American Classics: Free EPUB Editions

The American shelf is the largest national shelf on the site, and it is the one that changes character most often: political pamphlets in the 1780s, a Gothic and a transcendental phase in the 1830s and 1840s, the slave narrative and the war novel, then realism and the magazine story around 1900.

Fifty-five titles by thirty-eight authors, from The Federalist Papers to A Farewell to Arms, is enough to show the through-line: a literature arguing with its own founding documents. Hawthorne and Melville test the Puritan inheritance, Douglass and Jacobs answer the Constitution from the inside, Twain and Wharton measure the republic’s promises against its manners.

Every American title on this shelf

Fifty-five titles, oldest first, from 1788 to 1929 and about 4.9 million words.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1788	The Federalist Papers	Alexander Hamilton	Essays	190,000	11 h
1791	The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin	Benjamin Franklin	Autobiography	65,000	4 h
1819	The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.	Washington Irving	Essays and sketches	122,000	7 h
1820	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	Washington Irving	Novel	12,267	1 h
1826	The Last of the Mohicans	James Fenimore Cooper	Novel	149,000	8 h
1836	Nature	Ralph Waldo Emerson	Essay	15,400	1 h
1839	The Fall of the House of Usher	Edgar Allan Poe	Novel	6,909	1 h
1841	Essays: First and Second Series	Ralph Waldo Emerson	Essays	133,000	7 h
1845	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass	Frederick Douglass	Slave narrative	41,000	2 h
1846	Typee	Herman Melville	Travel narrative	101,000	6 h
1850	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	Novel	83,000	5 h
1851	Moby-Dick; or, The Whale	Herman Melville	Novel	211,000	12 h
1851	The House of the Seven Gables	Nathaniel Hawthorne	Novel	104,846	6 h
1852	Uncle Tom’s Cabin	Harriet Beecher Stowe	Novel	180,000	10 h
1853	Bartleby, the Scrivener	Herman Melville	Novel	14,522	1 h
1854	Walden	Henry David Thoreau	Nature writing	106,298	6 h
1855	Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman	Verse	122,000	7 h
1861	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	Harriet Jacobs	Slave narrative	81,000	5 h
1868	Little Women	Louisa May Alcott	Novel	201,000	11 h
1869	The Innocents Abroad	Mark Twain	Travel writing	193,000	11 h
1872	Roughing It	Mark Twain	Travel writing	165,000	9 h
1876	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Mark Twain	Novel	70,000	4 h
1880	The Art of Money Getting	P. T. Barnum	Lecture	14,300	1 h
1881	The Prince and the Pauper	Mark Twain	Novel	66,000	4 h
1883	Life on the Mississippi	Mark Twain	Memoir	148,000	8 h
1884	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	Novel	116,000	6 h
1889	A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court	Mark Twain	Novel	121,033	7 h
1890	An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge	Ambrose Bierce	Novel	3,765	1 h
1890	How the Other Half Lives	Jacob Riis	Reportage	82,000	5 h
1892	The Yellow Wallpaper	Charlotte Perkins Gilman	Novel	6,052	1 h
1895	The King in Yellow	Robert W. Chambers	Novel	70,485	4 h
1895	The Red Badge of Courage	Stephen Crane	Novel	46,000	3 h
1898	The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	Novel	41,876	2 h
1899	The Awakening	Kate Chopin	Novel	67,080	4 h
1899	The Theory of the Leisure Class	Thorstein Veblen	Treatise	106,000	6 h
1900	Sister Carrie	Theodore Dreiser	Novel	156,358	9 h
1900	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum	Novel	39,409	2 h
1901	Up from Slavery	Booker T. Washington	Autobiography	73,000	4 h
1902	The Varieties of Religious Experience	William James	Lectures	154,000	9 h
1903	The Call of the Wild	Jack London	Novel	32,000	2 h
1903	The Souls of Black Folk	W. E. B. Du Bois	Essays	69,000	4 h
1903	The Story of My Life	Helen Keller	Autobiography	134,000	7 h
1904	The Sea-Wolf	Jack London	Novel	107,000	6 h
1905	The Gift of the Magi	O. Henry	Novel	2,130	1 h
1905	The House of Mirth	Edith Wharton	Novel	129,036	7 h
1906	The Jungle	Upton Sinclair	Novel	149,277	8 h
1906	White Fang	Jack London	Novel	75,212	4 h
1907	Pragmatism	William James	Lectures	52,000	3 h
1911	Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton	Novel	34,619	2 h
1912	A Princess of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs	Novel	67,255	4 h
1916	Democracy and Education	John Dewey	Treatise	135,000	8 h
1920	The Age of Innocence	Edith Wharton	Novel	101,000	6 h
1920	Thuvia, Maid of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs	Novel	46,000	3 h
1925	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	Novel	48,257	3 h
1929	A Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway	Novel	88,000	5 h

How this list was made

Inclusion is by the author’s first recorded citizenship, from Wikidata. Authors who wrote in America but kept another citizenship, such as Conrad, are placed with the country Wikidata lists first.

Where a book exists in several editions the site offers one; word counts are for that text. The two longest entries, Moby-Dick and The Federalist Papers, are also the two most quoted in courtrooms.

Questions readers ask

Where should I start?

The Great Gatsby at 47,000 words is the shortest way into the twentieth century; Walden at about 110,000 is the shortest way into the nineteenth. If you want the founding argument, start with the Federalist Papers.

Why is Uncle Tom’s Cabin here?

Because it was the most consequential American novel of its decade, and its page records the genre. The book pages note both its abolitionist argument and its caricatures.

Does the list include poetry?

It includes Leaves of Grass, which is a book of poems, because the shelf is organised by book rather than by form. The poetry shelf gathers the epics separately.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · Irish Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.