The Great Quest
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Young adult and adult readers who enjoy seafaring adventure and far-off exploration
- Learners seeking free public-domain English reading material for long-form practice
- Literature enthusiasts studying early American young adult adventure fiction
- General readers interested in maritime narrative and journey-based structure
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer modern urban settings or complex psychological portrayal
- Beginners with weak English who find it hard to sustain long-form reading in the original
Reading tips
- First skim the chapter titles to grasp the stages of the journey, then read stage by stage and note the main events.
- Mark the characters' route on a map or a sheet of paper while reading to help follow spatial shifts and plot progression.
- After each chapter, write two or three sentences summarizing characters' motives and conflicts to train coherent understanding of long-form reading.
- After finishing, compare it with another seafaring adventure novel and consider the common structure of the genre.
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
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- 25
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- 27
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- 36
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- 47
- 48
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- 51
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- 56
FAQ
What age group is this book suitable for?
Can I understand it without any sailing knowledge?
Why is reading with a map recommended?
Comments
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About the author
Charles Boardman Hawes (1889–1923) was an American writer of maritime adventure novels, born in Clifton Springs, New York. In his short life he produced several works of sea adventure, notably The Mutineers, The Great Quest, and his posthumous novel The Dark Frigate. The Dark Frigate won the Newbery Medal in 1924, after his death from illness in Springfield in 1923, making him the first American-born Newbery winner. Three of his works are held in this collection, though no common category is currently assigned. Public information on his early education and writing career is limited, but his novels are confirmed to center on seafaring, mutiny, and long sea chases, with a taut style and strong maritime atmosphere that earned him a place in American adventure literature for young readers.
