The Masters of the Peaks: A Story of the Great North Woods

Altsheler, Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander), 1862-1919Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
448K words
Chapters
45

Tags

English Originals Featured Fiction Nature WritingVengeance and GratitudeHeroismAdventure SpiritGrowing UpAmerican FrontierYouth Reading

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 Masters of the Peaks: A Story of the Great North Woods by Joseph A. AltshelerAuthor: Altsheler, Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander), 1862-1919,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Feb 1, 2004

Editor's review

From the prolific writer of juvenile adventure fiction Joseph A. Altsheler, this work is set in the great northern forests of North America and continues his familiar themes of wilderness narrative and youthful growth. Its depictions of forest travel, hunting camps and the natural environment are vivid and concrete, while the characters' choices in hardship and their comradeship provide the main tension; the reading is brisk and highly visual. As a free Project Gutenberg ebook, it is easy to access at any time and serves as an approachable sample of early twentieth-century American juvenile adventure literature, as well as a text English learners can use to observe how narrative prose moves forward. While reading, note how the author uses setting to drive plot and action to portray character, and observe the period's attitudes toward nature and its imaginings of peoples.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Skim the chapter titles first to grasp the route of the journey, then read in sections according to changes of place
  2. Mark unfamiliar woodland and hunting terms, then look them up together after finishing a section
  3. Read alongside other wilderness novels by the same author to compare narrative patterns
  4. Write a short retelling afterward to check your grasp of plot and character relationships

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable for English beginners to read directly? Not really for complete beginners. The original is early twentieth-century English narrative with long sentences and many woodland, hunting and regional terms. Intermediate readers can get through it with a dictionary; beginners would do better with a simplified or bilingual edition.
Does the book involve real North American geography and history? The adventure unfolds against a northern forest backdrop with a strong period imagination rather than strict geography or historical record. Readers can treat it as a literary setting; for historical or geographical knowledge, consult specialized works.
Any practical advice for reading the electronic edition? Use reading software that supports dictionary lookup and bookmarks so you can mark names, places and unfamiliar words; divide the reading into chapter-based goals with a fixed daily amount, and review your marks afterward—this noticeably improves comprehension and retention.

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

Altsheler, Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander), 1862-1919 Author

Joseph A. Altsheler (1862–1919) was an American author known for historical adventure novels, with 33 of his works held in this collection. Because public information is limited, details of his life are difficult to set out, yet his works show that he drew on American history, especially the frontier and the Civil War era. Representative titles include The Riflemen of the Ohio, The Guns of Bull Run, The Forest Runners, The Hunters of the Hills, The Rulers of the Lakes and The Shades of the Wilderness, most set in early Kentucky, the Great Lakes region or the Civil War. His novels are tightly plotted, stress historical atmosphere and youthful adventure, and often appear in series; they had a certain influence on early twentieth-century American historical reading for young people.