Famous Authors (Men‪)‬

William Dean Howells wrote his first story one line at a time—setting the type as he invented it, then printing a new chapter each week. When the tale refused to end, the young Ohioan was left “positively panic stricken.”

In nineteenth-century Ohio, a printer’s son rises before dawn to sell newspapers, sets type, and nurses ambitions that seem poorly matched to his family’s uncertain fortunes. E. F. Harkins’s early-twentieth-century collection of American literary portraits begins with Howells, following his passage from local newspaper work toward Boston’s literary circles, where even Emerson’s casual advice could unsettle a young writer. These sketches look beyond books and titles to the struggles, friendships, and telling anecdotes behind an author’s public name. How did the boy who feared he could not invent find his place among the writers he admired?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.