37 books like Sheppard Lee

This early American novel starts off with an episode of human spontaneous combustion, followed by repeated episodes of characters hearing disembodied voices.

Brown’s novel uses these Gothic devices and a couple of real-life murder cases to explore religious and political issues that preoccupied Americans in the years after the Revolution. How do we know whether we’re really being guided by reason? What is the basis of authority?

Most editions of Wieland include Brown’s prequel Memoirs of Carwin, which complicates the story by placing one of the main characters in an Illuminati-like organization. American Gothic literature pretty much starts here.  

Early African American fiction is not as well-known as the slave narrative genre, but the few novels that do exist before the Civil War are sophisticated interpretations and developments of sentimental fiction. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig is a bildungsroman charting the life of free Black servant girl Frado who is exploited and abused by her adopted white family. Wilson challenges the passive and flat portraits of Black men and women in most antebellum fiction, by portraying a complex and multifaceted character in Frado.

Another example of early African American fiction, The Garies and their Friends is the second novel published by a Black American. Following the lives of an interracial couple moving from Savannah to Philadelphia, their middle-class Black friends, and the racism they face, The Garies is one of the first texts to examine free Black life in depth. Writing an anti-racist novel, Webb criticizes the legal structures and extra-legal white supremacist violence that prohibit Black safety and success in the ‘free’ North.

Although Herman Melville is considered the most canonical US writer today, after the muddled reception of Moby-Dick (1851) his critical and commercial acclaim had waned. In response, he wrote the much-maligned Pierre, a sensational gothic novel about a young man discovering his half-sister and endeavoring to rescue her from poverty. Both sublime and ridiculous, this overly-wrought novel features spiritualism, incest, and diatribes against the literary marketplace, but most pressingly it probes the roles and responsibilities of young independent men in the mid-19th century. If you can find it, the 1995 Kraken edition features bold and brilliant illustrations by Maurice Sendak.

Marshall is my favorite working biographer, and this book had me hooked from page 1.

Fuller’s life almost demands Hollywood treatment. This early feminist thinker was a great friend, intellectual sparring partner, and collaborator of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the first editor to publish Henry David Thoreau.

Less well known is her second career as a pioneering newspaper reporter, who eventually became the first female foreign correspondent in US history. Her dispatches on the cultural scene in Europe and then her eyewitness accounts of the revolutions of 1848 were riveting. Traveling with her Italian aristocrat-turned-revolutionary lover and their young child, she returned to the US with a draft of a history of the Roman republic.

But the ship sank off Fire Island; Fuller, her lover, their child, and the manuscript were lost. But thanks to Marshall, we at least have her story!

If you think the 1960s tops the list of eras that experimented with counter-cultural protest movements, utopian societies, and radical social experimentation, think again.

There are more free love advocates, anti-racist rebels, anti-capitalist communes, oversexed vegans, and messianic prophets in this book than you could shake a staff at. Jackson tells their stories with verve, wit, and a perfectly measured assessment of their contributions and failures.

Taking only names and a few verses stitched onto a cotton sack discovered at a flea market near Nashville, Tiya Miles uncovers a stunning story of love, resilience, and triumph in the lives of family members who carried this cotton sack out of slavery.

This National Book Award Winner is not to be missed, not only for its powerful storytelling, but for the tools it teaches about reaching back into history and recovering lives otherwise consigned to oblivion.

Not technically a “nineteenth-century” book, this 1902 novel is the most surprising work of fiction from the period that you’ll ever read. 

Written by a Black woman from Boston who had achieved success first as an actress and then as a magazine editor, this wild fantasy reads like a cross between the film The Black Panther and a Verdi opera. It concerns a Black physician who passes for white (until he can’t), then joins an archeological expedition to discover the remains of an ancient civilization in Ethiopia. 

The plot unfolds at breakneck speed, and there are so many twists you might get whiplash. But if you slow down and focus on the details of the story you’ll find an extraordinarily complex picture of politics, spirituality, psychology, music, history, and science.

Ms. Swift’s lyrical writing immediately enthralled me in this unusual story. Alice, stuck in an arranged marriage in 1660 England, uses her skills to protect an orchid called the Lady’s Slipper. But her nemesis, Richard, also her landlord, wants it for other reasons. Their animosity changes to attraction, and I loved the emotions between them. Ms. Swift writes with skill about the Quakers, the era, and a forbidden love. She easily weaves history with heartbreak, and I devoured this story, never wanting it to end. The drama never drags, and I could not put it down. Later, I met Ms. Swift at a writers’ conference, and she’s a sweet, humble woman. One of my all-time favorite novels.

A thousand-page runaway bestseller, The Quaker City sold more copies than any American novel prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Lippard happened to be a friend of Poe’s, and he exceeded him when it came to depicting depravity and mayhem. Underneath the surface of order and respectability, Lippard’s Philadelphia is a city pervaded by corruption and crime, and the center of it all is a vast men’s clubhouse called Monk Hall.

Three interlocking plots deploy more sex and violence than most readers would expect from a mid-nineteenth-century novel, or even a twenty-first-century novel. Lippard coins the term “grotesque-sublime” in his description of his main character, Devil-Bug, but that expression applies to the whole novel.

You might get lost in one of his sentences even as he describes a character getting lost in the secret passages of Monk Hall, but it’s a fascinating trip. Think of it as a trashy but bingeworthy… show more.