American Literature

  • Vandover and the Brute

    Vandover and the Brute

    Written circa 1894-95 but published posthumously in 1914, Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute presents an unflinching portrait of unconventional sexuality, moral dissolution, and physical…

  • The Western Captive and Other Indian Stories

    The Western Captive and Other Indian Stories

    This edition recovers Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s successful 1842 novel The Western Captive; or, The Times of Tecumseh and includes many of Oakes Smith’s other writings…

  • The Blithedale Romance

    The Blithedale Romance

    Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s own experience as a member of the famous Brook Farm Community, which the author describes in his preface as the “most…

  • Domestic Manners of the Americans

    Domestic Manners of the Americans

    Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, complemented by Auguste Hervieu’s satiric illustrations, took the transatlantic world by storm in 1832. An unusual combination of…

  • The Red Badge of Courage

    The Red Badge of Courage

    The story of a young soldier, Henry Fleming, who flees a Civil War battle, The Red Badge of Courage has been celebrated for its depiction…

  • The Female American - Second Edition

    The Female American – Second Edition

    When it first appeared in 1767, this novel was called a “sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders.” Indeed, The Female American is an…

  • The Octoroon

    The Octoroon

    Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in…

  • Ethan Frome

    Ethan Frome

    This amply annotated edition of Wharton’s 1911 classic novella includes textual notes and documents, including Wharton's preface, letters, reviews, and early short story, “Mrs. Manstey’s…

  • Herland and Related Writings

    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: 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…

  • Black Oxen

    Black Oxen

    Black Oxen unites such unlikely topics as medical rejuvenation treatments, eugenics, American youth culture, and cross-generational relationships. The beautiful American widow of a Hungarian count,…

  • Emma Corbett

    Emma Corbett

    Set both in England and in America, Emma Corbett is the moving story of a family torn apart by the American revolutionary war. Edward Corbett…

  • Daisy Miller

    Daisy Miller

    Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the…

  • Clarence

    Clarence

    Honorable mention recipient for the 2012 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Award. A pioneering American novel of manners first published in 1830,…

  • Mrs. Spring Fragrance

    Mrs. Spring Fragrance

    Among the first works of fiction in English by a North American writer of Asian descent, the stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance present a…

  • The Age of Reason

    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.…

  • The Coquette and The Boarding School

    The Coquette and The Boarding School

    Hannah Webster Foster based The Coquette on the true story of Elizabeth Whitman, an unmarried woman who died in childbirth in New England. Fictionalizing Whitman’s…

  • The Awakening and Other Writings

    The Awakening and Other Writings

    Critically acclaimed as Kate Chopin’s most influential work of fiction, The Awakening has assumed a place in the American literary canon. This new edition places…

  • Rights of Man

    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…

  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    From its first appearance onward, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been both praised and condemned, enshrined as one of the world’s great novels and banned…

  • The Waste Land and Other Poems

    The Waste Land and Other Poems

    This volume brings together the full contents of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922), together with an informative introduction…

  • Bertram Cope's Year

    Bertram Cope’s Year

    In 1918, when Henry Blake Fuller was 62 years old, he completed the manuscript of a novel, Bertram Cope’s Year. Though Fuller was well known…

  • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

    The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

    Edgar Allan Poe’s only long fiction has provoked intense scholarly discussions about its meaning since its first publication. The novel relates the adventures of Pym…

  • The Cliff-Dwellers

    The Cliff-Dwellers

    The Cliff-Dwellers was the first American realist novel to use the rapidly developing city of Chicago as its setting. Henry Blake Fuller’s depiction of social…