The Lion and the Mouse a Story of an American Life

Klein, Charles, 1867-1915Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1
Word count
468K words
Chapters
47

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Social ObservationFate and FortunePower GameUrban RomanceHuman NatureInspirationMoral Dilemma

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 Lion and the Mouse; a Story of an American Life by Hornblow and KleinAuthor: Klein, Charles, 1867-1915,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Feb 1, 2004

Editor's review

The Lion and the Mouse; a Story of an American Life, with Charles Klein among its creators, is an American narrative work with a social conscience. The title borrows the fable imagery of the lion and the mouse to suggest reversals between the strong and the weak and the role of the seemingly insignificant, and the story unfolds around American social life, presenting through its characters' fortunes the tensions among class, power, and morality. The work has a pronounced melodramatic style, with direct plotting and clear-cut good and evil, making it a useful sample of early twentieth-century American popular literature. The Project Gutenberg edition is free and easy to obtain, and readers can use it as English original reading material, observing the social attitudes and narrative conventions of the time while experiencing the story's tension. Those interested in the background of its stage adaptation may also note the markedly dramatic handling of scenes in the text.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the opening to understand the main characters' circumstances, then follow the plot forward
  2. Note how the lion-and-mouse imagery maps onto the character relationships to catch the metaphorical layers
  3. For the English original, read in sections and briefly retell each chapter to reinforce understanding
  4. Read with early twentieth-century American social context in mind to understand the work's melodramatic features

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

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47

FAQ

Can this book be obtained for free? Yes. This book is published by Project Gutenberg as a free ebook; search its website by title to download, usually in plain text and other formats, with no purchase required.
What does "the lion and the mouse" in the title mean? The title borrows the fable's classic imagery of the strong and the weak, suggesting shifts in the balance of power and the key role of the seemingly insignificant. While reading, note who plays the "lion" and who plays the "mouse" in the character relationships.
How difficult is this book to read? As an early twentieth-century English work, the language is somewhat more formal than modern English, but the plotting is direct and there is plenty of dialogue, making the overall difficulty moderate. Readers with basic English reading ability can get through it with a dictionary.
Is this book suitable for learning English? It can be used as extensive reading material; the direct plot helps maintain reading motivation. But the language carries period features and is not suitable as the only learning model; pair it with modern English materials and a dictionary.

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

Klein, Charles, 1867-1915 Author

Charles Klein (1867-1915) was an Anglo-American playwright active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Public information about him is limited, and many details of his life remain unclear. Five of his works are held in this collection, most of them novels adapted from stage plays, such as The Third Degree: A Narrative of Metropolitan Life, The Lion and the Mouse: A Story of American Life, John Marsh's Millions, The Music Master, and another version of The Lion and the Mouse. These works take urban life and everyday American circumstances as their subjects, with intricate plots and sharp dramatic conflict in a melodramatic vein. They reflect the contemporary vogue for adapting stage plays into popular reading matter and offer material for studying the interaction between popular literature and theater of the period.