Free summaries
American Literature — page 25
3,609 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 25 of 76.
Home as Found: Sequel to "Homeward Bound"
James Fenimore Cooper
A returned family discovers that their beloved homeland has traded its high ideals for democratic vulgarity, wild speculation, and petty provincial tyranny.
McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 6, October, 1908
Various
A turn-of-the-century cultural tapestry capturing American life through public art, international warfare, industrial legislation, and the quiet struggles of everyday people.
Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862
Henry Morford
Set against the backdrop of a nation torn by Civil War, Henry Morford’s 1863 novel captures the home-front anxieties and military conflicts of a defining era.
The Common Sense of Socialism: A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg
John Spargo
Written as a direct epistolary address to an American factory worker, this plain-spoken treatise dismantles the economic status quo to argue that true democracy requires collective ownership of the nation's industrial wealth.
The Mysterious Rider
Zane Grey
On a high mountain ranch in Colorado, a waif’s devotion to her adopted father is tested when she is bound to marry his worthless son.
The Riddle and the Ring
Gordon MacLaren
A penniless man in wintertime New York steps out of desperation and straight into a web of mistaken identity, high-society intrigue, and dangerous international secrets.
Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales
Henry James
Crossed-cultural romance falters when high-born English propriety meets raw American wealth, forcing both sides to weigh social vanity against personal freedom.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 81, July, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
The heavy weight of wartime survival presses hard against the quiet longings of ordinary human hearts.
Poems 1918-21, Including Three Portraits and Four Cantos
Ezra Pound
A modern poet wanders through classical Rome, medieval Provence, and post-war London, discarding grand imperial ambitions to capture fleeting moments of beauty, desire, and intellectual frustration.
Secret Service: Being the Happenings of a Night in Richmond in the Spring of 1865
Cyrus Townsend Brady
A officer risks everything behind enemy lines, only to find that the hardest mission is choosing between a soldier's duty and a quiet love born in the shadows of a doomed city.
The Business of Being a Housewife: A Manual to Promote Household Efficiency and Economy
Leona A. (Leona Alford) Malek
A structured guide to early twentieth-century home management shows how systemic organization, smart market choices, and precise culinary techniques can transform chaotic domestic labor into a streamlined, economical enterprise.
Betty Wales, Freshman
Edith K. (Edith Kellogg) Dunton
A sheltered girl ventures into the boisterous world of college life, discovering that navigating friendships and faculty expectations is far more challenging—and rewarding—than her initial naivety suggests.
The Sixty-First Second
Owen Johnson
A stolen ruby triggers a high-stakes investigation that mirrors the precarious collapse of a financial empire. In this tense drama of New York society, the truth is obscured by the frantic ambitions of the city’s elite.
At Last: A Novel
Marion Harland
Happiness is a labor of endurance, a long-term reclamation of the self from the wreckage of early misunderstandings and the crushing weight of family expectation.
Domesday Book
Edgar Lee Masters
The death of a young woman ripples outward, revealing the secret, messy, and often hypocritical lives of those she left behind. It is a sprawling, investigative portrait of an American town attempting to make sense of a life that defied its narrow boundaries.
Fidelity: A Novel
Susan Glaspell
A woman returns to the suffocating town that cast her out years ago, only to discover that her past is still alive and her future is entirely her own to define.
Ragged Lady
William Dean Howells
The journey of a young woman from the quiet hills of New England to the refined, often hollow, circles of international society tests the integrity of her character against the allure of wealth and status.
The Man from the Bitter Roots
Caroline Lockhart
A quiet, determined man stakes his future on a rugged mountain claim, only to find his life tangled with an unscrupulous engineer and the sister of his late, wayward partner.
Why Joan?
Eleanor Mercein Kelly
A young woman maneuvers through the rigid social expectations of Kentucky, eventually discovering that her own independence is a more reliable companion than any marriage or romantic ideal.
A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories
William Dean Howells
These stories capture the quiet, often agonizing friction of Americans living abroad in the mid-nineteenth century, where small social blunders carry the weight of moral crises.
Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times: 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance
Charles Carleton Coffin
A courageous young woman navigates a divided Boston, using her influence to safeguard the cause of liberty while her heart remains tethered to a soldier presumed lost to the brutal tides of war.
Our Next-Door Neighbors
Belle Kanaris Maniates
The sudden arrival of five rambunctious children next door turns a quiet, childless household upside down, forcing a young couple to navigate the chaotic and often humorous reality of being "parents" by proximity.
The Eye of Dread
Payne Erskine
The shadows of the past and the secrets of a quiet village converge in a web of lost identity and lingering grief. A man’s return from the void forces a reckoning that tests the boundaries of faith, family, and the enduring power of love.
The Plunderers: A Novel
Edwin Lefevre
A man of mystery orchestrates elaborate, psychological gambits against the titans of Wall Street, turning their own greed and insecurities into a weapon for social redistribution.
Young Wallingford
George Randolph Chester
A professional confidence man navigates the high-stakes world of early 20th-century American finance, proving that the line between a shrewd entrepreneur and a swindler is often merely a matter of perspective.
A Certain Rich Man
William Allen White
This story explores the slow erosion of a man’s conscience, charting how early idealism is systematically sacrificed to the relentless pursuit of industrial power. It serves as a somber meditation on the cost of success in a changing America.
Doctor Grimshawe's Secret
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A dark inheritance and a long-hidden secret bridge the divide between a gloomy New England childhood and the ancient, brooding manor houses of Old England. This unfinished narrative explores the haunting power of ancestry and the weight of the past upon the living.
Keziah Coffin
Joseph Crosby Lincoln
A resilient widow and a beleaguered young minister navigate the rigid social tides of a small Cape Cod village. Through quiet strength and shared secrets, they challenge the town’s unforgiving divisions.
Lady Baltimore
Owen Wister
A tradition-bound Southern town faces an unwanted transformation when a young heir becomes entangled with a woman whose values belong to a world he does not recognize.
Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Volume 2 (of 2)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
These private missives reveal the interior world of a celebrated novelist, documenting the profound, quiet, and often lonely devotion he maintained for his wife during their long years of partnership.
Round the Block: An American Novel
John Bell Bouton
This sprawling urban portrait captures the peculiar rhythms of mid-19th-century New York, where the boundaries between ambition, artifice, and genuine human connection constantly shift behind the facades of city life.
Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York
Harold Frederic
The tragedy of small-town ambition, this narrative charts the collision between rural tradition and the encroaching modern world. It is a sharp, atmospheric portrait of a family caught in the machinery of politics and personal desire.
The Adventures of a Modest Man
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
HOOK This lighthearted collection of linked stories follows a group of affluent, impulsive Americans navigating romance and social mishaps across France and the United States.
Amanda: A Daughter of the Mennonites
Anna Balmer Myers
The story of a young woman finding her own path amidst the quiet traditions of her people, this novel celebrates the persistence of hope and the quiet courage found in everyday life.
Susy, a Story of the Plains
Bret Harte
This tale of California’s shifting landscapes and volatile hearts captures the restless spirit of a society in transition, where old Spanish traditions collide with the raw ambition of new settlers. It is a story of how easily a life—and a fortune—can be unmade by a single, violent stroke of fate.
The Brimming Cup
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The choice between a life of refined, rootless exploration and the deep, demanding embrace of a settled home is a struggle fought in the quiet corners of the heart. To read these pages is to watch a woman weigh the world against the weight of her own family.
The Port of Adventure
C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson
Hook An elegant woman fleeing a shadowed past meets a rugged, open-hearted man in the vast, untamed beauty of California, where the promise of a new life waits behind the Golden Gate.
The Pride of Palomar
Peter B. (Peter Bernard) Kyne
A returning veteran fights to reclaim his ancestral California ranch from an ambitious intruder, only to find his own heart besieged by his enemy’s daughter.
A long way from home
Claude McKay
This restless, wandering memoir captures a life lived on the front lines of art and politics, where the search for personal freedom constantly collides with the rigid, often cruel barriers of race and class.
Back Home
Eugene Wood
The echoes of a vanishing world resonate through these pages, capturing the bittersweet ache of childhood and the enduring pull of the places that shaped us. This collection of sketches serves as a quiet homecoming to an American heartland defined by seasons, small-town rituals, and the transition from innocence to…
Compensation
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The universe is a self-balancing equation, where every action and every event carries its own invisible but inevitable price. Justice is not a deferred reward, but a constant, present reality woven into the fabric of existence.
P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A man confined to a small, iron-grated chamber travels the globe through the expansive, often unreliable lens of his own imagination. He writes letters from an illusory London, encountering the celebrated figures of his age as if they were ghosts trapped in the machinery of his own crumbling mind.
Tales from a Rolltop Desk
Christopher Morley
The literary life is a fragile, frantic pursuit where the boundary between the printed page and the pulse of reality often dissolves into shadow. This collection of linked narratives captures the precarious, bittersweet nature of ambition among those who live by the ink.
The Desert of Wheat
Zane Grey
A young farmer’s life is torn between his devotion to the golden wheat fields of the American Northwest and the brutal, encroaching reality of the First World War.
The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
Eugene Field
The obsession with books is a noble, incurable disease that transforms the collector into a lifelong student of history, friendship, and the imagination. These reflections celebrate the eccentric, often humorous journey of finding, buying, and living among one’s own library.
The Red Acorn
John McElroy
Amid the brutal churn of the American Civil War, a young man struggles to shed his reputation for cowardice while a woman finds her own battlefield in the chaos of the front lines.
Vandemark's Folly
Herbert Quick
The frontier is not merely a place of grand vistas, but a rugged crucible where the vulnerable are forged into something resilient and new. This story captures the immense, shifting weight of the American prairie as it transforms an orphaned boy into a man.
A Fool and His Money
George Barr McCutcheon
An inheritance, a crumbling German castle, and a runaway countess collide in this tale of an impulsive young man discovering that the price of romance is often higher than gold.