50 American Classics - format ePub

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, MA in 1817, and is best know for his influential work, Walden, which was published by Ticknor & Fields in 1854.

Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri,In 1851. She began writing shortly after herHusband's death and, from 1889 until her ownDeath, her stories and other miscellaneousWritings appeared in Vogue, Youth's companion,Atlantic Monthly, Century, Saturday EveningPost, and other publications. In addition to The Awakening, Mrs. Chopin published another novel, At Fault, and two collections of short stories and sketches, Bayou Folk and A Night at Acadie. The publication of The Awakening in 1899 occasioned shocked and angry response from reviewers all over the country. The book was taken off the shelves of the St. Louis mercantile library and its author was barred from the fine arts club. Kate Chopin died in 1904.

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester and spent her early years there with her family. Her father died in 1852, and eventually, in 1865, Frances emigrated to the United States with her mother and siblings, settling with family in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Frances began to be published at the age of nineteen, submitting short stories to magazines and using the proceeds to help support the family. In 1872, she married Swan Burnett, a doctor, with whom she had two sons while living in Paris. Her first novel, That Lass o'Lowrie's, was published in 1877, while the Burnetts were living in Washington D. C. Following a separation from her husband, Burnett lived on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually marrying for a second time, however she never truly recovered from the death of her first son, Lionel.

Best known during her lifetime for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), her books for children, including The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, have endured as classics, but Burnett also wrote many other novels for adults, which were hugely popular and favourably compared to authors such as George Eliot.

John Griffith Chaney, conocido como Jack London (1876-1916), creció en Oakland. A los catorce años dejó el colegio y pasó su juventud trabajando como pescador, patrullero de costas o marinero a la caza de focas. También sufrió el desempleo y fue arrestado por vagabundear, hasta que se trasladó a Alaska empujado por la «fiebre del oro». Allí vivió sus experiencias más duras, pero también las que plantarían la semilla de la escritura. De ese entorno surgen sus primeros relatos y los que le granjearon fama inmediata: La llamada de la selva (1903) y Colmillo Blanco (1906), para muchos sus mejores obras. La desnutrición y sus escasas ganancias lo llevaron de vuelta a California, pero no tardó en hacerse de nuevo a la mar. Primero (1904) como corresponsal de guerra y más adelante (1907) con su propio navío, en una expedición que recorrió el mundo durante varios años y que inspiró Cuentos de los mares del Sur (1911), otro de sus títulos más conocidos. A su vuelta compró una gran propiedad, pero un incendio fortuito destruyó la nueva casa y aquello afectó profundamente a la salud del autor, ya de por sí precaria en aquel momento. Falleció en su rancho de California a los cuarenta años.

Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871. He died in Germany on June 5, 1900.

O. Henry (1862 - 1910) is the pen-name of William Sidney Porter, the American writer born in Greensboro, North Carolina. He was known for a style of writing that featured surprise endings and showed the grim and often humorous effect of coincidence on the lives of his subjects. A keen observer of the lives of Americans from New York to Texas in the early 20th century, his works have been adapted many times for the stage and screen.

Ubicado en Providence y descendiente de una familia burguesa, H. P. Lovecraft dio muestras desde muy joven de un carácter retraído y elitista. Aunque vivió unos años en Nueva York, donde se relacionó con otros escritores, y a pesar de que también cultivó la poesía y el ensayo, es sin duda conocido por su narrativa fantástica y de terror, que supo renovar dotándola de elementos novedosos, ligados a la ciencia ficción (con alienígenas, otras dimensiones o viajes en el tiempo). Publicó tres novelas y sesenta relatos, casi todos en la revista de género Weird Tales [“Cuentos inquietantes”] fundada en 1923. Se le considera hoy uno de los grandes maestros del horror.

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900 and received enormous, immediate success. Baum went on to write seventeen additional novels in the Oz series. Today, he is considered the father of the American fairy tale. His stories inspired the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, one of the most widely viewed movies of all time.

MinaLima is an award-winning graphic design studio founded by Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima, renowned for establishing the visual graphic style of the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts film series. Specializing in graphic design and illustration, Miraphora and Eduardo have continued their involvement in the Harry Potter franchise through numerous design commissions, from creating all the graphic elements for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter Diagon Alley at Universal Orlando Resort, to designing award-winning publications for the brand. Their best-selling books include Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone, Harry Potter Film Wizardry, The Case of Beasts: Explore the Film Wizardry of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Archive of Magic: Explore the Film Wizardry of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, and J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts screenplays. MinaLima studio is renowned internationally for telling stories through design and has created its own MinaLima Classics series, reimagining a growing collection of much-loved tales including Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, and Pinocchio.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is the creator of Tarzan, one of the most popular fictional characters of all time, and John Carter, hero of the Barsoom science fiction series. Burroughs was a prolific author, writing almost 70 books before his death in 1950, and was one of the first authors to popularize a character across multiple media, as he did with Tarzan’s appearance in comic strips, movies, and merchandise. Residing in Hawaii at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, Burroughs was drawn into the Second World War and became one of the oldest war correspondents at the time. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s popularity continues to be memorialized through the community of Tarzana, California, which is named after the ranch he owned in the area, and through the Burrough crater on Mars, which was named in his honour.

Lew Wallace was an American lawyer, soldier, politician and author. During active duty as a second lieutenant in the Mexican-American War, Wallace met Abraham Lincoln, who would later inspire him to join the Republican Party and fight for the Union in the American Civil War. Following the end of the war, Wallace retired from the army and began writing, completing his most famous work, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ while serving as the governor of New Mexico Territory. Ben-Hur would go on to become the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, and is noted as one of the most influential Christian books ever written. Although Ben-Hur is his most famous work, Wallace published continuously throughout his lifetime. Other notable titles include, The Boyhood of Christ, The Prince of India, several biographies and his own autobiography. Wallace died in 1909 at the age of 77, after a lifetime of service in the American army and government.

American author (Pearl Zane Grey) is best known as a pioneer of the Western literary genre, which idealized the Western frontier and the men and women who settled the region. Following in his father’s footsteps, Grey studied dentistry while on a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Grey’s athletic talent led to a short career in the American minor league before he established his dentistry practice. As an outlet to the tedium of dentistry, Grey turned to writing, and finally abandoned his dental practice to write full time. Over the course of his career Grey penned more than ninety books, including the best-selling Riders of the Purple Sage. Many of Grey’s novels were adapted for film and television. He died in 1939.

Dillon Wallace was born in Craigsville, New York, on June 24, 1863, the son of Dillon Wallace and Ruth Ann Ferguson.

After completing high school and spending the intervening years working in a variety of occupations, he entered New York Law School in 1892. He graduated in 1896, was called to the bar in 1897 and practised law in New York for several years. In 1900 Dillon Wallace met Leonidas Hubbard, an assistant editor with Outing magazine. Hubbard was interested in exploration and adventure and had soon convinced Wallace to join him in an expedition to the interior of Labrador.

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (Frederick Douglass) was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland. He took the name Douglass after escaping from the South in 1838.

As a leader in the abolitionist movement, Douglass was famed for his eloquent yet incisive political writing. And, like his near-contemporary, Booker T. Washington, understood the central importance of education in improving the lives of African Americans, and was therefore an early proponent of desegregation.

A firm believer in equal rights for all, Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C., in the hours before his death in February 1895.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, she was raised in a deeply religious family and educated in a seminary school run by her elder sister. In her adult life, Stowe married biblical scholar and abolitionist Calvin Ellis Stowe, who would later go on to work as Harriet’s literary agent, and the two participated in the Underground Railroad by providing temporary refuge for escaped slaves travelling to the American North. Shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, Stowe published her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a stark and sympathetic depiction of the desperate lives of African American slaves. The book went on to see unprecedented sales, and informed American and European attitudes towards abolition. In the years leading up to her death, suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, Stowe is said to have begun re-writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, almost word-for-word, believing that she was writing the original manuscript once again. Stowe died in July 1, 1896 at the age of eighty-five.

Nathaniel Hawthorne est un écrivain américain originaire de Salem, dans le Massachusetts. Après des études au Bowdoin College, il s'engage dans une carrière littéraire marquée par une profonde introspection psychologique et morale. En 1850, il publie son chef-d'oeuvre, La Lettre écarlate. Son écriture subtile et symbolique a exercé une influence majeure sur la littérature américaine, explorant les conflits intérieurs de ses personnages à travers une prose riche et évocatrice.

WILLA CATHER (1873–1947), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than fifteen books, was one of the most distinguished American writers of the early twentieth century.

Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, critic and war veteran. Bierce fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army following an 1866 expedition across the Great Plains. Bierce’s harrowing experiences during the Civil War, particularly those at the Battle of Shiloh, shaped a writing career that included editorials, novels, short stories and poetry. Among his most famous works are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Boarded Window,” “Chickamauga,” and What I Saw of Shiloh. While on a tour of Civil-War battlefields in 1913, Bierce is believed to have joined Pancho Villa’s army before disappearing in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

Wallace Delois Wattles was an American New Thought writer.
Little is known about his life. Wattles was born in the USA shortly after the civil war (1860) and experienced much failure in his earlier years.
According to the 1880 US Federal Census, Wallace lived with his parents on a farm in Nunda Township, McHenry County, Illinois, and worked as a farm laborer. His father is listed as a gardener and his mother as "keeping house". Wallace is listed as being born in Illinois while his parents are listed as born in New York. No other siblings are recorded as living with the family.
According to the 1910 census, Wattles was married to Abbie Bryant, 47. They had three children: Florence Wattles, 22, Russell H. Wattles, 27, and Agnes Wattles, 16.
Later in his life he took to studying the various religious beliefs and philosophies of the world including those of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Swedenborg, Emerson, and others.
It was through his tireless study and experimentation that he discovered the truth of New Thought principles and put them into practice in his own life. He began to write books outlining these principles. He practiced the technique of creative visualisation and as his daughter Florence relates, "He wrote almost constantly. It was then that he formed his mental picture. He saw himself as a successful writer, a personality of power, an advancing man, and he began to work toward the realization of this vision. He lived every page ... His life was truly the powerful life."
Elizabeth Towne, in her magazine "Nautilus", published the articles of Wallace D. Wattles in almost every issue in the early 1900's and until his untimely death in 1911.
Wattles' best known book, The Science of Getting Rich is a clear-cut and practical guide, with a mental and spiritual approach on how to become rich.
As a practical author, always Wattles encouraged his readers to test his theories on themselves rather than take his word as an authority, and he claimed to have tested his methods on himself and others before publishing them.
His daughet Florence wrote: "he made lots of money, and had good health, except for his extreme frailty" in the last three years before his death.
Wattles died on February 7, 1911, in Ruskin, Tennessee, and his body was transported home for burial to Elwood, Indiana. As a sign of respect, businesses closed throughout the town for two hours on the afternoon of his funeral....

William Walker Atkinson was a prolific writer, well known for his publications on the power of the mind. Though his books were written in the early years of the twentieth century, they are still popular up to this day.
Atkinson was born in Baltimore on December 5, 1862 to William C. Atkinson and his wife Emma Lyal Mittnacht Atkinson.
His father and grandfather were successful merchants, owning grocery stores; they were engaged in civic activities such as the school board, fire department, and Whig political party. As a teenager William Jr. worked as a clerk in the grocery.
Atkinson studied law in Pennsylvania and passed the bar exam in 1894. He died on November 22, 1932 in Pasadena, California at age 69.
Atkinson was an extremely prolific author, and editor of several magazines, including Suggestion, a New Thought Journal (1900-1901) and New Thought (1901-1905). As the editor of Advanced Thought magazine (1906-1916), he wrote articles under several names. One of them was "Swami Ramacharaka".
As early as 1885, Atkinson corresponded with early Theosophical Society leaders Thomas Moore Johnson and Elliott B. Page. He became a member of the American Theosophical Society on January 28, 1903, while living in Chicago, according the records of the international Theosophical Society based in Adyar, Chennai, India.