Imlay’s delightful epistolary adventure of 1793, set on the American frontier, was one of the first American novels. The trials of an emigrant family in the Ohio River Valley of Kentucky contrast the decadence of Europe with the utopian promise of the American West. Its sensational love plots also dramatize the novel’s surprising feminist allegiances.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a brooding romance of inherited guilt, moral decay, and possible regeneration, centered on the ancestral Pyncheon mansion in Salem. Blending Gothic atmosphere with psychological realism, Hawthorne transforms the decaying house into a symbol of historical sin and family obsession. Its style is richly allegorical, meditative, and darkly poetic, standing within the American Renaissance beside works concerned with Puritan memory, social ra...

Introduction by Mary OliverCommentary by Henry James, Robert Frost, Matthew Arnold, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry David ThoreauThe definitive collection of Emerson’s major speeches, essays, and poetry, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson chronicles the life’s work of a true “American Scholar.” As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy that championed the individual, emphas...

Disseminating his genius through celebrated essays and the hundreds of public lectures he gave across the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century and was lionised as a champion of individualism and a staunch critic of the countervailing pressures of society. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature’s finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents the complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with beautiful ...

This collection was designed for optimal navigation on eReaders and other electronic devices. It is indexed alphabetically, chronologically and by category, making it easier to access individual books, stories and poems. This collection offers lower price, the convenience of a one-time download, and it reduces the clutter in your digital library. All books included in this collection feature a hyperlinked table of contents and footnotes. The collection is complimented by an author biograph...

Biography of the pioneer of women's rights and mother of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein). According to Wikipedia: "Mary Wollstonecraft 27 April 1759 10 September 1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that...

'Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.' With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of two very different men, as moral cod...

The indispensable guide to living a good life, drawn from the writings of the founding father.Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s most revered founders, was a man of uncommonly fine common sense. Although he was never able to finish his project of compiling a comprehensive compendium of practical wisdom, he was able to lay down the beginnings of this work in his later writings.Collected within this volume are Franklin's writings organized around his timeles...

This volume brings together extracts of the major political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in the order in which they appeared in the revolutionary 1790s. It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and e...