Biography &amp; autobiography

True story

The Road

by Jack London

Tales of London's days as a hobo.

Free

Download

Travel

Great Astronomers: Isaac Newton

by Robert Stawell Ball

Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian who has been considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist...

Free

Download

Roughing It

by Mark Twain

Roughing It follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the Wild West during the years 1861–1867. After a brief stint as a Confederate cavalry militiaman, he joined his brother Orion Clemens, who had been...

Free

Download

Humor

Travel

Great Astronomers: Galileo Galilei

by Robert Stawell Ball

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and...

Free

Download

The Yellow Wallpaper

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American...

Free

Download

Horror

Short Stories

The Diary of a U-boat Commander

by Sir William Stephen Richard King-Hall

The diary of a World War One U-Boat commander. As well as being a fascinating glimpse of life on the German U-boats during the intense submarine blockade, this also reminds us there were humans involved - on...

Free

Download

History

History by country

St. Francis of Assisi

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Chesterton was an orthodox religious person, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism. In 1923, he wrote this short biography of St. Francis of Assisi, after whom Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose his papal...

Free

Download

Religious

The Golden Age

by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame’s reminiscences are notable for their conception “of a world where children are locked in perpetual warfare with the adult ‘Olympians’ who have wholly forgotten how it feels to be young”--a...

Free

Download

Fantasy

The Confessions

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher...

Free

Download

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

by Mark Twain

Mark Twain's work on Joan of Arc is titled in full Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte who is identified further as Joan's page and secretary. The work is fictionally presented...

Free

Download

Historical

My Bondage and My Freedom

by Frederick Douglass

My Bondage and My Freedom is an autobiographical slave narrative written by Frederick Douglass and published in 1855. It is the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass, and is mainly an expansion...

Free

Download

Personal Memoirs

True story

Sailing Alone Around the World

by Joshua Slocum

Sailing Alone Around the World (1900) is a sailing memoir by Joshua Slocum about his single-handed global circumnavigation aboard the sloop Spray. Slocum was the first person to sail around the world alone....

Free

Download

Adventurers & Ex...

Personal Memoirs

Great Astronomers: Nicolaus Copernicus

by Robert Stawell Ball

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a mathematician and astronomer who formulated a comprehensive heliocentric model which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the universe, contrary to the...

Free

Download

Great Astronomers: Johannes Kepler

by Robert Stawell Ball

German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) derived his mathematical laws of planetary motion from astronomical data meticulously collected by Tycho Brahe, who, as he was dying, beseeched young Kepler to use...

Free

Download

Twelve Men

by Theodore Dreiser

Character sketches, combining the best of biography with the finest of narrative - short and illustrative.

Free

Download

Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave

by Sojourner Truth

Free

Download

Personal Memoirs

True story

Childhood

by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Free

Download

Biographical Stories

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Free

Download

Shelley: The Poet of Rebellion, Nature, and Love

by Sydney Waterlow

Waterlow gives a brief, unpretentious account of the life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who is regarded as one of the finest lyric poets of the English language. Not merely a biography of events, this is...

Free

Download

Literary essay