American Prose

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…