Home Again with Me

Riley, James Whitcomb, 1849-1916Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0

Word count: 8.5K words
Chapters: 1

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.Home Again with Me by James Whitcomb RileyAuthor: Riley, James Whitcomb, 1849-1916,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Apr 28, 2014

Editor's review

Riley was an American poet of Indiana known for dialect verse and homely lyricism, and Home Again with Me continues his warm writing about home, childhood, and everyday human feeling. The language is plain and the pace unhurried, with a marked ballad quality and colloquial expression; it suits slow reading in a quiet setting, to take in the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century rural life in the American Midwest. For readers who want to know American regional literature and the dialect poetry tradition, this ebook offers a light entry point; for general readers it is more a booklet of lyrical sketches to dip into, not to be read for plot but for the sound and feeling of the lines. Note that this is a public-domain electronic edition in English with no Chinese translation facing it, and Riley's dialect spellings pose a hurdle for non-native readers; reading with annotation or an introductory guide is advised.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who enjoy English lyric poetry and rural themes
Enthusiasts who want to know American Midwestern regional literature
Readers who need short poems for fragmented reading time
Beginners studying late nineteenth-century American dialect poetry

Not a good fit for

Novel readers expecting a full plot and narrative progression
Beginners with weak English who do not want to consult a dictionary
Readers who need a Chinese translation alongside the text

Reading tips

Read through once for the rhythm first; do not verify every dialect spelling word by word.
Choose pieces about home and childhood for close reading and take brief notes.
Use material on Riley's life and Indiana local background to aid understanding.
Read aloud to feel the colloquial rhythm and ballad quality of the lines.

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.

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a poetry collection?

It is a collection of poems by James Whitcomb Riley, mainly short lyrics, not a novel with a continuous plot. Read it for the rhythm, imagery, and feeling of the lines rather than expecting a story to advance.

What if the English dialect spellings are hard to read?

Riley often uses dialect spellings to reproduce speech. Non-native readers can skip difficult words at first and grasp the overall tone, or consult a standard English version or introductory guide, focusing on the feeling and scenes in the poems rather than word-for-word correspondence.

Is this ebook suited to close reading or extensive reading?

Both. Extensive reading conveys the overall rural atmosphere and lyrical tone; for close reading, choose short pieces about home and family and, with Riley's period in mind, appreciate the expressive features of dialect poetry.

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About the author

Riley, James Whitcomb, 1849-1916 Author

James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) was an American poet known for his folksy children's verse and dialect poetry. The library holds 22 of his works, including children's collections such as Riley Child-Rhymes, The Book of Joyous Children and A Child-World, along with Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury, Riley Songs of Home, several volumes of The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley, and the Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers. These works draw mainly on childhood, family and everyday human feeling; their language is plain and their rhythm light, with a marked flavor of Midwestern American speech that makes them well suited to reading aloud. Commonly classified under inspirational growth, they are often treated as warm, optimistic reading for young people. Given the limits of the available material, details of his life are sparse, and this introduction rests chiefly on the character of his works.