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Woman's Home Companion (1873–1957), founded as the semi-monthly Home Companion at Cleveland, Ohio, became the Ladies' Home Companion (1886), and in 1897 became a monthly under the title Woman's Home Companion, later moving to New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Varieties of Religious Experience, psychological study by William James, published in 1902, originally delivered in two courses of lectures at the University of Edinburgh (1901–2). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Songs for the Nursery; Or, Mother Goose's Melodies, nursery rhymes said to have been first printed at Boston (1719) by Thomas Fleet, from verses known by his mother-in-law, Mrs. Elizabeth Goose or Vergoose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Present State of the New-English Affairs, broadside printed and published by Samuel Green of Boston (1689), “to prevent False Reports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Self-Reliance, essay by Emerson, published in Essays, First Series (1841). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Scout; Or, The Black Riders of the Congaree, romance by Simms, published as The Kinsmen (1841) and reissued under the present title (1854). It is one of his Revolutionary Romances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, authorized textbook of Christian Science, published by Mary Baker Eddy in 1875. In 1886 Mrs. Eddy employed the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, a former Unitarian minister and then an editor of the University Press at Cambridge, Mass., to rewrite large portions of the book. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prejudices, six series of critical essays by H.L. Mencken, published in 1919, 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926, and 1927. A selected volume appeared in 1927. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Partisan, first of the Revolutionary Romances by Simms, published in 1835. Set in South Carolina, it covers the period between the capture of Charleston and the American defeat at Camden. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ponteach, or, the Savages of America, blank-verse play by Robert Rogers, published in 1766. It was the first tragedy to be written about the Indians. Rogers had served in the expedition to crush Pontiac's Rebellion, but in the play he extols the noble Indian warrior and depicts the baseness of the English methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prayers of Steel, free-verse poem by Sandburg, published in Cornhuskers (1918). Symbolizing the attitude of the modern worker, the poet represents the unformed metal as supplicating.Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike … Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Power of Sympathy; Or, The Triumph of Nature, anonymously published in 1789, is called “the first American novel.” Although now known to be by William Hill Brown, it was long attributed to Sarah W. Morton because it deals partly with events in her life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Potiphar Papers, seven satirical sketches of New York society by G.W. Curtis, published in 1853. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Prairie, romance by Cooper, published in 1827. It is the fifth in plot sequence of the Leather-Stocking Tales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prairie, free-verse poem by Sandburg, published in Cornhuskers (1918). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Portrait of a Lady, novel by Henry James, published in 1881. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pot of Earth, free-verse narrative by MacLeish, published in 1925. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Porgy, novel by DuBose Heyward, published in 1925. The dramatization by the author and his wife Dorothy was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) is an opera based on the story. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Political Litany, mock litany by Freneau, published in 1775. Beginning with the traditional “Libera Nos, Domine,” this slashing satire in anapestic couplets proceeds to pray for complete and final deliverance from association with the British. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Portnoy's Complaint, novel by Philip Roth, published in 1969. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Politician Outwitted, comedy attributed to Samuel Low, a federal official, was produced in 1788 and published in 1789. Obviously modeled on Royall Tyler's The Contrast, it presents its political opinions through Old Loveyet, who disinherits his son because of his adherence to the new Constitution, and Trueman, who staunchly upholds it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Plimmoth Plantation, History of, was begun by William Bradford, about ten years after the landing of the Pilgrims. Book I was completed within a year or two, Book II written between 1646 and 1650, and the list of Mayflower passengers added in 1651. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Patriots, play by Robert Munford, published in 1776 and reprinted in his Collection of Plays and Poems (1798), but probably never produced. It represents the nonpartisan attitude at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. The soldiers are depicted as braggarts or cowards, and the rebel committee as ignorant and intolerant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Poetic Principle, lecture by Poe, delivered in various cities (1848–49) and posthumously published in The Union Magazine (1850). Partly an elocutionary vehicle, it contains short poems by Willis, Longfellow, Bryant, Shelley, Thomas Moore, Hood, Byron, and Tennyson. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, essays by Holmes, published in 1872. It is a sequel to The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Outsider, novel by Richard Wright, published in 1953. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Play It as It Lays, novel by Joan Didion, published in 1970. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Plain Language from Truthful James, comic ballad by Bret Harte, published in the Overland Monthly (Sept. 1870). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pit and the Pendulum, tale by Poe, published in The Gift (1843). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pit: A Story of Chicago, novel by Frank Norris, posthumously published in 1903 as the second part of his “Epic of the Wheat”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pike County Ballads, dialect poems by John Hay, published in 1871. They show an appreciation of the candor, crudeness, and self-reliance of frontiersmen in Pike County, Ill. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pioneers; Or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, romance by Cooper, published in 1823. It is the fourth in plot sequence of the Leather-Stocking Tales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pilot, romance by Cooper published in 1823. The unnamed hero is supposed to represent John Paul Jones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities, novel by Melville published in 1852. It is considered to be semi-autobiographical. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica …, by Samuel Sewall, published in 1697, bears the subtitle, “A Description of the New Heaven … to those who stand upon the New Earth.” Sewall predicts that New England will be the final “rendezvous for Gog and Magog” and the true seat of the New Jerusalem. This work is the subject of Whittier's poem The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Philosophy of Composition, critical essay by Poe, published in Graham's Magazine (1846). It purports to describe the author's usual procedure in composing poetry and is mainly devoted to an analysis of The Raven as an example of this procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Petrified Forest, play by Robert Sherwood, produced in 1934 and published in 1935. Set in the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q, a gasoline station and lunch room in the Arizona desert, it melodramatically brings together representatives of a decadent civilization, in which Nature is “taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The People, Yes, free-verse poem by Sandburg, published in 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, poem by Whitman, published as A Word Out of the Sea in Leaves of Grass (1860) and given its present title in 1871. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Penrod, novel by Tarkington, published in 1914. Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929) are sequels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Peder Victorious, novel by Rölvaag, published in Norway (1928) and in translation in the U.S. (1929), the second volume of a trilogy that includes Giants in the Earthand Their Fathers' God. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pearl of Orr's Island, novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1862. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Paul Revere's Ride, narrative poem by Longfellow, published in 1861 and included as the landlord's tale in his Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). In galloping anapestic tetrameter, this literary ballad tells of “the midnight ride of Paul Revere” from Charlestown to Lexington and Concord, to warn the inhabitants of the approach of British troops at the outbreak of the Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our Town, play by Thornton Wilder, produced and published in 1938, when it won a Pulitzer Prize. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Patriotic Gore, Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, by Edmund Wilson, published in 1962. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pathfinder; Or, The Inland Sea, romance by Cooper, published in 1840 as the third in plot sequence of the Leather-Stocking Tales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Paterson, long poem by William Carlos Williams, divided into five Books published in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958. Fragments of the incomplete Book Six were published posthumously (1963) as an appendix to the collection of the first five parts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Passionate Pilgrim, story by Henry James, published in 1871 and collected in A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Passage to India, poem by Whitman, the title piece of a pamphlet (1871), was incorporated in Leaves of Grass (1876). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Partisan Leader, novel by N.B. Tucker, published in 1836 under the pseudonym Edward William Sidney, with the fictitious publication date 1856. In order to excoriate the followers of Jackson, laud Calhoun, and promote the doctrine of secession, Tucker wrote this romantic fantasy as an account of events supposed to take place during 1849. Van Buren has become dictator of the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]