The Journal
The best adventure novels in the public domain
Adventure fiction is the genre in which plot and place do the heaviest work -- where the journey, the obstacle, and the resolution carry moral and thematic weight that in other genres would be carried by interiority. These are the best adventure novels available free to read right now.
Treasure Island -- Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)#
The adventure novel against which every subsequent adventure novel is measured. Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, the map, the island. Stevenson invented the stock figures of pirate fiction -- the one-legged sea cook, the treasure map, the black spot -- so thoroughly that they feel like they preceded his novel. Long John Silver is one of the great morally ambiguous characters in fiction: charming, treacherous, and never quite reducible to simple villainy. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
The Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas (1844)#
The longest novel on this list and the most purely enjoyable. Edmond Dantes is imprisoned unjustly, escapes after years, acquires a vast fortune, and returns to destroy the men who betrayed him with an elaborateness and patience that is one of fiction's great pleasures to watch. It is a revenge fantasy executed with maximum ingenuity and minimum moral ambiguity -- and it is about 1,200 pages long. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
Around the World in Eighty Days -- Jules Verne (1872)#
Phileas Fogg bets his club that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days. He proceeds to do so, pursued by a detective who believes he is a bank robber, accompanied by his French valet Passepartout. It is a perfectly constructed adventure comedy, and Verne's research into the actual transport schedules of the 1870s gives it a texture that pure invention would not. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
The Three Musketeers -- Alexandre Dumas (1844)#
D'Artagnan arrives in Paris, meets Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and proceeds to have adventures. The pleasures of The Three Musketeers are entirely in the momentum, the camaraderie, and the swashbuckling -- Dumas wrote at speed and the speed shows in the best possible way. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
Kidnapped -- Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)#
Stevenson's other great adventure novel, set in the Scottish Highlands after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. David Balfour is kidnapped by his corrupt uncle and thrown onto the same ship as the Jacobite fugitive Alan Breck Stewart. The flight across the Highlands is the finest sustained adventure sequence Stevenson wrote. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea -- Jules Verne (1870)#
Captain Nemo and the Nautilus. The first great submarine adventure and the first sustained fictional depiction of the deep ocean as a space of beauty as well as terror. Verne's Nemo -- mysterious, self-exiled from the human world, simultaneously magnanimous and ruthless -- is one of the great characters of 19th-century fiction. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
Moby-Dick -- Herman Melville (1851)#
The adventure novel that became something else. Moby-Dick is technically a whaling adventure -- Ahab pursues the white whale across the Pacific -- and Melville embeds a complete philosophical meditation inside it. The cetology chapters slow the adventure, which is by design. For the practical guide to reading it, how to read Moby-Dick covers the method. Free on Foxing.
Further reading#
For shorter adventure classics you can read in a weekend, short classics you can finish in a weekend includes Jekyll and Hyde, The Time Machine, and others.
For classic science fiction that shares the adventure genre's love of exotic settings, the best classic science fiction in the public domain covers the Wells and Verne tradition.