
The cable
Marion Ames Taggart
HOOK A young woman’s headstrong choices and deep-seated faith collide when she falls for a man whose past holds a secret that threatens to undo her entire moral compass.
The Complete Works of Artemus Ward
Artemus Ward
A roaming showman navigates the absurdities of nineteenth-century America with a sharp tongue and a misspelled, phonetically rendered wit that exposes the era's grand pretensions.
The Good Time Coming
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
The human heart often chases a future of prosperity that remains perpetually out of reach. This narrative explores the quiet redirection of a man who learns that true contentment is found only when one stops looking for it in material gain.
The Madness of Philip, and Other Tales of Childhood
Josephine Daskam Bacon
These stories capture the unruly, imaginative, and often baffling inner lives of children as they navigate the rigid expectations of the adult world.
The other Miller girl
Joslyn Gray
A young girl’s unconventional efforts to heal a grief-stricken neighbor bring unexpected transformation to a quiet New England village.
True Riches
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
The pursuit of wealth often masks a deeper, spiritual poverty, and the things we hold most dear are the very things that test our moral resolve.
A Belated Guest (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
William Dean Howells
The privilege of recording the past is a heavy burden, as the historian risks turning sweet, private memories into a public duty that may wear out its welcome with an increasingly hurried world.
Between Friends
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
An embittered, reclusive sculptor finds his cold existence challenged by a young model and a haunting past. This story maps the slow, painful thawing of a man who has retreated into the wreckage of his own grievances.
Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5: Emerson
John Morley
This critical portrait strips away the mythic layers surrounding an American icon to reveal a thinker whose most enduring strength was his unwavering commitment to individual sincerity. It offers a balanced, rigorous assessment of a man who transformed his own life into a laboratory for the soul.
Green Fancy
George Barr McCutcheon
A traveler’s casual walk through a mountain wilderness leads him into a web of international intrigue, where he must rescue a distressed noblewoman from a nest of conspirators. This tale of high stakes and hidden identities unfurls against the backdrop of a world on the brink of war.
In the Dead of Night
John T. (John Thomas) McIntyre
A soldier of fortune returns to New York, only to find himself ensnared in a web of deceit, stolen identities, and a high-stakes conspiracy involving a mysterious packet.
People Like That: A Novel
Kate Langley Bosher
A woman living in a neglected corner of the city discovers that her quest for independence is inseparable from the struggles of the marginalized people living right outside her window.
Rising in the world
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
This cautionary tale follows two college friends whose diverging paths—one paved with cold, calculated ambition, the other with steady, moral integrity—reveal the true cost of success. It is a story of shifting fortunes, where the pursuit of status eventually collapses under the weight of character.