American Prose

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  • Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly)…

  • Civil Disobedience

    In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as…

  • Herland and Related Writings

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s provocative utopian novel Herland, first published in 1915, tells its story through the observations of three male explorers who discover a land…

  • Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales

    Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are among the most haunting and indelible in American literature, but critics for decades persisted in seeing Poe as…

  • The Age of Reason

    The Age of Reason is one of the most influential defences of Deism (the idea that God can be known without organized religion) ever written.…

  • Rights of Man

    Advocating equality, meritocracy, and social responsibility in plain language, Thomas Paine galvanized tens of thousands of readers and changed the framework of political discourse with…

  • “We Must Be Up and Doing”

    African American women have been “up and doing” for their communities for as long as they have been in the United States, and their ability…

  • Lydia Sigourney

    Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865) was the most widely read and respected pre-Civil War American woman poet in the English-speaking world. In a half-century career, Sigourney…

  • Glances Backward

    Glances Backward brings together in one volume a broad selection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American writings about gay male love, including love stories, Westerns,…

  • Infelicia and Other Writings

    Adah Isaacs Menken was the most highly paid and most scandalous stage performer of the 1860s. She is also one of the most fascinating and…