The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX: America

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.4
Word count
387K words
Chapters
39

Tags

English Originals Essays and Miscellany Literary GiantsHumanistic CareIntellectual EnlightenmentClassic AnthologySelected EssaysBeautiful EssaysEssays and NotesEclectic ReadingAmerican LiteratureCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - AmericaAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PN: Language and Literatures: Literature: General, Criticism, Collections, Release Date: May 1, 2009

Editor's review

This volume is the ninth of the ten-volume The Best of the World's Classics and is devoted exclusively to American prose, forming part of the public-domain English literary canon. Its value lies not in novel opinions but in offering an editorially curated lineage of prose: within a single volume readers can encounter a range of voices and styles in American writing from the early period to the modern era, saving the trouble of sifting through vast public-domain texts themselves. As a Project Gutenberg e-book, it is easy to search and permits full-text copying and quotation, making it suitable for close reading and stylistic comparison. It is best treated as a "sample collection" rather than a "general history": read piece by piece and note the differences in syntax and rhetoric when different authors treat the same kind of subject (persons, scenery, argument). For English learners it is a relatively safe advanced reader, as the language is mostly standard written prose; for researchers it can serve as an entry point for the study of editions and anthologies. Note that an anthology carries the editor's stance, and the selection itself is worth questioning: inclusion should not be equated with the whole of the classics.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents first, group by author or theme, and concentrate on two or three pieces at a time while taking brief notes.
  2. When encountering long sentences, first identify the main clause, then review the modifiers, and collect sentence patterns worth imitating.
  3. Read pieces on the same subject side by side and record differences in style rather than merely the content.
  4. Use the e-book's search function to look up keywords and observe how a concept is used by different authors.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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  7. 7
  8. 8
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  11. 11
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  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
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  21. 21
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  27. 27
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  36. 36
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  38. 38
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FAQ

Is this anthology suitable for English beginners? Not really for complete beginners or elementary learners. The selected prose is mostly standard written English with long sentences and distant cultural background. If you already have some vocabulary and grammar, you can read slowly with notes and reference works; beginners are better off starting with graded readers or short simplified texts before returning to an anthology like this.
Is this a Chinese book or an English book? The text is in English; it is a public-domain anthology of English literature, released electronically by Project Gutenberg. It has no accompanying Chinese translation, so readers need English reading ability. If you only want to learn about American prose content, you can find another anthology with a translation to read alongside it.
Can the pieces in this anthology represent the whole of American prose? Not entirely. Any anthology is limited by the editor's perspective, length, and era, and the selected pieces reflect the editor's criteria. Readers can treat it as an introductory sample, then follow their interests to read more works by a given author, and pay attention to voices not included, so as not to equate an anthology with the full picture of literary history.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Project Gutenberg Author

Project Gutenberg is not a single author but a nonprofit digital library founded by Michael Hart in 1971 and one of the world's earliest free ebook platforms. It relies on volunteers to digitize, proofread, and freely distribute public-domain works and is now operated by the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Its collection contains 2,692 works, mainly religious texts, epics, and story collections, including the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims volumes, the epic Mahabharata, a literal translation of the Arabian Nights, and Danish editions of the Old and New Testaments. Public information is limited, and its nature is closer to a public-interest compiling and dissemination body; these texts are open to the public, easy to consult and circulate, and have had a profound influence on the spread of ebooks and the preservation of public-domain resources.