Early American Fiction

Early American Fiction is a project to create digital preservation-quality images and fully searchable texts of over 700 books from the Special Collections held in Alderman Library, primarily from the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, one of the world's most complete collections of American Literature. Students and scholars from around the world can view rare first editions of American classics such as Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter online. Digital access to every page of a book, including covers and endsheets, can replace a visit to Special Collections to examine rare editions, aiding in the preservation of these valuable resources.

During Phase I, over 560 volumes of American prose fiction from 1789-1850 were digitized and are available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/. Of those, 94 are publicly available, while the remainder are available only to UVa.

Phase II made texts available by such writers as Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Clemens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and some 90 other 19th century novelists.

As part of this project, The University of Virginia hosted the New Frontiers in Early American Literature conference on August 8-10, 2002. Abstracts from the program are available.

The project is sponsored by the University of Virginia Library with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and published by Chadwyck-Healey and the University of Virginia Library.

<This is an archived page for a project that is no longer active>