American Novels 1901-1925
Explore a curated list of American novels published between 1901 and 1925. Discover classic literature, iconic authors, and timeless stories that defined early 20th-century American fiction.
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ID: 0486431630
(Type: books)
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The Log of a Cowboy
by Andy Adams
A classic fictional chronicle of life on the open trail, THE LOG OF A COWBOY has long been 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 the 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. Guided by his plainspoken, sure-saddled voice and the living, breathing feel of firsthand experience on every page, we relive dusty cattle drives, perilous river crossings, honor-based gunfights, and narrow escapes from buffalo stampedes, not to mention tall tales passed around the campfire and such unforgettable characters as Bull Durham and Bill Blades. THE LOG OF A COWBOY, newly introduced by Thomas McGuane, offers a true depiction of a cowboy's life and work as well as a classic adventure story of the great American frontier.
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The Octopus
by Frank Norris
Like the tentacles of an octopus, the tracks of the railroad reached out across California, as if to grasp everything of value in the state Based on an actual, bloody dispute between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880, The Octopus is a stunning novel of the waning days of the frontier West. To the tough-minded and self-reliant farmers, the monopolistic, land-grabbing railroad represented everything they despised: consolidation, organization, conformity. But Norris idealizes no one in this epic depiction of the volatile situation, for the farmers themselves ruthlessly exploited the land, and in their hunger for larger holdings they resorted to the same tactics used by the railroad: subversion, coercion and outright violence. In his introduction, Kevin Starr discusses Norris's debt to Zola for the novel's extraordinary sweep, scale and abundance of characters and details.
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ID: 0451525582
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The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
The uncut version of Upton Sinclair's classic 1906 novel about the shocking working conditions endured by immigrants in early twentieth-century Chicago stockyards and packinghouses.
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ID: 0393963144
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
A portrait of American manners and morals at the turn of the century offers the saga of Lily Bart, a beautiful heroine who lacks one important requirement for marrying well in New York society, her own money. Reissue.
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Three Lives
by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged woman, but she was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little choice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immigrant women who had no occupational choice but to become domestic workers. This collection of documents from the history of women's suffrage, medical history, modernist art, and literature enables readers to see how radical Stein's subject was.
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ID: 141790478X
(Type: books)
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The Magnificent Ambersons
by Booth Tarkington
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class. Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right." "The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel," judged Van Wyck Brooks. "[It is] a typical story of an American family and town--the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Ambersons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end."
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ID: 015610685X
(Type: books)
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Jurgen
by James Branch Cabell
One of the most-talked-about works of the 1920s, this compelling fantasy recounts the odyssey of a middle-aged pawnbroker who regains his youth for a year of amorous adventures. Jurgen's allegorical journey leads through a supernatural dreamscape to romances with Guenevere and The Lady of the Lake and confrontations with God and the Devil. This edition of Cabell's witty and irreverent landmark of modern fiction contains the full text of the revised and definitive version of 1926, together with 13 striking full-page illustrations by Frank PapƩ.
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You Know Me Al
by Ring Lardner
This classic piece of baseball fiction takes readers on the witty and exciting journey of big leagues as they join player Jack Keefe on his journey as a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. First published in 1914, You Know Me Al is an all-time classical baseball tale that takes readers into the life of Jack Keefe, a bush league baseball player who earns as spot in in the majors as a Chicago White Sox pitcher. Set in pre-World War I America, letters that Keefe sends to his āold palā Al reveal Keefeās self-centered, regular struggles to maintain his spot in the big leagues, keep his personal life under control, and juggle his financial difficulties. Filled with Keefeās tales from on and off the field as he travels with the team, Ring Lardnerās writing is full of wit, insight, and entertainment.
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ID: 0812966120
(Type: books)
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My Ćntonia
by Willa Cather
The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of immigrants.
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ID: 0553214861
(Type: books)
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the companion of his needs--tender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. The engagement was announced discreetly, but all of New York society was soon privy to this most perfect match, a union of families and circumstances cemented by affection. Enter Countess Olenska, a woman of quick wit sharpened by experience, not afraid to flout convention and determined to find freedom in divorce. Against his judgment, Newland is drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska, who opens his eyes and has the power to make him feel. He knows that in sweet-tempered May, he can expect stability and the steadying comfort of duty. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry precision, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a tragic love story and a powerful homily about the perils of a perfect marriage. Commentary by William Lyon Phelps and E. M. Forster
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ID: 0140189858
(Type: books)
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Herland
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
On the eve of World War I, an all-female society is discovered somewhere in the distant reaches of the earth by three male explorers who are now forced to re-examine their assumptions about women's roles in society.