Philo Culturo is a web project dedicated to the English and literature classroom. Materials for students and teachers on topics ranging from essay basics to critical theory are presented alongside full free versions of public domain texts. You may be surprised at how many big name titles are in the public domain now.
Take a look if you’d like to find something to read for free. Knock an item off your reading list. Or, for teachers, take a look at all the free resources your students may find helpful. Instructor resources are available too.
Free Texts Online at Philo Culturo
Listed by Genre
Short Stories
- Chopin, Kate – “The Story of an Hour”
- Christie, Agatha – “The Adventure of the Western Star”
- De Maupassant, Guy – “The Thief”
- Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm – “Hansel and Gretel”
- Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm – Grimm’s Fairy Tales
- Joyce, James – “Araby”
- Kafka, Franz – “Metamorphosis”
- Poe, Edgar Allan – “The Tell-Tale Heart”
- Poe, Edgar Allan – “The Masque of the Red Death”
Poetry
- Blake, William – “The Tiger”
- Blake, William – Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
- Dickinson, Emily – “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers”
- Dickinson, Emily – Selected Poems
- Eliot, T. S. – “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
- Whitman, Walt – “Song of Myself”
- Whitman, Walt – “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
- Whitman, Walt – Selected Poems
Plays
- Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
- O’Neill, Eugene – ILE
- O’Neill, Eugene – The Hairy Ape
- Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
- Shakespeare, William – Romeo & Juliet
- Shakespeare, William – Julius Caesar
- Shaw, Bernard – Pygmalion
- Sophocles – Oedipus the King
- Sophocles – Oedipus at Colonus
- Sophocles – Antigone
- Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest
- Yeats, William Butler – The Land of Heart’s Desire
Novels
- Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
- Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
- Christie, Agatha – The Secret Adversary
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
- Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick
- Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine
- Shelly, Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly) – Frankenstein
Non-Fiction
- Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Du Bois, W.E. B. – The Souls of Black Folk
- Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
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