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2) Essays
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Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays are an American classic. These essays explore Emerson's thoughts about transcendentalism and romanticism. Some of the most famous essays in this collection are Self Reliance, Compensation, The Over, Soul, Circles, The Poet, Experience, and Politics.
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The original play by Shakespeare's drama telling how Demetrius and Lysander love Hermia, Hermia loves Lysander but is betrothed to Demetrius, much to her dismay. And no one loves Helena, though her heart belongs to Demetrius. When Hermia and Lysander escape escape through the forest to elope, Demetrius chases them, and Helena chases Demetrius. With the magic of the forest bewitching the hand of fate, perhaps their dream of love will come true.
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"Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a classic work of American literature that explores the harsh realities of slavery in the nineteenth century. Published in 1852, the novel follows the lives of several characters, including the titular character Tom, a long-suffering slave on a plantation in Kentucky. Through the characters' stories, Stowe paints a vivid picture of life in slavery, as well as its psychological, emotional, and spiritual...
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A classic fictional chronicle of life on the open trail, long considered the best and most reliable account of real cowboy life ever written. In the years following the Civil War, sixteen-year-old Andy Adams left his home in San Antonio Valley and took to the range. Here he charts his first journey as a bona fide cowboy, from south Texas to Montana along the western trail.
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Chronicles the exploits of Becky Sharp, an unscrupulous young woman who is determined to achieve wealth and social success, and her sentimental companion, Amelia, who has fallen for a caddish soldier, in the classic novel set against the backdrop of English society in the early 1800s.
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Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach. Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond, on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed,...
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Blessed with enormous talents and the energy and ambition to go with them, Franklin was a statesman, author, inventor, printer, and scientist. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and later was involved in negotiating the peace treaty with Britain that ended the Revolutionary War. He also invented bifocals, a stove that is still manufactured, a water-harmonica, and the lightning rod. Franklin's extraordinary range of interests and accomplishments...
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Presents Jonathan Swift's satire in which a shipwrecked Englishman encounters bizarre populations in unheard-of lands, including an enlightened race of horses that makes him see his fellow humans in a different light; and includes explanatory notes and a note on the text, which is based on the 1726 edition.
12) Sister Carrie
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After leaving the country for Chicago, Caroline Meeber is seduced by a traveling salesman and then falls in love with a saloon manager.
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Young Henry Fleming had always dreamt of performing heroic deeds in battle. But as a raw recruit in the American Civil War, the reality if one of mental and physical torment. Throughout his first ordeal in action, Henry experiences both fear and self-doubt, and has no idea whether war will make him a coward - or a hero.
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How did Texas cowboy Charlie Siringo survive decades living among the worst outlaws of the Old West cattle country, such as Billy the Kid, Bill Moore, John Wesley Hardin, Ben Thompson, Clay Allison, Sam Bass, and Tom Horn?
In 1927, Charles A. Siringo published an in-depth narrative of his life among the outlaws and lawmen of the Old West cattle country, as well as first-hand accounts provided by other noteworthy figures of the times. It is this book...
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Torquemada, the dour Dominican Friar, was responsible for one of the cruellest examples of religious persecution the world has ever known. Driven by his own warped genius, and against the express wishes of his king and queen, he single-handedly engineered torture and fear to a staggering degree. For Torquemada was the original President of the Spanish Inquisition. All you might ever want to know about Torquemada is here, the background to his inquisition,...
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Fresh from his escapades with Tom Sawyer, with six thousand dollars in the bank and the Widow Douglas as his guardian, Huck Finn faces a new challenge: his father, Pap, who is so determined to get his hands on Huck's fortune that he kidnaps Huck and threatens to kill him. Escaping from Pap, Huck meets the runaway slave, Jim, who plans to head north and buy his wife and children our of slavery. Huck joins Jim on a salvaged raft, and together the two...
20) O pioneers!
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"O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent and clear-headed young woman whose passionate faith in the Nebraska prairie makes her a wealthy landowner." "Willa Cather's second novel is imbued with the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, but it is not merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, O pioneers! also...
