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American Literature — page 18
3,373 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 18 of 71.
The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851
Various
A mid-nineteenth-century literary compendium gathers serialized fiction, European politics, polar exploration, fine arts, and social commentary into a single vibrant cross-section of mid-century intellectual life.
Mark Twain's Letters
Mark Twain
A young printer leaves his Missouri home to wander through a series of restless trades, mailing raw, unvarnished dispatches to his family whenever he finds enough light to write by.
Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis
Richard Harding Davis
To live at the absolute center of one's era requires an appetite for action, a devotion to family, and an unshakeable belief that the world is waiting to be documented.
International Short Stories: American
Unknown
This anthology gathers two centuries of distinctively American voices, capturing a nation's shifting landscapes, social anxieties, and eccentric humor through the intimate lens of short fiction.
Hawthorne and His Circle
Julian Hawthorne
A son’s affectionate memoir captures the domestic intimacies, literary friendships, and European travels that shaped one of nineteenth-century America’s most celebrated authors.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
George Edward Woodberry
A solitary boy walks the pine woods of Maine, grows into an obscure ghost in a Salem attic, and eventually shapes the moral imagination of a nation.
The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale Founded Upon the Mysteries of Electricity
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A teenage boy inadvertently summons an elemental force through his electrical experiments, receiving a suite of unbelievable futuristic gadgets that hurl him into a whirlwind global adventure.
The Touchstone
Edith Wharton
Desperate for money to marry the woman he loves, a struggling young lawyer sells the intimate private letters of a deceased famous novelist who once adored him.
Clotelle
William Wells Brown
Born into the shadow of systemic bondage, a daughter of mixed lineage navigates peril, loss, and the relentless pursuit of freedom across two continents.
Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled During Her Visit Among the "Pennsylvania Germans"
Edith May Bertels Thomas
Combining a homey story with a regional cookbook, this manual reveals how domestic thrift, structured study, and rural wisdom turn an untrained city woman into a master housekeeper.
H. R
Edwin Lefevre
A young bank clerk turns spectacle, advertising, and public sentiment into instruments of personal advancement, conquering New York society by sheer force of personality.
The Little Lady of Lagunitas: A Franco-Californian Romance
Richard Savage
A sprawling frontier melodrama gives way to a globe-trotting story of conspiracy, deceit, and rightful inheritance in nineteenth-century California and Europe.
Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions
Slason Thompson
A vibrant portrait of a legendary American newspaperman, this biography reveals how a child's imagination and a rogue's sense of mischief combined to shape a unique figure in nineteenth-century letters.
The Crucible
Mark Lee Luther
A young woman sent to a state reformatory struggles to shed the stigma of her past and carve out a life in New York City.
The Spell of the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines
Isabel Anderson
Lush insular landscapes, intricate tribal customs, and colonial statecraft converge as an intrepid early-twentieth-century American traveler navigates the shifting political and cultural waters of the newly acquired Pacific territories.
Work: A Story of Experience
Louisa May Alcott
A young woman sets out into the world to earn her own living, discovering that honest labor, self-reliance, and sisterhood offer the truest path to a meaningful life.
Mark Twain's Letters
Mark Twain
A restless young printer flees home to roam northern cities, chasers of fortune, and riverboats, slowly transforming his raw observational wit into a world-renowned voice.
Lad: A Dog
Albert Payson Terhune
A noble, eighty-pound collie defends his home and loved ones through extraordinary trials, displaying absolute loyalty and unwavering courage.
The Humors of Falconbridge: A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes
Falconbridge
A collection of mid-nineteenth-century sketches captures the quirky encounters, eccentric personalities, and rural misadventures of early American life with sharp comic observation.
Si Klegg, Book 6: Si and Shorty, with Their Boy Recruits, Enter on the Atlanta Campaign
John McElroy
On the eve of the Atlanta Campaign, two seasoned Union veterans take on a squad of raw Indiana recruits, determined to forge green boys into hardened soldiers while navigating the absurdities, perils, and heartbreaks of life on the march.
When the movies were young
Linda Arvidson
In a landscape of makeshift studios and nickelodeons, a small troupe of theater castoffs stumbles blindly into shaping the modern motion picture industry.
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A devoted Acadian woman spends her entire life traversing the vast American wilderness in search of her displaced betrothed after British forces exile their entire village on their wedding day.
To the Last Man
Zane Grey
A violent family grudge collides with an unexpected romance in the dust of the Tonto Basin, where two young survivors must choose between inherited hatred and their own desperate desire for peace.
Complete Poetical Works
Bret Harte
Rough frontiersmen, elegant heiresses, ghostly cavaliers, and chatting steam engines mingle in a sweeping poetic landscape of early California and Civil War America.
The Story of a Bad Boy
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
A spirited, honest look at the messy reality of growing up, this story rejects the sugary tropes of Victorian childhood to celebrate the impulsive, imperfect, and thoroughly human experience of a New England boy.
Manhattan Transfer
John Dos Passos
HOOK A sprawling, kinetic mosaic of New York City in the early 20th century, this novel captures the frantic collision of immigrants, social climbers, and dreamers struggling against the relentless gears of the metropolis.
Si Klegg, Book 2: Thru the Stone River Campaign and in Winter Quarters at Murfreesboro
John McElroy
The mud of Tennessee provides the stage for a young soldier’s education, where survival depends as much on foraging for bacon as it does on surviving the winter at Murfreesboro.
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table
Oliver Wendell Holmes
This observant, conversational collection of essays captures the intellectual and social life of a mid-19th-century Boston boardinghouse through the eyes of a scholarly narrator. It serves as a philosophical record of a changing American identity.
Mince Pie
Christopher Morley
HOOK This collection of lighthearted, observant essays celebrates the quiet rhythms of domestic life, the curiosities of the city, and the enduring comfort of a good book.
The Negro in American fiction
Sterling A. Brown
This critical study examines the evolution of African American representation in literature, tracing how social biases and shifting political climates have shaped the fictional construction of Black identity in the United States.
From Immigrant to Inventor
Michael Pupin
This memoir chronicles a journey from a Serbian village to the heights of American science, tracing how an immigrant boy’s curiosity became a cornerstone of modern electrical engineering. It is an enduring testament to the power of intellectual idealism.
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II
Various
This expansive periodical offers a snapshot of mid-nineteenth-century intellectual life, blending literary excerpts, historical narratives, and international news. It serves as a bridge between the Victorian era’s artistic preoccupations and the burgeoning concerns of the American public.
Miss Billy
Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
This story of a young woman adjusting to the realities of marriage explores the delicate machinery of domestic life with humor and emotional honesty. It captures the transition from the dream of romance to the practical challenges of keeping a home and a heart steady.
Pink and White Tyranny: A Society Novel
Harriet Beecher Stowe
A marriage built on deception becomes a suffocating trap for a man of principle and a woman who views herself as the only idol worthy of worship. This domestic drama dissects the devastating collision between romantic illusion and harsh reality.
So Big
Edna Ferber
A young mother transforms a hardscrabble existence on the Illinois prairie into a life of purpose, while her son struggles to find his own measure of success in the opulent, hollow world of Chicago’s elite.
Dangerous Days
Mary Roberts Rinehart
A story of middle-aged awakening and wartime sacrifice, where long-standing societal facades crumble under the weight of a world in transition.
Mark Twain's Letters
Mark Twain
This collection of correspondence captures a singular American voice as it navigates the twilight of a legendary life, moving between fierce public activism and the private devastation of personal loss. It is a portrait of a mind both relentless in its critique of human folly and tender in its capacity for friendship.
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
The city is a siren song for the restless, promising everything to those who arrive with nothing but a trunk and a dream. Yet, as the lights of the theater dim, the pursuit of beauty often leaves the heart reaching for a horizon that never draws nearer.
Port O' Gold: A History-Romance of the San Francisco Argonauts
Louis J. (Louis John) Stellman
A sprawling, romanticized chronicle of San Francisco’s evolution, from its early days as a lawless outpost to its emergence as a resilient, modern city through decades of fire, gold, and social upheaval.
Views and Reviews
Henry James
The sharp, discerning eye of a master novelist turns toward his contemporaries, capturing the literary landscape of the late nineteenth century with elegant precision and exacting standards.
The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume 1
Emma Lazarus
This collection of poetry and drama captures the intellectual and emotional evolution of a brilliant 19th-century American voice, moving from the ethereal, romantic concerns of her youth to the urgent, moral clarity of her maturity.
A Manual of American Literature
Unknown
This survey captures the evolution of American letters from the colonial pulpit to the dawn of the twentieth century. It serves as a grounded, encyclopedic record of the writers and political forces that shaped the nation’s voice.
The Price
Francis Lynde
The story follows a man named Kenneth Griswold, who finds himself destitute in New Orleans after a series of failures. In a moment of desperation, he commits a bank robbery, an act that leaves him not only a criminal but a man perpetually on the run from his own conscience and the relentless pursuit of a persistent…
My Life
Josiah Flynt
A restless wanderer chronicles his lifelong obsession with the "Beyond," charting a course from a sheltered Midwestern upbringing to the gritty, hidden corridors of the international criminal underworld.
Prairie Gold
Iowa Press and Authors' Club
This collection of regional voices captures the heartbeat of a nation at a crossroads, where the quietude of the American prairie meets the encroaching anxieties of the First World War.
Pigs is Pigs
Ellis Parker Butler
A stubborn express agent and a furious customer lock horns over a simple shipping rate, unintentionally triggering a bureaucratic catastrophe of exponential proportions. This lighthearted tale explores how rigid adherence to rules can spiral into absurdity.
The Lost Wagon
Jim Kjelgaard
HOOK A Missouri farmer leads his family into the vast, untamed West, seeking freedom from debt and the promise of land. They face a solitary, perilous journey toward Oregon as their only path to a better life.
The Younger American Poets
Jessie Belle Rittenhouse
The landscape of early twentieth-century American verse is a vibrant, shifting territory, captured here through the close examination of the prominent voices defining its era.