The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, is an 1896 novella and early example of the regionalism genre with its sketches of the fictional fishing village of Dunnet Landing in Maine. The narrator is a woman from Boston who returns to the small coastal town after a brief earlier visit, in order to finish writing her book. She rents an empty schoolhouse with a panoramic view of Dunnet Landing, which serves as a focus of narrative consciousness....

Some have called this collection of nine short stories Sarah Orne Jewett's finest work. In the title story, a young city girl named Sylvia travels to the country to live with her grandmother. While there, she meets a young hunter and bird enthusiast who is seeking a rare bird thought to be in the area. Sylvia comes to love country life and the animals that inhabit it, and she must choose whether or not to tell the hunter that she has seen the rare...

The Jolly Corner is a short story by Henry James published first in the magazine The English Review of December, 1908. One of James' most noted ghost stories, "The Jolly Corner" describes the adventures of Spencer Brydon as he prowls the now-empty New York house where he grew up. He encounters a "sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity."

In the late nineteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island, was a cauldron of money, excess, and unapologetic greed, where reputations were made and lost in a whirlwind of parties and fancied slights. But amid the glamour of yacht races, tennis matches, and costume balls raged undeclared class warfare, scandalous doings, even madness. In 1893, railroad mogul Sam Driver, one of the few surviving robber barons of the lawless years after the Civil War, knocks...

Recovered for a new generation of feminist readers, this revolutionary depiction of the American working poor was one of the first literary critiques of industrial capitalism by a nineteenth-century proletarian. Originally published in 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly, "Life in the Iron Mills" remains a classic of proletarian literature that paints a bleak and incisive portrait of nineteenth-century industrial America. Rebecca Harding Davis was one...

The Altar of the Dead Henry James - The Altar of the Dead is a short story by Henry James, first published in his collection Terminations in 1895. A fable of literally life and death significance, the story explores how the protagonist tries to keep the remembrance of his dead friends, to save them from being forgotten entirely in the rush of everyday events. He meets a woman who shares his ideals, only to find that the past places what seems to be...

Critics call Stephen Crane, who is best known for his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, the first "modern" American writer. Crane was only twenty-eight when he died, but his work had a profound influence on American letters. He helped to kill sentimentality in American writing, giving this country&;s fiction renewed strength and dignity as an art form. Crane is considered the American counterpart of such European Nationalists as Zola, Tolstoy,...

BBC Audiobooks America presents 27 classic short stories, taken from the most celebrated humorists from the 19th century.