American Prose
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Coming SoonSelected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
