A child's guide to reading

If you ever go into the Maine woods to hunt and fish you will have as your companion a veteran of forest and stream, a professional guide. It will be his duty to show you where...

The question why we read books is one of those vast questions that need no answer. As well ask, Why ought we to be good? or, Why do we believe in a God? The whole universe of wi...

Our reason for considering prose fiction before the other departments of literature is not that fiction is of greatest importance, but that it is the branch of literature most w...

In discussing the question of plots we could not keep out the question of character, which we agreed for the purposes of our discussion is the second element of fiction. In impo...

When Julia Bryant, the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, was a child, a neighbor of the poet made her first call, and was shown into the parlor. She found the small Julia seate...

In almost every American household there will be some volume of poetry through which the young reader can make his entrance into the enchanted world; there will be a volume of S...

The plays of Shakespeare which are based upon the chronicles of English kings are grouped in the Folio edition of the dramatic works as “Histories.” It will not surprise any rea...

Since literature is, broadly, the written record of human life, biography, the life story of real men, lies at the core and center of literature. On one side biography is allied...

All literature consists of the written opinions and ideas, the knowledge and experience, of individuals; it is a chorus of human voices. Often the individuality of the creative...

Since there is not time in the short life of man to read all the good books written in one language, the young reader, or even the person who has formed the habit of reading, ma...

If we were guiding an intelligent stranger from another planet through our busy world, before what institution should we pause with greatest anxiety to explain to our alien comr...

In our age of free libraries and cheap editions of good books anyone who has time and disposition may become not merely a reader of literature, but a student of literature. The...

If there is one central idea which it is hoped a young reader might find in the foregoing pages, it is this: that literature is for everyone, young or old, who has the capacity...