Free to read

174 Classic Books You Can Read Free Online

1605 to 1929, in three eras

Copyright expires, and when it does a book belongs to everyone. These 174 titles are old enough to read free and legally right now, and every one of them won a major prize or earned a place on one of our curated lists. Standard Ebooks supplies the carefully typeset editions and Project Gutenberg the rest. Nothing here costs anything, and we earn nothing when you click.

Books by era

Oldest first. Long eras are shelved by decade so you can land on the one you want.

Before 1800

7 books in 7 decades

1600s

1605 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Project Gutenberg Read free

1660s

1667 Paradise Lost by John Milton Standard Ebooks Read free

1670s

1678 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan Project Gutenberg Read free

1710s

1719 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Project Gutenberg Read free

1720s

1726 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift Project Gutenberg Read free

1750s

1759 Candide by Voltaire Project Gutenberg Read free

1770s

1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Project Gutenberg Read free

The Nineteenth Century

85 books in 9 decades

1810s

1811 Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen Standard Ebooks Read free
1813 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Standard Ebooks Read free
1815 Emma by Jane Austen Standard Ebooks Read free
1817 Persuasion by Jane Austen Standard Ebooks Read free
1818 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Standard Ebooks Read free
1819 Ivanhoe by Walter Scott Standard Ebooks Read free

1820s

1826 The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper Standard Ebooks Read free
1827 The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni Standard Ebooks Read free

1830s

1830 The Red and the Black by Stendhal Project Gutenberg Read free
1838 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Standard Ebooks Read free

1840s

1840 A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov Project Gutenberg Read free
1842 Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Project Gutenberg Read free
1843 A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Standard Ebooks Read free
1844 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas Project Gutenberg Read free
1844 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas Project Gutenberg Read free
1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass Standard Ebooks Read free
1847 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Standard Ebooks Read free
1847 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Standard Ebooks Read free
1848 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë Standard Ebooks Read free
1848 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Standard Ebooks Read free

1850s

1850 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Standard Ebooks Read free
1850 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Standard Ebooks Read free
1851 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville Standard Ebooks Read free
1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Project Gutenberg Read free
1853 Bleak House by Charles Dickens Standard Ebooks Read free
1853 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell Standard Ebooks Read free
1853 Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup Standard Ebooks Read free
1854 Walden by Henry David Thoreau Standard Ebooks Read free
1855 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Standard Ebooks Read free
1855 North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell Standard Ebooks Read free
1857 Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope Standard Ebooks Read free
1857 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Project Gutenberg Read free
1859 A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Standard Ebooks Read free
1859 Adam Bede by George Eliot Project Gutenberg Read free
1859 Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov Project Gutenberg Read free

1860s

1860 The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot Standard Ebooks Read free
1860 The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins Standard Ebooks Read free
1861 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Standard Ebooks Read free
1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs Project Gutenberg Read free
1861 Silas Marner by George Eliot Standard Ebooks Read free
1862 Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev Project Gutenberg Read free
1862 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo Project Gutenberg Read free
1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Project Gutenberg Read free
1866 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky Project Gutenberg Read free
1868 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Standard Ebooks Read free
1868 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins Standard Ebooks Read free
1869 The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky Project Gutenberg Read free
1869 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Project Gutenberg Read free

1870s

1870 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne Project Gutenberg Read free
1871 Middlemarch by George Eliot Standard Ebooks Read free
1871 Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll Project Gutenberg Read free
1872 Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne Project Gutenberg Read free
1874 Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy Standard Ebooks Read free
1875 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope Standard Ebooks Read free
1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain Standard Ebooks Read free
1877 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Project Gutenberg Read free
1877 Black Beauty by Anna Sewell Standard Ebooks Read free
1878 The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Standard Ebooks Read free

1880s

1880 The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Project Gutenberg Read free
1881 Heidi by Johanna Spyri Project Gutenberg Read free
1881 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James Standard Ebooks Read free
1883 The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi Project Gutenberg Read free
1883 Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Standard Ebooks Read free
1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Project Gutenberg Read free
1885 Germinal by Émile Zola Project Gutenberg Read free
1885 King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard Project Gutenberg Read free
1885 The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells Standard Ebooks Read free
1886 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson Standard Ebooks Read free
1886 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Project Gutenberg Read free
1886 The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy Standard Ebooks Read free
1887 A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle Standard Ebooks Read free
1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain Project Gutenberg Read free
1889 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome Standard Ebooks Read free

1890s

1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Standard Ebooks Read free
1891 Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Project Gutenberg Read free
1892 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle Standard Ebooks Read free
1894 The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling Standard Ebooks Read free
1895 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy Standard Ebooks Read free
1895 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane Standard Ebooks Read free
1895 The Time Machine by H. G. Wells Standard Ebooks Read free
1897 Dracula by Bram Stoker Standard Ebooks Read free
1898 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James Standard Ebooks Read free
1898 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells Standard Ebooks Read free
1899 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Standard Ebooks Read free
1899 The Awakening by Kate Chopin Standard Ebooks Read free

The Prize Years, 1900 to 1929

82 books in 3 decades

1900s

1902 The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen Project Gutenberg Read free
1904 The Great Galeoto by José Echegaray Project Gutenberg Read free
1905 Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz Project Gutenberg Read free
1905 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton Standard Ebooks Read free
1906 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Standard Ebooks Read free
1907 Kim by Rudyard Kipling Standard Ebooks Read free
1908 Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery Standard Ebooks Read free
1908 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Standard Ebooks Read free
1909 The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf Project Gutenberg Read free

1910s

1910 Howards End by E. M. Forster Standard Ebooks Read free
1911 Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Standard Ebooks Read free
1911 The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck Project Gutenberg Read free
1911 The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett Standard Ebooks Read free
1913 Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore Standard Ebooks Read free
1914 Dubliners by James Joyce Standard Ebooks Read free
1915 Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland Project Gutenberg Read free
1915 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Project Gutenberg Read free
1917 Julia Ward Howe by Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott Project Gutenberg Read free
1917 With Americans of Past and Present Days by Jean Jules Jusserand Project Gutenberg Read free
1918 Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed by William Cabell Bruce Project Gutenberg Read free
1918 His Family by Ernest Poole Standard Ebooks Read free
1918 Love Songs by Sara Teasdale Project Gutenberg Read free
1918 My Ántonia by Willa Cather Standard Ebooks Read free
1918 The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West Project Gutenberg Read free
1919 The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams Standard Ebooks Read free
1919 The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington Standard Ebooks Read free
1919 The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham Standard Ebooks Read free
1919 Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson Standard Ebooks Read free

1920s

1920 Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun Project Gutenberg Read free
1920 Main Street by Sinclair Lewis Standard Ebooks Read free
1920 The Life of John Marshall by Albert J. Beveridge Project Gutenberg Read free
1920 The War with Mexico by Justin H. Smith Project Gutenberg Read free
1920 This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald Standard Ebooks Read free
1921 Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley Standard Ebooks Read free
1921 Penguin Island by Anatole France Project Gutenberg Read free
1921 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Standard Ebooks Read free
1921 The Americanization of Edward Bok by Edward Bok Project Gutenberg Read free
1921 The Victory at Sea by William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick Project Gutenberg Read free
1921 Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos Project Gutenberg Read free
1922 A Daughter of the Middle Border by Hamlin Garland Project Gutenberg Read free
1922 Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington Standard Ebooks Read free
1922 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse Project Gutenberg Read free
1922 The Founding of New England by James Truslow Adams Project Gutenberg Read free
1922 The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon Standard Ebooks Read free
1922 Ulysses by James Joyce Standard Ebooks Read free
1923 Cane by Jean Toomer Standard Ebooks Read free
1923 One of Ours by Willa Cather Standard Ebooks Read free
1923 The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page by Burton J. Hendrick Project Gutenberg Read free
1923 The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran Standard Ebooks Read free
1923 The Tower by William Butler Yeats Project Gutenberg Read free
1923 The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting Standard Ebooks Read free
1924 A Passage to India by E. M. Forster Standard Ebooks Read free
1924 From Immigrant to Inventor by Michael I. Pupin Project Gutenberg Read free
1924 New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes by Robert Frost Standard Ebooks Read free
1924 The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson Standard Ebooks Read free
1924 The Dark Frigate by Charles Boardman Hawes Standard Ebooks Read free
1925 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Standard Ebooks Read free
1925 Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw Standard Ebooks Read free
1925 So Big by Edna Ferber Standard Ebooks Read free
1925 Tales from Silver Lands by Charles Finger Standard Ebooks Read free
1925 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Standard Ebooks Read free
1925 The Trial by Franz Kafka Project Gutenberg Read free
1926 Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis Standard Ebooks Read free
1926 Shen of the Sea by Arthur Bowie Chrisman Standard Ebooks Read free
1926 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Standard Ebooks Read free
1926 Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne Standard Ebooks Read free
1927 Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson Project Gutenberg Read free
1927 Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather Standard Ebooks Read free
1927 Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield Standard Ebooks Read free
1927 Fiddler's Farewell by Leonora Speyer Project Gutenberg Read free
1927 Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James Standard Ebooks Read free
1927 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Standard Ebooks Read free
1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence Project Gutenberg Read free
1928 Main Currents in American Thought by Vernon Louis Parrington Project Gutenberg Read free
1928 Orlando by Virginia Woolf Standard Ebooks Read free
1928 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder Standard Ebooks Read free
1929 A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Standard Ebooks Read free
1929 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque Project Gutenberg Read free
1929 Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe Standard Ebooks Read free
1929 Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin Standard Ebooks Read free
1929 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Standard Ebooks Read free
1929 The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly Standard Ebooks Read free

Where these come from

Every text here is hosted by Standard Ebooks or Project Gutenberg, both of which publish only books whose copyright has expired. We link what they hold rather than judging copyright ourselves, so a book appears here when one of them has cleared and published it.