The definitive grammar book, the one that sat on Ernest Hemingway’s bookshelf and sparked the sentence diagramming craze of the Industrial Era, is Higher Lessons in English: A Work on English Grammar and Composition by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg.

This book, originally published in 1877, is long out of copyright and freely available in a number of places around the internet including Project Gutenberg, Plain Label Books on Google Book Search, and the Internet Archive.

Unfortunately, the versions available are next to useless. Each of them was scanned and then interpreted by OCR (object character recognition) software and converted to plain text or some other form of PDF or e-book. The versions freely available on the internet are either totally readible, but impossible to download or easy to download but impossible to read. The problem is that OCR software can’t understand sentence diagrams, and that is what the bulk of this text covers.

Sometime back I did download an actual scanned-PDF, ancient-Kansas City-library version of Lessons in Higher English.  Sadly, I can’t remember the site that I obtained the file; and despite searching for it, I can’t find the original. 

This amazing version of the text has been sitting on my school computer drive taking up space, and today I’ve decided to make this useful, clearly readable version of the text available for download.

If anyone knows a site that offers the original Reed and Kellogg books in scanned PDF form for download, please send me an e-mail or post it in the comments section.

In case you’re interested, the text of the answer key, The Key Containing Diagrams of the Sentences Given for Analysis, is available to view online at the Internet Archive. (If you want to download it, you must click print first.)The full text scan that you can download is utterly useless.

Download the File

Higher Lessons in English by Brainerd Kellogg and Alonzo Reed (PDF).

A hard copy of this book may also be purchased through my Amazon Associates account. For this website to benefit, you must click the link.