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American Literature — page 36
3,609 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 36 of 76.
Evening Dress: Farce
William Dean Howells
A frantic search for missing evening attire turns a quiet Boston apartment upside down in this sharp, turn-of-the-century theatrical farce.
Fennel and Rue
William Dean Howells
A young author receives a hoax letter claiming a terminally ill fan longs to read his serial, triggering a tangled web of wounded pride, deceit, and lingering romantic fascination.
In the Onyx Lobby
Carolyn Wells
A lingering family feud collides with a dark crime in a glamorous Manhattan apartment house, where a wealthy man's sudden death leaves behind a trail of suspicion and a cryptic dying clue.
Kindred of the Dust
Peter B. (Peter Bernard) Kyne
The world is quick to trample the vulnerable like dirt beneath its feet, but love makes no compromise with pride.
Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 1
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A restless American writer wanders through the icy streets of Paris and the sun-drenched ruins of Rome, recording art, cold weather, and the quirky habits of European locals with sharp, observant detachment.
The Bishop murder case
S. S. Van Dine
A cunning serial killer turns Manhattan into a grisly nursery-rhyme playground, mocking the district attorney with cold, mathematical precision.
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10: The Opinionator
Ambrose Bierce
A collection of caustically witty essays dismantles early twentieth-century American culture with sharp prose, targeting everything from cheap popular literature and bad art criticism to military hubris and environmental meddling.
The Leatherwood God
William Dean Howells
A mysterious stranger rides into an isolated frontier settlement, claims divinity, and tears a pioneer community apart through the sheer force of religious delusion.
The Plow-Woman
Eleanor Gates
A resolute young woman fights to build a home on the Dakota frontier, torn between protecting her fragile sister, surviving prairie hardships, and claiming her own heart.
The Rector of St. Mark's
Mary Jane Holmes
A young clergyman's secret love and a series of quiet misunderstandings test the fragile bonds between duty and desire in a small town.
The Trimming of Goosie
James Hopper
An athletic young husband inexplicably sprouts a pair of magnificent wings, forcing his practical wife to trim them so he can remain a respectable suburban commuter.
The Trumpeter Swan
Temple Bailey
A young woman who has mistaken superficial charm for devotion must choose between the glamorous illusions of the city and the quiet, enduring love rooted in her Virginia home.
Camperdown
Mary Griffith
A sleeping gentleman awakens into a radically reformed Philadelphia, launching a collection of short narratives that reimagine civic order, social duty, and domestic life in early nineteenth-century America.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: Ten Christmas stories
Edward Everett Hale
Through snowy New England drifts, crowded city tenements, and distant historical landscapes, these stories celebrate the quiet power of human connection, utility, and generous goodwill.
Jewel Weed
Alice Ames Winter
Behind the gleaming facade of a booming Midwestern city lies a tangled network of municipal corruption, mismatched marriages, and self-serving ambition that threatens to derail a young man’s high ideals.
Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories
Rex Beach
A rogue's quick wit and a heavy fist meet the unforgiving wilderness and the bustling frontier.
Sketches from Memory (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A wanderer journeys through the majestic notch of the White Mountains and across the dark waters of the Erie Canal, capturing the changing spirit of nineteenth-century New England.
The Blind Man's Eyes
William MacHarg
A quiet train ride across a snowy wilderness becomes a dangerous web of deceit when a targeted assault leaves a blind powerhouse of justice fighting for his life alongside a mysterious traveler with a hidden past.
The raid of the guerilla, and other stories
Charles Egbert Craddock
A harsh mountain war, an accidental infant in the mail, a fugitive haunted by dog tracks, and a girl who steps into a cage with a muzzled lion—all belong to the rugged, isolated world of Charles Egbert Craddock’s late short stories.
Three Thousand Dollars
Anna Katharine Green
A criminal plot, a secret mechanism, and a brave stenographer intersect in a high-stakes New York office drama.
Years of My Youth
William Dean Howells
Setting ink into type at the printer's bench before sunrise, a young boy learns that words carry the power to shape both a quiet home and a rising nation.
An Apache Princess: A Tale of the Indian Frontier
Charles King
A sun-bleached Arizona outpost erupts into suspicion, betrayal, and violence when an officer's mysterious assault collides with a deadly Apache uprising.
Betrothed for a day
Laura Jean Libbey
A high-society betrayal and an unexpected southern inheritance force a penniless hero and an unpolished heiress into a sudden marriage, testing whether love can survive deceit, mistaken identities, and financial ruin.
Dawson Black: Retail Merchant
Harold Whitehead
A young, impetuous storekeeper learns that managing a small-town hardware business takes far more than raw ambition, discovering that true commercial success depends on mastering numbers, controlling impulse, and listening to wise advice.
In Pastures New
George Ade
An American abroad is a creature of endless confidence and total confusion, marching through the ancient world with a guide book in one hand and a yearning for home cooking in the other.
Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board
Unknown
The dead speak, but they still need an editor.
Marjorie Dean, College Junior
Josephine Chase
Underneath the polite routines of campus life, a quiet battle for the soul of Hamilton College plays out through seasonal tradition, earnest charity, and hidden malice.
Polly Oliver's Problem
Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
Confronted by family hardship and sudden grief, a young woman transforms her love of storytelling into a life-sustaining vocation.
Queechy
Susan Warner
A orphan's quiet strength carries her family through ruin and disgrace, while an English nobleman's silent devotion waits for her to claim her place.
Randy and Her Friends
Amy Brooks
In a sunlit New England village, a generous farm girl brings quiet warmth to everyone she touches, whether sharing simple pleasures at home or stepping into city life.
Rezanov
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
A Russian diplomat hazards a forbidden courtship in Spanish California, risking empire and pride for a young woman who holds the key to his survival.
Sheila of Big Wreck Cove: A Story of Cape Cod
James A. Cooper
A young woman, falsely accused and seeking a clean start, assumes another girl’s identity on Cape Cod, only to discover that love and honesty demand a far harder reckoning.
Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems
William Carlos Williams
Winds batter bare branches, city traffic roars outside quiet bedrooms, and cold mud gives way to sudden, sharp blossoms.
Story of Chester Lawrence: Being the Completed Account of One who Played an Important Part in "Piney Ridge Cottage"
Nephi Anderson
Bound for Europe aboard a sea-tossed steamer, a lonely traveler discovers that the father who abandoned him is closer than he thinks.
Struggling Upward, or Luke Larkin's Luck
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A honest boy in nineteenth-century New England faces poverty, false accusations, and the petty malice of his rich rivals, only to rise through his own integrity and the aid of wealthy allies.
The best stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Volume 1 (of 2)
Sarah Orne Jewett
A summer visitor settles into a quiet Maine coastal village, discovering a community of retired mariners and herbalists whose quiet lives hold surprising depth and dignity.
Twilight sleep
Edith Wharton
A family built on modern self-delusion shatters when its matriarch's serene denial can no longer keep real passion, greed, and despair from crashing through the door.
Walt Whitman in Mickle Street
Elizabeth Leavitt Keller
A nurse’s clear-eyed memoir pulls back the curtain on Walt Whitman’s final years in Camden, revealing the quiet devotion of his long-suffering housekeeper, Mary Davis, who managed the poet’s chaotic household at her own financial and emotional expense.
A Little Book of Western Verse
Eugene Field
From quiet nursery lullabies to the raucous humor of Western mining camps, these verses capture the tender, nostalgic, and comic rhythms of nineteenth-century American life.
Ailsa Paige: A Novel
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
Courage and devotion collide as a proud New York woman and a wounded soldier seek redemption across the bleeding battlefields of the American Civil War.
Cap'n Eri
Joseph Crosby Lincoln
An aged sea captain takes on household chores and local troubles in a small Cape Cod town, only to find himself navigating love and unexpected community duties.
Chicken Little Jane
Lily Munsell Ritchie
Intense, warm-hearted, and endlessly curious, seven-year-old Jane Morton—better known as Chicken Little—navigates the high-stakes small-town adventures of childhood with a fierce sense of justice and a talent for getting into trouble.
Chit-Chat
Mathew Joseph Holt
An eccentric tapestry of Kentucky legal life, global wanderings, and historical dreams, blending small-town domesticity with wild, speculative excursions.
East Angels: A Novel
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Against the backdrop of a languid post-Civil War Florida, a woman bound by rigid Northern duty must navigate the silent, heartbreaking boundary between personal desire and unyielding moral obligation.
Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848
Various
A vivid window into antebellum American tastes, this periodical captures a culture balancing gothic romance, naval adventure, and domestic moralizing.
My study windows
James Russell Lowell
A crisp view from a New England window opens onto both the tranquility of nature and the sprawling landscape of English literature.
The Air Trust
George Allan England
A ruthless billionaire and his partner attempt to monopolize the planet’s atmosphere, triggering an underground worker revolution and a bloody war for human survival.
The Education of American Girls
Anna C. (Anna Callender) Brackett
American girls are needlessly breaking down in body and mind, not because higher education demands too much of them, but because society deprives them of real purpose and healthy living.