Where to find Original Words on the Web

A Web Resource list of public domain or fair use E-texts for language arts teachers, writers, students and readers.

The following web sites link to an incredible amount of original source material for research and reading. Though many of these are crossed-linked, each has a focus that recommends it. On many of the sites I searched for relatively obscure writers such as Aphra Behn. I found a variety of her works that weren’t readily available two years ago when I first became interested in her.

10. Penn Celebration of Women Writers http://digital.library.upenn.edu /women/ This site links to many, many works by women writers through the ages. Their Statement of purpose says "The Celebration of Women Writers recognizes the contributions of women writers throughout history. Women have written novels, poems, letters, biographies, travel books, religious commentaries, histories, economic and scientific works. Our goal is to promote awareness of the breadth and variety of women's writing." It even includes a search engine that can search by: name, date, country or ethnicity.

9. Internet School Library Media Center African American Writers http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ra mseyil/afroonline.htm This wonderful site has many links to online e-texts by African American writers, but also lists links to other information on African American Literature from Slave narratives to the Harlem Renaissance to Maya Angelou’s poem for Clinton’s Inauguration.

8. LSU Libraries Webliography: Authors http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/autho rs.html This site is actually a collection of author links to different sites on the web, many of which include e-texts as well as information on the authors themselves. I got lost here following trails. It made points with me because Aphra Behn was listed third!

7. The Internet Public Library http://www.ipl.org/div/books/ This site is less easy to use and overlaps some of the sites, below. But if you are looking for specific author this is a good site to check.

6. The Complete Shakespeare http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/ ~matty/Shakespeare/ This resource is arguably the oldest repository of Shakespeare’s Complete Works on the web. It is searchable and includes html versions broken into scenes. In addition you can download a version of the Complete Works as a zipped text file.

4. University of Virginia http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ The Electronic Text Center at the U of V has 1,800 free ebooks even including a holiday section in which I found Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol with illustrations! They have a "Best Sellers" list and downloaded 6.4 million free e-texts in the last 2 years. The texts can be downloaded in Microsoft Reader, Palm Pilot and html formats.

3. The Online Books Page http://digital.library.upenn.edu /books/ The Books Online Page at the University of Pennsylvania includes many sections including A Celebration of Women Writers, Banned Books Online, Prize Winners Online, General, Foreign Language, Specialty as well as updates on news related to the posting of texts online.

2. Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts http://www.infomotions.com/alex/ The Alex Catalogue has many public domain texts ranging from philosophy to fiction. One super cool feature on this site is the ability to directly convert the e-text into an eBook in all the following formats: PDF, Newton Paperback, Palm Pilot, or Rocket eBook. I converted to Aphra Behn files to Newton E-books to read on my Apple eMate 300!

1. Project Gutenberg http://promo.net/pg/ This site is the great grandmother of all e-text sites. As the web site states: "Project Gutenberg is the brainchild of Michael Hart, who in 1971 decided that it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to everyone in the world. Since then, he has been joined by hundreds of volunteers who share his vision. Now, almost thirty years later, Project Gutenberg publishes an average of one e-text every day!"

Enjoy!

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