Free summaries
American Literature — page 62
3,593 public-domain american literature books, summarised. Page 62 of 75.
May Iverson's Career
Elizabeth Garver Jordan
This chronicle follows a young, ambitious convent graduate as she navigates the competitive world of New York journalism and eventually finds success as a playwright. It is a portrait of a woman claiming her own voice.
Patience Sparhawk and Her Times: A Novel
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
This is a study of a fiercely independent woman navigating the rigid social structures and internal conflicts of late 19th-century America. It captures the tension between the raw, individualistic spirit of a "new race" and the stifling expectations of traditional society.
Sunny Boy and His Playmates
Ramy Allison White
When six-year-old Sunny Boy Horton steps out into the winter air, everyday childhood adventures unexpectedly turn into high-stakes rescues, lost grandfathers, trapped horses, and runaway barns.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
A vibrant slice of Civil War-era intellect, this issue captures a nation reimagining its culture, science, and moral obligations amid conflict.
The Bread Line: A Story of a Paper
Albert Bigelow Paine
This is a cautionary, often humorous account of four ambitious men in turn-of-the-century New York who stake their futures on a scheme to launch a magazine without a cent of capital.
The Doctor's Christmas Eve
James Lane Allen
A physician in the twilight of his youth confronts the ghosts of his own unfulfilled desires on a cold, transformative Christmas Eve in Kentucky.
The Lash
Olin L. (Olin Linus) Lyman
The city’s political machine is a web of corruption, and the man at the center finds his own past catching up to him in the form of an unlikely, troubled investigator.
The Pace That Kills: A Chronicle
Edgar Saltus
The fast life of a cynical socialite leads to ruinous consequences when he marries for a fortune that proves as phantom as his own integrity. This grim chronicle explores the collision between inherited prestige and the harsh realities of debt and deceit.
The Second Generation
David Graham Phillips
A self-made titan disinherits his children to save their souls, forcing a generation raised for idle luxury into the furnace of real work.
A Little Florida Lady
Dorothy C. (Dorothy Charlotte) Paine
This is a story of a young girl’s relocation from the frozen North to the sun-drenched, wild landscape of Florida, where she learns to navigate the complexities of nature, friendship, and responsibility.
A Town Is Drowning
Frederik Pohl
This is a spare, urgent portrait of a community thrust into sudden, catastrophic crisis. It traces the disintegration of order and the raw human responses—both selfish and heroic—that emerge when the earth gives way.
Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A wealthy uncle and his three spirited nieces arrive at a neglected, mysterious farm in the backwoods of Millville, where they soon find themselves embroiled in a local puzzle involving a hidden inheritance and a shady hardware merchant.
Mackinac and Lake Stories
Mary Hartwell Catherwood
HOOK Set against the rugged, untamed beauty of the Great Lakes, these stories capture the fleeting, intense moments of lives lived on the edge of the wilderness.
Marjorie Dean, High School Freshman
Josephine Chase
Marjorie Dean is a high-spirited girl navigating the social complexities of a new high school, where her integrity is tested by elitist peers and a false accusation against her best friend.
The Efficiency Expert
Edgar Rice Burroughs
A star athlete leaves university to conquer the working world, only to find himself trapped in a web of urban poverty, false accusations, and a murder mystery that threatens his future.
The House: An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice
Eugene Field
A gentle, observational tale of a scholarly astronomer and his wife who discover that the dream of owning a home is less about architecture and more about managing the eccentricities of neighbors, contractors, and life itself.
The Life of Nancy
Sarah Orne Jewett
This collection of stories captures the quiet dignity of New England life, where the deepest emotional currents often run beneath the surface of routine. It is a portrait of resilience, finding beauty in the small, enduring connections that sustain people through the long winters of life.
The Train Boy
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
The train boy is a classic archetype of American self-reliance, charting the rise of a virtuous youth through industry, honesty, and a dash of good luck. This narrative follows a young man as he navigates the precarious social and economic landscape of the late 19th-century Midwest.
Zelda Dameron
Meredith Nicholson
A young woman returns home to a changing Midwestern city, navigating the stifling expectations of her father and the encroaching influence of a world shifting from tradition to commerce.
A Texas Blue Bonnet
Caroline Emilia Jacobs
A wild, spirited girl from a Texas ranch struggles to reconcile her love for the open prairie with the structured life of her formal New England relatives.
An Echo Of Antietam: 1898
Edward Bellamy
This story captures the quiet, devastating intersection of private romance and public duty during the American Civil War, as a young couple faces the inevitable separation of a regiment’s departure.
Devota
Augusta J. (Augusta Jane) Evans
A long-standing misunderstanding between two proud hearts finds its reckoning under the moonlight of a country estate. Thirteen years of silence dissolve as long-held secrets and private griefs finally come to light.
Kathie's Soldiers
Amanda M. Douglas
This story follows a young girl discovering that true courage is found in the quiet, daily commitment to duty, kindness, and faith, rather than in the grand gestures of war.
Michael O'Halloran
Gene Stratton-Porter
The life of a streetwise newsboy changes forever when he adopts an invalid girl, proving that goodness is a principle, not a purchase. This story captures the moral fervor of early 20th-century American optimism.
Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 06, May 7, 1870
Various
This nineteenth-century periodical offers a sharp-witted, satirical window into the political scandals, social pretensions, and daily irritations of post-Civil War New York. It functions as a comedic mirror held up to the excesses of the Gilded Age.
Running to Waste: The Story of a Tomboy
George M. (George Melville) Baker
A wild-spirited girl finds herself at a crossroads, where she must choose between the aimless freedom of her youth and the structured demands of a maturing life.
Starved Rock
Edgar Lee Masters
Humanity exists in a state of perpetual, restless flux, caught between the desire for eternal connection and the cold certainty that all things—even the most profound passions—must eventually dissolve into change.
The Great Valley
Edgar Lee Masters
A sprawling, ambitious portrait of the American landscape, this collection captures the restless energy of a young nation expanding toward its uncertain future.
The Lawton Girl
Harold Frederic
A sharp-eyed observation of social ambition in a changing American town, where the collision of inherited wealth and industrial strife leaves no life untouched.
The nameless man
Natalie Sumner Lincoln
A haunted man is forced to confront his past when he becomes the primary suspect in two brutal, seemingly impossible murders.
The Point of View
Henry James
A transatlantic voyage serves as the threshold for a group of travelers reconsidering their identities as they navigate the clash between Old World expectations and the raw, unfolding reality of the American Republic.
The Prince and the Pauper, Part 7
Mark Twain
An unlikely pair—a displaced monarch and a disinherited knight—navigate the brutal underworld and deceptive drawing rooms of Tudor England. Their quest is not merely for a crown, but for recognition in a world that denies their existence.
The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition: A Pictorial Survey of the Art of the Panama-Pacific international exposition
Stella G. S. (Stella George Stern) Perry
HOOK This illustrated survey captures the fleeting, monumental ambition of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, documenting the sculptural and mural masterpieces that transformed a San Francisco landscape into a temporary city of dreams.
The Two Wives
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
The struggle between domestic harmony and the corrosive influence of secret habits defines the lives of two households. This narrative explores how the presence or absence of a supportive, self-forgetting partner determines whether a man survives his own worst impulses.
The Vehement Flame
Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
A young man’s impulsive marriage to an older woman unravels under the weight of jealousy and a hidden past, leaving him to navigate the wreckage of his own honor and the persistence of new love.
Town and Country
John S. (John Stowell) Adams
HOOK A tapestry of nineteenth-century moral instruction, this collection weaves together sentimental poetry and cautionary tales to remind the reader that kindness, faith, and sobriety are the only true paths to a meaningful life.
While Caroline Was Growing
Josephine Daskam Bacon
Caroline is a spirited young girl who, while navigating the rigid expectations of her upbringing and the boredom of her lessons, finds herself a silent observer of the complexities of the adult world.
Yankee Gypsies
John Greenleaf Whittier
A keen observer of human nature finds his solitary, rain-swept day interrupted by a persistent wanderer, prompting a nostalgic journey into the lives of the nomadic figures who once defined his childhood landscape.
A Colored Man Round the World
David F. Dorr
This 1858 travelogue captures a world in transition through the eyes of a traveler who defies the rigid boundaries of his time. It is a candid, spirited, and often surprising chronicle of mid-19th-century Europe and the Middle East, written with a rare blend of intellectual curiosity and personal defiance.
A Singular Life
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
The son of a saintly mother and a man of unyielding conviction, a young minister trades the comforts of academic life for the hard, salt-sprayed reality of a fishing town.
An Unofficial Patriot
Helen H. (Helen Hamilton) Gardener
A Southern clergyman faces the impossible moral cost of his conscience, navigating the deep divide of the American Civil War as he attempts to protect his family and his humanity.
In Madeira Place: 1887
Heman White Chaplin
In the late 1880s, a quiet enclave near the wharves of a bustling American city becomes a microcosm of political disillusionment. When a local French immigrant community discovers that their idealized version of American democracy is just as prone to corruption as the Old World systems they fled, the faith of their…
Margaret Smith's Journal: Part 1 from Volume V of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier
A young English woman arrives in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony, documenting her observations of the harsh landscape, the local religious fervor, and the complex social tensions of a nascent society.
Nelly's Silver Mine: A Story of Colorado Life
Helen Hunt Jackson
A resilient young girl finds more than just mineral wealth when her family moves west. This story captures the rugged hope and honest adjustments of frontier life in 19th-century Colorado.
Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement life in New York City
Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis
These collected sketches offer a visceral, unvarnished look at the tenement districts of 19th-century New York, where the struggle for survival is punctuated by moments of unexpected grace.
Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 04, April 23, 1870
Various
This periodical offers a sharp, satirical snapshot of American life in 1870, blending biting commentary on politics, theater, and social trends with the earnest commercial advertisements of its era.
Senator North
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
The heavy, hidden machinery of the American Senate grinds against the personal desires of those who walk its halls, forcing a choice between public duty and private longing.
The Arm-Chair at the Inn
Francis Hopkinson Smith
The warmth of a crackling hearth and the company of seasoned travelers provide the backdrop for a collection of tales that celebrate the enduring power of human connection and the quiet dignity of a life well lived.