Essays & Short Works
- Philosophical Travelogues
- Essays on Society and Culture
- Essays for Personal Growth
- Explorations in Science and Thought
- Explorations in Psychology
- Political Essays and Reflections
- Political Essays and Manifestos
- Philosophical Essays on Existence
On a Chinese Screen
On a Chinese Screen is a captivating collection of essays by W. Somerset Maugham, offering a window into the complexities of life in early 2…
The Art of Travel
The Art of Travel is a handbook of practical advice for the adventure seeking Victorian. We hear how to organize all steps of a voyage, from…
Tolstoy on Shakespeare
In this thought-provoking essay, Leo Tolstoy presents a critical examination of William Shakespeare's works, exploring the playwright's them…
All Things Are Possible
A passionate exponent of Russian Existentialism, Lev Shestov is little known in the English-speaking world but had an extensive influence on…
Creative Unity
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore talks of the many things he feels is necessary for creativity through joy of unity, he covers many topics like t…
Revolution
A collection of 13 essays written between 1900 and 1908, published in 1910. The lead essay, "Revolution", outlines how and why Lon…
Sadhana, the Realisation of Life
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist whose work reshaped Bengali literatur…
Flowers from the Garden of Saint Francis
This is a collection of 365 moral admonitions of Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and other notable Franciscans. The compiler of this ant…
Mistakes of Moses
Robert G. Ingersoll was an extremely popular humanist orator in the late nineteenth century, and he wrote Mistakes of Moses after many bootl…
The Negro Problem
This is a collection of essays, edited by Booker T. Washington, representative of what historians have characterized as "racial uplift …
As a Man Thinketh
The burgeoning conflict between science and organized religion in the Nineteenth Century had many cultural offshoots, one of the most signif…
Eminent Victorians
On Modern Library's list of 100 Best Non-Fiction books, "Eminent Victorians" marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also help…
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World
Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, was at one time Ambassador to the Hague, negotiated the second Treaty of Vienna, was a founding gover…
The Perfect Wagnerite
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (originally published London, 1898) is a philosophical commentary on Richard Wagne…
Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass
These two articles were reproduced as an e-book by Project Gutenberg in 2008 to supplement "...several articles by Frederick Douglass,…
Memory
An in-depth series of chapters devoted to the use of our memory system; as the title suggests, how to develop our memory system, how to trai…
Mob Rule In New Orleans
Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist…
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almost conversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling the diffi…
The Art of Fiction
A lecture on the art of fiction, given by the English critic Walter Besant on April 25, 1884, and an answer to the lecture by American write…
Noted Speeches of Abraham Lincoln
A few of Lincoln's most famous speeches and the Lincoln-Douglas debate make for historic reading. (summary by David O)