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....

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...

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...

Poignant collection of 5 stories - based in part on the author's experiences as a nurse during the Civil War - includes "A Night," a moving account of her encounter with a dying soldier; "My Contraband," a gripping tale of vengeance involving a Civil War nurse, her Confederate patient and his former slave; plus 3 other titles.

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.