Children's Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860

"Left his lodging some time ago and has not been heard of since, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. . . . Any...

The region of Otsego Lake, New York, was at the last of the eighteenth century a wilderness. Here and there rose a little clearing, the birthplace of a future village, but westw...

Almost any summer day in the early part of the century a blue-eyed, brown-haired boy might have been seen lying under a great apple-tree in the garden of an old house in Portlan...

Among the boys most familiar with the scenes described in Lowell's recollections of his youth was Oliver Wendell Holmes, the son of the pastor of the First Congregational Church...

James Russell Lowell was born on the 22d of February, 1819, at Cambridge, Mass. Fate had willed that he, beyond all other writers, was to preserve a certain phase of Yankee life...

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first distinguished woman writer of America, was born at Litchfield, Conn., in those old New England days when children were taught that good little g...

At twelve o'clock on a summer night, nearly a half century ago, a young man of twenty-three stood in the shadow of a great Indian camp watching intently the scene before him. On...

In 1804 the town of Salem, in Massachusetts, was the most important seaport in America. With the regularity of the tides its ships sailed to China, the East Indies, the Feejee I...

In the days when Louisiana was a province of Spain a little dark-eyed boy used to wander among the fields and groves of his father's plantation studying with eager delight the w...

Seventy years ago the Round Hill School at Northampton, Mass., was perhaps the most famous school in New England. The founder, George Bancroft, had modelled it upon a celebrated...

One of the stories that mankind has always liked to believe is that of the existence of a marvellous country whose climate was perfect, whose people were happy, whose king was w...

One day in the year 1827, a boy of thirteen first entered the chapel of Harvard College to take his seat there as a student. His schoolfellows looked at him curiously first, bec...

One Sunday morning, about the year 1661, a group of Indians was gathered around a noble-looking man, listening to a story he was reading. It was summer and the day was beautiful...

William Cullen Bryant was born in 1794 in a log farmhouse in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. His father was the country doctor and the child was named af...

In the play-ground of an old-fashioned English school the boy Edgar Allan Poe, then in his ninth year, first entered that world of day-dreams, whose wonders he afterward transcr...

In an old New England farm-house kitchen, a barefoot boy, dressed in homespun, one day sat listening to a lazy Scotch beggar who piped the songs of Burns in return for his meal...

Walking the streets of Boston, in the days when old-fashioned gambrel-roofed houses and gardens filled the space now occupied by dingy warehouses, might be seen a serious-eyed b...