Literature audiobooks page 128

James Whitcomb Riley was an American writer, poet, and best selling author, born in the town of Greenfield, Indiana. During his lifetime he was known as the "Hoosier Poet" and "Children's Poet" for his dialect works and his children's poetry respectively. His poems tended to be humorous or sentimental, and of the approximately one thousand poems that Riley authored, the majority are in dialect.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born and grew up in Manchester, England, and emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 16. For her first novels, written in Knoxville, Tennessee and published in New York, she drew upon her knowledge of life and speech of the Lancashire working classes. Set in a Lancashire mining town, That Lass o' Lowries is a gritty, and at times brutal, tale of romance across the classes, which stands in stark contrast to her later work.

This is a lovely collection of melodic poems, many melancholy in tone, many featuring Housman's constant theme of living this short life to the fullest.

Frank Norris based his 1901 novel The Octopus (A Story of California) on the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, a bloody conflict between ranchers and agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The central issue was over the ownership of the ranches, which the farmers had leased from the railroad nearly ten years earlier with intentions of eventually purchasing the land. Although originally priced at $2.50 to $5 per acre, the railroad eventually opened the land for sale at prices adjusted for land improvements; the railroad’s attempts to take possession of the land led the ranchers to defend themselves as depicted in the book.

In effect Professor Newland declared that the curious astronomical phenomena of the previous November--the new "stars" observed, the two meteors that had fallen with their red and green light-fire--were all evidence of the existence of intelligent life on the planet Mercury. (An excerpt from chapter 1. )