Henry Buhl Library: American Literature: Find Literary Works

Find Books & eBooks

Looking for an American classic? Lots of literature (mainly pre-1923) can be found online.

Try

E-Books & Online Books
A collection of links for locating books that are available through library subscriptions and in the public domain.

Books are organized by subject categories and an A to Z list is provided for quick access to specific e-book databases.

Use the Advanced Search.

This is helpful for prolific writers and/or common titles.

Screengrab of Henry Advanced Search for the Title Bernice Bobs Her Hair by Author Fitzgerald.

Search the Notes.

Searches the table of contents of anthologies of literature and criticism.

Need a book the library does not own?

You can request the book through Interlibrary Loan. Info and a downloadable form are available here!

To search for books available in other libraries, try using

WorldCat -- Search the holdings of more than 10,000 libraries to locate books and identify citation information.

Library of Congress -- Access to the Library of Congress catalog and other online collections.

NOTE: Users do not need to identify a library that owns the book. Simply provide the appropriate information on the form and library staff will do the rest!

Find Literary Works in Databases and Online

Literary Reference Source Plus This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to classics, poetry, and short stories.

Ebsco eBooks
Access to over 200,000 full text eBooks across a variety of subjects.
Bartleby.com
Bartleby.com publishes thousands of free online classics of reference, literature and nonfiction.
The William Blake Archive
Access multiple editions of digitized works by Blake, a biography of Blake, and an extensive bibliography of resources for further study (from the Library of Congress UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Rochester, and the National Endowment for the Humanities).
The Willa Cather Archive
Read writings, letters, and some biographies of Willa Cather through this archive. Users can also access issues of Cather Studies and use the TokenX tool to analyze Cather's work(s).
The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Archive
This site includes "the manuscripts of The Domain of Arnheim, The Spectacles, and some of Poe's most famous poems," as well as "correspondence, books belonging to Poe (including the author's annotated copies of several works), and a large group of sheet music for songs based on Poe's poetry."
The Walt Whitman Archive
"an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers."