Fiction Books

CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH.—SCHOOL DAYS. The subject of the following sketch, Sarah Margaret Fuller, has already been most fortunate in her biographers. Cut off herself in the prime of life, she left behind her devoted friends who were still in their full vigor of thought and sentiment. Three of these, James Freeman Clarke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Henry Channing, set their hand,... more...

CHAPTER 1 MY name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born. My maternal grandfather was an attorney in good practice. He was fortunate in every thing, and had speculated very successfully in stocks of the Edgarton New Bank, as it was formerly called. By these and other means he had managed to lay by a tolerable sum of money. He was more... more...

If Providence, instead of a vagabond, had made me a justice of the peace, there is no species of penalty I would not have enforced against a class of offenders, upon whom it is the perverted taste of the day to bestow wealth, praise, honour, and reputation; in a word, upon that portion of the writers for our periodical literature whose pastime it is by high-flown and exaggerated pictures of society,... more...

WE GET INTERESTING NEWS It was on a tropic sea, and night, that I heard a little scrap of a tale that had in it that which was destined to preserve my life. The waning moon had not yet risen; the stars were all out, the Milky Way more than commonly near. The schooner's sails were barely drawing, and flapped idly at times. I leaned on the rail, listening to the purling of the sea against the... more...

CHAPTER I. YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.  That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.  There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.  That is nothing.  I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or... more...

Introduction The Wakarusa River rises in the eastern edge of the Flint Hills and flows approximately 50 miles in an easterly direction and empties into the Kansas River near Eudora; with its tributaries, the Wakarusa drains 458 square miles in parts of Wabaunsee, Shawnee, Osage, and Douglas counties of northeastern Kansas (Fig. 1). The average gradient is 6.3 feet per mile. Turbidity is consistently... more...

THE HALL. The ancientest house, and the best for housekeeping in this county or the next, and though the master of it write but squire, I know no lord like him. MERRY BEGGARS. The reader, if he has perused the volumes of the Sketch Book, will probably recollect something of the Bracebridge family, with which I once passed a Christmas. I am now on another visit at the Hall, having been invited to a... more...

FOREWORDS. This Essay is an expansion, in accordance with a preconceived scheme, of two papers, one on "The Witches in Macbeth," and the other on "The Demonology of Shakspere," which were read before the New Shakspere Society in the years 1877 and 1878. The Shakspere references in the text are made to the Globe Edition. The writer's best thanks are due to his friends Mr. F.J.... more...

I. THE WICKEDNESS OF MAN. Behold how kind and merciful Our heavenly Father was, To bear so long with sinful men, Who had transgressed His laws. The hearts of men wax'd worse and worse, They disobeyed the Lord; They followed their own thoughts, nor walked According to His word. And men were multiplied on earth, They spread both far and wide; And there were giants in those days, Who did God's... more...

CHAPTER I COLONIAL LITERATURE RELATION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE.—The literature produced in that part of America known as the United States did not begin as an independent literature. The early colonists were Englishmen who brought with them their own language, books, and modes of thought. England had a world-famous literature before her sons established a permanent settlement across the Atlantic.... more...