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American Literature — page 38
3,609 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 38 of 76.
Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A wealthy benefactor’s attempt to introduce his three nieces to the exclusive circles of New York society results in a harrowing abduction and a dramatic race against time. This novel explores the friction between old-money pride and the ambitions of those attempting to climb the social ladder.
Harlem shadows
Claude McKay
The poems within these pages are an urgent, unflinching cry against systemic cruelty and a deeply personal testament to the ache of displacement. They capture the spirit of a writer caught between the vibrant, sun-drenched memory of the Caribbean and the cold, often hostile, reality of American city life.
Lizzy Glenn
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
Hard work alone cannot protect a family from the grinding machinery of an unforgiving economy. This narrative exposes the fragility of life for the urban poor in nineteenth-century Philadelphia.
More Fables
George Ade
This collection of satirical vignettes serves as a sharp, unsentimental mirror held up to the absurdities of American social life at the turn of the twentieth century. It offers a series of cautionary tales where the moral is often less about virtue and more about the inevitable cost of pretense.
Say and Seal, Volume I
Susan Warner
In a quiet New England town, a new teacher arrives, sparking a delicate dance of faith, duty, and courtship that centers on his quiet, transformative influence over his students and a young woman named Faith.
The Blindman's World: 1898
Edward Bellamy
The stars hold a mirror to humanity in this haunting exploration of a world where the future is as visible as the past. A professor’s accidental journey through space exposes the profound, tragic fragility of the human condition.
The Fool: A Play in Four Acts
Channing Pollock
The story of a man who attempts to live by the literal teachings of Christ in modern New York, this play explores the friction between spiritual ideals and the cold realities of industrial capitalism. It is a work that asks, with quiet intensity, what would happen if a man actually tried to live like the Master.
The Iron Game: A Tale of the War
Henry F. (Henry Francis) Keenan
The "iron game" of the American Civil War serves as the backdrop for a tale of love, duty, and the tragic ironies that bind families across battle lines.
The Mystery Girl
Carolyn Wells
The mystery of a locked-room death in a New England college town hinges on a young woman who refuses to explain her presence or her past. A master detective must untangle a web of inheritance, secret relationships, and academic scandal to uncover the truth.
The Tracer of Lost Persons
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
A mysterious detective agency uses elaborate, orchestrated coincidences to nudge hesitant, mismatched, and often bewildered lovers into each other’s arms.
A Cynic Looks at Life
Ambrose Bierce
The world is a stage of fools, and the author is a spectator who has long since grown weary of the performance. Through a series of biting essays and sharp epigrams, this collection exposes the vanity, hypocrisy, and inherent stupidity of the human race.
Alec Lloyd, Cowpuncher
Eleanor Gates
HOOK A devoted cowpuncher navigates the rough-and-tumble life of an Oklahoma frontier town, using his matchmaking instincts to secure his own future with the woman he loves.
Andy Grant's Pluck
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A young man’s sudden departure from school to rescue his family’s farm leads him into a wider world of honest enterprise and unexpected fortune.
Bohemian Days: Three American Tales
George Alfred Townsend
This collection of three short novels and interspersed poetry offers an intimate, often melancholic window into the lives of Americans drifting through the mid-19th century—some as self-imposed exiles in Europe, others navigating the social pressures of home. It is a work of observation, capturing the restlessness…
Good References
E. J. Rath
A young woman seeking employment and a wealthy, aimless heir find themselves entangled in a web of elaborate lies, social climbing, and accidental boxing matches.
King Spruce, A Novel
Holman Day
A young man battles a ruthless timber baron to protect the forests of Maine and the woman he loves. This rugged tale follows a principled outsider as he confronts the corrupt, iron-fisted rule of the lumber industry.
Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885
Various
This collection offers a vibrant, eclectic snapshot of 19th-century intellectual life, blending travelogues, social commentary, and fiction into a singular mosaic of the Victorian era’s curiosity and concerns.
Lost Man's Lane: A Second Episode in the Life of Amelia Butterworth
Anna Katharine Green
A formidable amateur detective travels to a remote, dread-filled lane to assist the children of a deceased friend, only to find herself trapped in a web of family secrets, spectral legends, and cold-blooded criminality.
Paul Bunyan
James Stevens
A giant of the American frontier, Paul Bunyan commands the wilderness with a blue ox and a crew of heroic loggers in a series of tall tales that define the mythic scale of the logging industry.
Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories: With Illustrations
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The flickering hearth serves as the gateway to a vanishing world where fireside yarns, ghost stories, and local legends hold the power to shape a community’s shared memory.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 67, May, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
This volume captures a fractured nation in the midst of its greatest trial, blending intellectual inquiry, political anxiety, and literary ambition. It offers an authentic, unvarnished look at a society struggling to reconcile its ideals with the chaos of war.
The Girl of the Golden West
David Belasco
A frontier saloon keeper stakes her life and her love on a high-stakes poker game that decides the fate of an outlaw. She is the heart of a rough-hewn world, and her choice defines her destiny.
Tripping with the Tucker Twins
Nell Speed
After a boarding-school fire, three inseparable friends embark on a spirited Southern excursion, finding unexpected adventure, romance, and a newfound sense of independence.
Trumps
George William Curtis
Ambition, social standing, and the volatile nature of fortune collide in this sweeping mid-19th-century portrait of life in New York and beyond. It is a story where the pursuit of wealth often masks a deeper, more desperate need for meaning.
Vera, the Medium
Richard Harding Davis
A fragile young woman trapped in a life of deception finds her path to redemption blocked by those who would exploit her talents for their own greed. In this tense drama, the line between performance and survival vanishes.
Chicken Little Jane on the Big John
Lily Munsell Ritchie
A spirited young girl finds her place on a Kansas ranch while navigating the complexities of adolescence, shifting family fortunes, and the tender, often puzzling bonds of friendship.
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.
Grand'ther Baldwin's Thanksgiving, with Other Ballads and Poems
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
The domestic heart and the national spirit collide in these verses, painting a portrait of mid-19th-century American life defined by simple virtues, profound loss, and a steadfast faith in duty.
In Old Kentucky
Edward Marshall
A mountain girl’s life is forever changed when an outsider arrives, bridging the divide between the rugged, secluded hills and the horse-racing culture of the Bluegrass. This classic tale captures a collision of two worlds, anchored by a secret past and the pursuit of a thoroughbred champion.
Mountain: A Novel
Clement Wood
A young man struggles to define his own morality against the backdrop of his father’s industrial empire, leading to a clash between the comforts of inherited wealth and the harsh realities of a labor-riven southern town.
Murder in Black Letter
Poul Anderson
A scholar is drawn into a lethal hunt for a rare manuscript, forcing him to confront a hidden history of violence beneath the quiet facade of a university town.
Old News: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
This is a meditative exploration of American history, using the fragile, yellowed pages of 18th-century newspapers as a lens to view the transformation of colonial society from a rigid outpost into a revolutionary nation.
Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby
Kathleen Thompson Norris
This collection of short stories captures the quiet desperation and sudden, sharp joys of early twentieth-century American life. It is a portrait of people navigating the hidden fractures of their own expectations.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 25, November, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
This collection captures the intellectual pulse of mid-nineteenth-century America, offering a bridge between the era’s high-minded political idealism and its vibrant, domestic storytelling. It stands as a vivid time capsule of a nation defining its voice.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
This artifact of American intellectual history captures the fractured, hopeful, and inquisitive spirit of a nation poised between the conclusion of the Civil War and the promise of a new era.
The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I
Unknown
This collection serves as a sweeping survey of American prose, tracing the evolution of the national voice from the first colonial encounters to the philosophical and literary maturity of the late nineteenth century.
The Bridge of the Gods: A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition
Frederic Homer Balch
A missionary’s calling clashes with the tragic fate of an indigenous empire as a natural bridge across the Columbia River seals the destiny of two worlds.
The Daughter of the Chieftain
Edward Sylvester Ellis
Children playing a simple game of stones in a Pennsylvania log cabin find their lives upended by the sudden, violent shadows of the American Revolution.
The House of Mystery: An Episode in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, Clairvoyant
Will Irwin
A doctor attempts to rescue a mysterious young woman from the clutches of a fraudulent spiritualist, only to discover that the woman is being used as a pawn in a sophisticated game of psychological manipulation.
The house of pride, and other tales of Hawaii
Jack London
This collection of short stories captures the uneasy collision of cultures, classes, and diseases in early twentieth-century Hawaii. It is a stark, observant portrait of an island society defined by its rigid hierarchies and the hidden rot beneath its tropical beauty.
The Under Dog
Francis Hopkinson Smith
A collection of poignant sketches, this book illuminates the quiet struggles of those pushed to the margins of society. It observes the overlooked and the misunderstood, finding dignity in lives that rarely command public attention.
The Wound Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington during the War of the Rebellion
Walt Whitman
HOOK Amidst the sprawling, whitewashed wooden sheds of Civil War Washington, one man commits himself to the solitary, harrowing work of comforting thousands of dying and broken soldiers.
Two College Friends
Frederic W. (Frederic Wadsworth) Loring
This intimate, tragic portrait of two Harvard students caught in the maw of the American Civil War explores the profound, sometimes volatile bonds of male friendship against the backdrop of a nation torn asunder.
Was It Right to Forgive? A Domestic Romance
Amelia E. Barr
The journey of the human heart toward reconciliation is rarely a straight line, but rather a winding path through the shadows of pride, social expectation, and the hard-won clarity of forgiveness. This domestic romance follows the lives of two families, the Van Hoosens and the Filmers, as they navigate the volatile…
A Dixie School Girl
Gabrielle E. (Gabrielle Emilie) Jackson
A high-spirited Virginia girl finds her love of freedom at odds with the rigid, joyless tyranny of a prestigious boarding school.
A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's, and Other Stories
Bret Harte
The steamer Silveropolis cuts through the Sacramento River, carrying travelers across a landscape of fragile colonial ambition and raw frontier resilience. This collection of stories captures the shifting social tides of late 19th-century California, where the line between scoundrels and saints remains as thin as…
Hail to the Chief
Randall Garrett
A masterful, calculated political machine must sometimes be dismantled from within to ensure its survival. This story explores the cynical intersection of high-stakes statecraft and the desperate measures required to secure a nation’s future.
Hillsboro People
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Hillsboro is a place where the stillness of mountain winters and the weight of ancestral ghosts define the soul. It is a portrait of a landscape that demands everything from those who call it home.