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sources commonly used in English include fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction, interviews with authors, autobiography, historical documents, letters, diaries, and many more.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 This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Provides access to more than 150,000 full-text poems and over 800,000 poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. biographies, work summaries, photographs, and a glossary are also included
20th Century African American Poetry This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Features almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.
African American Poetry This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Contains the early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry's 'Bars Fights', c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

Historical Documents

Women's Studies Archive: Women's Issue and Identities This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
This database focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, Women's Issues and Identities provides a history of the social, political, and professional aspects of women's lives and offers a look at the roles, experiences, and achievements of women in society.
Through a variety of documents such as diaries, letters, photographs, news clippings, organizational records, and journals, it presents a record of the issues that have affected women, societal contributions, social status, and women's movements. The Archive material list provides details about materials included.
Women and Social Movements in the United States This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the collection includes 124 document projects or archives and 5,100 documents and 180,000 pages of additional full-text sources, written by more than 2,800 primary authors.
It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. It continues to grow with two new issues/releases annually.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 covers topics including LGBTQ activism and the HIV/AIDS crisis. It provides researchers with the documents about the Gay Rights Movement with resources.
Repositories for this collection include: Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation; Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives; Women's Energy Bank; GLBT Historical Society; National Library of Medicine; among other archives.For a detailed title list, please check the Archives title list.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Slavery and Anti-Slavery (SAS): A Transnational Archive, Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 is a collection devoted to the scholarly study and understanding of slavery from a multinational perspective.
Part 1: Debates
Part 2: Slave Trade
Part 3: Institution
Part 4: Emancipation

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 24, 2023 1906 views this year

University Library

English Literature

OneSearch Primary Sources

Poetry & Short Stories Databases

Historical Documents

Primary Sources on the Web

Related Guides