The Substitute Prisoner
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers of English genre fiction who enjoy mistaken identity and suspense
- Learners who need plot-driven English public-domain books for extensive reading
- Readers interested in early American popular literature and narrative technique
- People who habitually read ebooks in segments on the commute or before bed
Not a good fit for
- Serious literary readers seeking profound literary experiment and complex structure
- Beginners with limited English vocabulary who need sentence-by-sentence annotation
- Readers with no interest in the criminal-substitute subject
Reading tips
- Read the first two chapters to establish the character relationships, then proceed chapter by chapter; avoid skipping, which would lose identity clues.
- Jot down the motives of characters connected to the "substitute" as you read, to help sort out how the suspense is set up.
- Use it as daily extensive reading material, one or two chapters at a time, and retell the gist to practice summarizing in English.
- After finishing, revisit the key turning points to see how the author uses dialogue to advance the plot.
About the publisher
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
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
FAQ
What genre is this book roughly?
Does the public-domain ebook include notes or an introduction?
Can I read it if my English is only average?
Is it suitable as English learning material?
Comments
Find this book
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
Max Marcin (1879–1948) was an American playwright and screenwriter. His work spanned both the stage and the screen, and he contributed to a number of Broadway plays and film scripts, making him one of the writers active in the American entertainment industry in the first half of the twentieth century. One of his works is held in this collection, The Substitute Prisoner, which reflects his interest in narrative built around suspense and dramatic tension. Public information about Marcin's life is limited; details of his early years, education, and creative process are largely unavailable, and the existing record centers mainly on his professional identity as a playwright and screenwriter and on the small number of works that have survived. His writing is noted for its dramatic structure and his ability to build suspense and advance conflict within a limited space, skills that carried over into his screenwriting. Although the scale and influence of his output cannot rival those of the leading names of his time, his plays and screenwriting remain a useful case for studying American popular theater and the early film industry in the early twentieth century.
