American Literature

On arriving at a rural monastery, the monk Ambrosius meets a young girl, Benedicta. She is shunned by the local community for being the daughter of the local hangman, but Ambrosius is drawn into a dangerous sympathy with her, and in defiance of the...
By: Ambrose Bierce

Four sailors discover a copper cylinder containing a manuscript written by the adventurer Adam More, who was shipwrecked in the southern hemisphere. They read its contents out to one another, and the incredible story unfolds of his journey through a...
By: James de Mille

Written during the same period as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn , and banned in the English-speaking world upon its publication in Paris in 1936, Black Spring is one of Miller’s finest achievements, and arguably his most distinguished...
By: Henry Miller

Mark Twain's gloriously funny 'Diary of Adam and Eve', which John Updike recently described as "a paradigm of the relations between sexes", is presented here with a number of other Twain pieces on our two oldest ancestors, showing the writer's...
By: Mark Twain

Having been found guilty of adultery, Hester Prynne is forced to wear an embroidered scarlet letter "A" as a punishment for her sin. While her vengeful husband embarks on a quest to discover the identity of her lover, she is left to face the...
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Written in 1957, but only recently rediscovered in manuscript form in a New Jersey warehouse, Beat Generation bears the hallmarks of vintage Kerouac: flowing, stream-of-consciousness language, orchestrated with a jazz-like sense of adventure and...
By: Jack Kerouac

Many people have castigated the shamelessness of the Tropic novels‚ which for a long time were widely suppressed and illicitly supplied under the counter, and have been at a loss to explain how their author could have simultaneously maintained a...
By: Henry Miller

Exposing the underbelly of Paris and its world of sex, prostitutes and destitution, this novel was, like most of Miller's novels, repressed in Britain and the USA due to its erotic content. Fortunately, this groundbreaking narrative, which captures...
By: Henry Miller