Find your next public domain classic.

Milton’s tragic poem on blindness, captivity, vocation, vengeance, and spiritual trial.

Carlyle’s strange philosophical satire on clothes, belief, symbols, and spiritual crisis.

A focused Emerson essay collection on intellect, character, friendship, heroism, nature, poetry, prudence, and moral independence.

Irving’s collection of European sketches, supernatural anecdotes, traveler’s tales, and comic observation.

Hawthorne’s romance of utopian reform, desire, performance, and disillusionment in a communal experiment.

A mature Emerson essay collection on fate, power, wealth, culture, behavior, beauty, and illusion.

A Leatherstocking tale of frontier conflict, initiation, wilderness, and moral testing.

A Mark Twain story collection led by the famous Hadleyburg satire, with sketches on reputation, fraud, belief, and social comedy.

A Leatherstocking adventure of scouting, war, loyalty, and romance around the Great Lakes frontier.

London’s firsthand account of poverty, labor, housing, and survival in London’s East End.

Cooper’s western Leatherstocking novel, closing Natty Bumppo’s life on the open plains.

The first Barsetshire novel, centered on conscience, charity, reform, journalism, and church income.

Hawthorne’s early story collection of Puritan shadows, moral allegory, and New England imagination.

A compact Brazilian romantic novel of love, disgrace, secrecy, sacrifice, and social restoration.

A foundational Argentine romantic-political novel set amid dictatorship, exile, danger, and love.

Alencar’s short romantic novel beginning with a delay, a glimpse, and a pursuit of mysterious love.

Lima Barreto’s socially sharp novel of race, class, suburb life, seduction, and injustice in Rio.

The great Middle High German heroic epic of Siegfried, Kriemhild, betrayal, vengeance, and downfall.

Schiller’s historical drama of freedom, friendship, court power, forbidden love, and political idealism.

Lamartine’s lyrical tale of memory, Naples, youthful love, loss, and romantic melancholy.

A Golden Age comedy about lies, reputation, love, social performance, and the comedy of suspicion.

Pascal’s brilliant polemical letters on Jesuit casuistry, conscience, grace, and religious controversy.

A dark Brazilian Romantic classic of tavern tales, transgression, death, desire, and Gothic excess.

A satirical portrait of an imaginary republic, exposing bureaucracy, elites, corruption, and empty nationalism.