Early American Classics

Three masterworks from the most revolutionary decade in American prose — with In Our Time, The Torrents of Spring, and over 100 pages of original critical essays on the iceberg theory, the Lost Generation, and the man behind the mask. Between 1925 and 1929, Ernest Hemingway published the body of work that would permanently alter the course of American literature. Writing from the cafés of the Left Bank and the fiestas of Pamplona, he forged a prose style so radical in what it chose not to say that every serious American writer who followed would have to reckon with it. This Erato Press ...

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry comes the first in a four-volume epic journey through the early American frontier, featuring the Berrybender family, English nobility adrift in the American West in the 1830s. It is 1830, and the Berrybender family—rich, aristocratic, English...

Unlike the other arts, American literature has been a powerful, influential, and leading aspect of American culture. By turns sedate and mercurial and possessing a moral mind set of various social values, the American short story reveals in its pages the psyche of a growing, sprawling nation whose sense of destiny has always been larger than life. Here are seven masterpieces that will make you smile, make you frown, and leave you pondering the mystery that surrounds the soul of a great nation.

A strikingly original collection of short stories and accompanying vignettes that marked Ernest Hemingway’s American debut. When In Our Time was first published in 1925, it was widely praised for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and earned...

The early fiction of one of the nation’s most celebrated writers, Truman Capote, as he takes his first bold steps into the canon of American literature Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote...

Fairy tales have always held a special place in my heart, a love first sparked by my grandmother. As children, my siblings and I would gather around her, eager for the bedtime stories she told us—tales passed down from her own childhood in India. These magical stories, rich with lessons and wonder, shaped our imaginations and taught us valuable life lessons. My love for these stories eventually inspired me to capture them in a book of recollections. Writing those stories deepened my appreciation for folklore, and in the process, I discovered equally fascinating tales from many other ...

No nation has ever achieved the literary diversity of America. From nativist humor to immigrant triumph, Americans have recorded their visions and hopes better than anyone

Ragtime Music History: The Complete Guide to the Origins, Legacy, and Essential Recordings of America’s First Popular Music is your ultimate deep dive into one of the most influential musical genres in American culture. From its syncopated origins in African American communities to its peak in the saloons, parlors, and vaudeville stages of the early 20th century, this beautifully written guide explores the evolution, key figures, cultural impact, and lasting legacy of ragtime. Discover the stories of Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Eubie Blake; learn how ragtime shaped early jazz, inspired...

Mamá X Beneath an elm in a Paris convent garden, one whispered secret changes two girls forever. Venezuela's Teresa de la Parra was barely past thirty when she won a national prize for Mamá X, and in a few luminous pages she made a child's small world feel as vast as life itself. Meet María Eugenia, a willful, daydreaming girl shipped from a sun-warmed Venezuelan hacienda to a cold French boarding school, where arithmetic is torture and apples far outshine the tens column. Everything shifts the day she meets Cristina de Iturbe — pale as a lily, brilliant, perfectly composed, and ...

Fairy tales have always held a special place in my heart, a love first sparked by my grandmother. As children, my siblings and I would gather around her, eager for the bedtime stories she told us—tales passed down from her own childhood in India. These magical stories, rich with lessons and wonder, shaped our imaginations and taught us valuable life lessons. My love for these stories eventually inspired me to capture them in a book of recollections. Writing those stories deepened my appreciation for folklore, and in the process, I discovered equally fascinating tales from many other ...

Maisie thinks of herself as a tough, resourceful woman, and that’s about to be put to the test. After leaving her abusive husband and making off with all the cash she can carry, her only goal is to stay out of sight and survive. Then she learns her husband is six feet under. She should be able to relax, only she fears she will be blamed for his murder. So she hops a train and finds herself as a Bridal Train Bride. Henry Cartwright loves tending the land, growing crops and raising animals for market, though it’s a lonely life. When his family urges him to take a wife, he can’t think of...

A new translation of Poor Folk, the debut novella that first brought the author of Crime and Punishment fame at the age of twenty-five, along with his other early stories, all showcasing the concern for human dignity that animated his later work. The short novel Poor Folk portrays the passionate...

Klaus Heinrich is born the second son of a Grand Duke, in a small German principality so reduced in fortune that its royal family maintains all the ceremony of monarchy over a treasury that is, in practice, nearly empty. He is also born with a withered left hand — a defect concealed from public view from his earliest infancy, and one that comes, over the years, to represent something larger: a life spent being watched, admired, and treated correctly by everyone around him, and genuinely known by almost no one. When his fragile elder brother inherits the throne and cannot bear its public ...

The greatest short story writers strive to achieve a single, dramatic effect, a feature which the early masters of this genre perfected. Although the short story came from Europe, it was reborn in America and reached a pinnacle of superb form on these shores by the turn of the 20th century. In so many of our best writers, we hear echoes of a pioneer ethos that sustains the heart of a great literature. Here are 12 of America's best.

She wrote seventy-eight novels, most of them in the same seven months a year, dictating some chapters to a stenographer between household duties, and literary history filed her under "sentimental" and moved on. It was wrong then and it's wrong now. Grace Livingston Hill spent forty years building a version of the American romance novel that ran on rescue, reinvention, and quiet moral steel instead of courtship for its own sake — and by the time she died in 1947, she had outsold most of the men who got the serious reviews. This volume collects twenty-three of her public-domain novels, in ...

While the idea that God created the world for His glory may seem obvious to some and perhaps confusing to others, Jonathan Edwards describes this beautiful premise with Scriptural evidence and in a completely revelatory way. In detailing not only the nature of God, but also of creation, humans...

Sparks fly when Meg McCracken enters Alexander Ogilvie's blacksmith shop. Attracted to the beautiful young woman from the start, he understands that her station in society is far above his, even though he has dreams of moving beyond the city and becoming a man of property. He is handsome and endearing, but he's also a lowly blacksmith. That isn't the worst of it, however. How can Meg be attracted to a man whose position on a revolution is neutral and still face her Patriot father and brothers? This novella was originally published in The Blacksmith Brides novella collection.

Where Gilded Age Titans, Wall Street Bankers, and Visionary Leaders Defined Modern Enterprise What made the minds that built the American industrial machine and modern global commerce tick? In Modern Eloquence: Business, Industry, and Professions (Volume V), readers are given a front-row seat to the most pivotal business addresses, lectures, and summit speeches of the early twentieth century. Compiled during the formative era of modern capitalism, this anthology captures the raw insight, strategic philosophy, and persuasive power of the titans, financiers, and innovators who shaped the ...

Fairy tales have always held a special place in my heart, a love first sparked by my grandmother. As children, my siblings and I would gather around her, eager for the bedtime stories she told us—tales passed down from her own childhood in India. These magical stories, rich with lessons and wonder, shaped our imaginations and taught us valuable life lessons. My love for these stories eventually inspired me to capture them in a book of recollections. Writing those stories deepened my appreciation for folklore, and in the process, I discovered equally fascinating tales from many other ...

The late 16th-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would shape the legal, philosophical, and moral issue of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on this historical juncture at which debt litigation was not merely an aspect of society but seemed to engulf it completely, Of Bondage examines a culture that understood money and the body of the borrower as comparable forms of property that impinged on one another at the moment of default.