LibGuides: English Literature: Primary Sources

OneSearch Primary Sources

Primary sources commonly used in English include fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction, interviews with authors, autobiography, historical documents, letters, diaries, and many more.

Start with OneSearch to see if the library has primary sources, including:

A specific book or work.
More things written by an author you're interested in.
Anthologies that contain works by more than one author.
Interviews with authors or people.

You can use OneSearch to find these in ebook or ebook-chapter format.

Poetry & Short Stories Databases

LitFinder
Full-text poems and poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, plays, biographies, work summaries, photographs, and a glossary.

Historical Documents

Women's Studies Archive: Women's Issue and Identities
Primary source materials on women's issues, movements, and achievements, including topics such as sexuality and reproductive freedom, women and the labor movement, and second wave feminist movements, Includes manuscripts, ephemera, newspapers, journals, and more.
Women and Social Movements in the United States
Scholarly articles and digitized primary documents such as images, pamphlets, training guides, ephemera, and more covering women's reform activism in the U.S.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940
Historical documents and other primary source materials focused on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world since the 1940s, including the gay rights movement, activism, and the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery
Historical primary sources including books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries, covering 1490 to 1888.

Primary Sources on the Web

The Online Medieval and Classical Library
Provides access to some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization. Originally a product of Berkeley Digital Library. Currently maintained by academic community member.
The Geoffrey Chaucer Website
Compiled by Harvard University's Chaucer Program and provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages.
TEAMS Middle English texts
Created by The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS), this is one of the most important free Web sites for Middle English literary studies, especially for teaching. University of Rochester.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Full texts can be obtained by searching either the chronological listing or the alphabetical listing in this site. MIT.
British History Online
A digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800. Some of the texts are free.
The American Verse Project
Provides electronic versions of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. Poets include Stephen Vincent Benet, Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allan Poe, Carl Sandburg, and many more. University of Michigan.
Nickels and Dimes
Dime novels were a format of inexpensive popular fiction produced in the United States between 1860 and 1930. Originally featuring stories about the American frontier and the West, cowboys eventually gave way to detectives, like Nick Carter, and boy adventurers and entrepreneurs, like Frank Reade Jr. This site contains materials from two major dime novel collections in Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, the Albert Johannsen and Edward T. LeBlanc Collections.
Discovering Literature: 20th Century
Features over 300 digitized documents including original manuscripts, maps, and letters. Also includes author information and work overviews from the British Library collection.
Internet Archive: Digital Library
A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Project Gutenberg
An online library of free primary source eBooks.

Related Guides

Primary Sources
by Kendall Faulkner Last Updated Aug 12, 2025 1299 views this year