Free summaries
American Literature — page 13
3,373 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 13 of 71.
The Apple of Discord
Earle Ashley Walcott
A young lawyer is thrust into a high-stakes power struggle between warring industrial titans and the volatile, incendiary labor unrest of 1870s San Francisco.
Fernley House
Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
HOOK In the sun-drenched gardens of an old estate, a group of young people learn that kindness, curiosity, and the courage to act are the greatest treasures of all.
Roderick Hudson
Henry James
The life of a gifted artist is a dangerous apprenticeship to his own ego. When a wealthy patron pulls a brilliant, restless sculptor from the stifling atmosphere of a New England town to the artistic crucible of Rome, he inadvertently sets in motion a tragedy of unchecked ambition and the volatile collision between…
The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete
John Greenleaf Whittier
A quiet, lifelong commitment to human equality, spiritual stillness, and political courage shapes a vast body of American writing.
Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings
Joel Chandler Harris
The trickster Brer Rabbit outwits his stronger, hungrier adversaries through sheer cunning, forever escaping the brier-patch and the snare. Within the quiet cabin of an elderly storyteller, ancient animal lore meets the complex social landscape of the post-Reconstruction South.
You can't win
Jack Black
A young man enters the American underworld of the late nineteenth century, learning the trades of burglary, safecropping, and hobo life before discovering that the game is stacked against him.
The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton
A relentless ambition drives a striking Midwestern woman to climb the rigid peaks of high society, discarding husbands and social codes in her unquenchable thirst for material triumph.
Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative
Harry Kemp
A poet’s wild youth, told without apology: the story of an American wanderer who trades steel mills, boxcars, and jail cells for the relentless pursuit of verse.
Tales of a Traveller
Washington Irving
Ghostly portraits wink from dark walls, ruined aristocrats nurse deadly vendetta, and obsessed treasure-seekers dig for pirate gold under the cover of night. Washington Irving’s frame narrative gathers a chorus of restless storytellers to probe the fine line between human imagination and real terror.
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
Margaret Sidney
Hardship and good humor live side by side in the little brown house, where five fatherless siblings and their cheerful mother discover that warmth, resourcefulness, and mutual support can turn the sparsest life into a rich adventure.
The Spy
James Fenimore Cooper
A humble peddler navigates the dangerous, divided neutral ground of Revolutionary Westchester, bearing the bitter burden of universal contempt to serve a secret, sacred patriotic trust.
Dear Enemy
Jean Webster
When an energetic socialite takes over a dreary orphanage, letters to her friends record the humor, heartbreak, and unexpected romance of transforming the institution.
The Lady, or the Tiger?
Frank R. Stockton
In a court where trial by ordeal is elevated to a public spectacle, a young lover's fate rests entirely on a subtle gesture from a jealous princess.
Drum-Taps
Walt Whitman
A city explodes into martial enthusiasm, only to watch its idealistic young men march away into a grinding, bloody war of unimaginable scale.
The Raven, and The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe
A grieving lover, a midnight visitor, and a mathematical dissection of literary terror collide in a single, perfectly calculated masterpiece.
The Song of Hiawatha: An Epic Poem
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A hero rises to unify the forest tribes, charting a path through legendary battles, deep sorrow, and the arrival of a changing world.
The Dreamer: A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe
Mary Newton Stanard
A boy's sensitive heart, kindled by tragedy and high ambition, seeks beauty across a landscape of bitter poverty, unrequited love, and relentless public judgment.
The Shuttle
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A quiet sisterly devotion sets out to undo twelve years of ruin in a magnificent, decaying English house.
The Big Trip Up Yonder
Kurt Vonnegut
When the discovery of anti-gerasone halts human aging, packed families are forced to spend decades jockeying for floor space and the whims of tyrannical, immortal patriarchs.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
A quiet afternoon along the Connecticut shore gives way to a sweeping consideration of mid-nineteenth-century thought, spanning intimate personal memories, classical philosophical debates, scientific evolution, and critical literary reviews.
The letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932
Hart Crane
An ambitious young poet battles financial precarity, commercial drudgery, and domestic discord while fighting to forge a visionary original voice in modern American poetry.
Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million
O. Henry
A million city lives collide, overlap, and trade places in twenty-three short stories where identity is fluid, romance is a gamble, and the metropolis always gets the last word.
The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington
A once-proud family's decline mirrors the changing American landscape in this poignant tale of pride, loss, and transformation.
The Land of Little Rain
Mary Austin
A lyrical exploration of California's arid landscapes, where nature, history, and human resilience intertwine.
From the Earth to the Moon, Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: and a Trip Round It
Jules Verne
A massive cannon built in the Florida dirt fires three men into the sky, sending them on a thrilling, mathematically precise journey to orbit the moon.
Skylark Three
E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith
Driven by runaway power and genocide across deep space, two Earthmen and their wives cross galaxies to stop an alien species that plans the total extermination of all other life in the universe.
Venus in Boston: A Romance of City Life
George Thompson
A innocent orphan girl struggles to maintain her virtue as she is hunted across mid-nineteenth-century Boston by corrupt politicians, cunning swindlers, and violent criminals.
Rural architecture
Lewis F. (Lewis Falley) Allen
A properly designed rural dwelling is neither a grand, empty palace nor a crude shelter, but a thoughtful harmony of proportion, utility, and natural setting. Lewis F. Allen offers a clear, practical vision for creating American farmsteads that balance everyday convenience with quiet, unpretentious beauty.
The Heart Line: A Drama of San Francisco
Gelett Burgess
Beneath the vibrant surface of pre-earthquake San Francisco, a charismatic palmist and a free-spirited bohemian girl navigate a web of spiritualist charlatans, high-society romance, and fatal choices.
The Life of David Belasco
William Winter
A titan of the American stage wages a fierce war for artistic control while engineering breathtaking, larger-than-life theatrical spectacles.
Tom Sawyer, Detective
Mark Twain
A spring-fever trip down the Mississippi entangles Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in a dark web of diamond thefts, mistaken identities, and a small-town murder trial.
The Jolly Corner
Henry James
A long-absent expat stalks the empty rooms of his New York birthplace, desperate to confront the ghostly specter of the man he would have become had he stayed.
Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2
John Wilson Townsend
A rich green pasture of bluegrass literature stretches across more than a century of American creation, gathering forgotten frontier voices and famous native sons under one roof.
The Victim: A Romance of the Real Jefferson Davis
Dixon, Thomas, Jr.
A fiery defender of Southern honor faces impossible odds, guiding a nation through war only to discover that the heaviest burdens are borne in silence after the cause is lost.
Whitman: A Study
John Burroughs
A critical defense of an unconventional poet turns into a sweeping celebration of the human body, the American landscape, and the democratic spirit.
Billy Budd
Herman Melville
A young sailor’s flawless innocence collides with an officer’s deadly malice aboard a British warship, forcing a tragic clash between rigid naval law and human justice.
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A quiet boarding-house table becomes a battleground of ideas as a poet, a scientist, and an astronomer debate faith, specialized knowledge, and the human heart.
Watch Yourself Go By
Al. G. (Alfred Griffith) Field
Behind the greasepaint and brass bands of old-time American show business lies a boy who never quite lost his wonder, watching his own life unfold like a travelling parade.
Hawthorne: (English Men of Letters Series)
Henry James
This critical study captures the quiet, interior life of America’s most evocative novelist, balancing deep admiration for his artistry with a measured assessment of his provincial limitations.
The case of Charles Dexter Ward
H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
An obsession with a notorious eighteenth-century alchemist leads a young man into a web of forbidden occult research and ancestral horror. What begins as a scholarly curiosity soon unravels into a struggle against an ancient, resurrected evil.
The Letters of Henry James (Vol. I)
Henry James
These private dispatches reveal the interior architecture of an artist in exile, tracing a lifelong, restless dialogue between American origins and the pull of European culture.
The Night of the Long Knives
Fritz Leiber
HOOK In a world ravaged by nuclear war, three hardened killers wander the irradiated ruins, driven by the inescapable, primal urge to murder everything they encounter.
The tunnel thru the air
William D. (William Delbert) Gann
This narrative serves as a speculative blueprint for the future, blending a young man’s romantic devotion with his rise as an inventor during a global conflict that mirrors biblical prophecy. It presents a vision where personal discipline and spiritual alignment lead to technological mastery and ultimate peace.
A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South
Anna J. (Anna Julia) Cooper
A profound, overlooked perspective from the nineteenth century, this work asserts that the future of racial progress in America depends entirely upon the empowerment and education of Black women.
Tales of Men and Ghosts
Edith Wharton
These ten interconnected tales explore the precarious border between the rational world and the spectral, where the obsessions of the living often prove more haunting than any ghost.
The Bells, and Other Poems
Edgar Allan Poe
The poet’s fevered, musical exploration of loss and longing remains a haunting, foundational pillar of American literature. Through rhythmic intensity and dreamlike imagery, these verses endure as a testament to the enduring power of melancholic beauty.
The Eagle's Heart
Hamlin Garland
The spirit of the American West, in all its raw, untamed intensity, finds a singular vessel in a young man searching for a purpose that the settled world refuses to provide.
John Barleycorn
Jack London
The struggle for self-possession unfolds against a backdrop of global adventure, as a man traces his lifelong, treacherous intimacy with alcohol. It serves as both a memoir of addiction and a philosophical inquiry into the human condition.