The Early American Fiction Collection provides online access to hundreds of first edition texts, manuscripts, letters, and visual materials with significance for early American literature.

In 1996, the University of Virginia Library received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to digitize several hundred volumes of early American fiction dating from 1789-1850. The texts chosen for the project include first printings of works by well-known authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as more obscure authors like Rufus Dawes and Hannah Webster Foster. With the success of the first phase of the project, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided funding for the Library to digitize an additional set of texts from 1851-1875 as well as a collection of related manuscript items held in Special Collections at the University of Virginia Library. Now completed, the Early American Fiction collection includes 886 volumes, totaling 230,016 pages. 136 authors are represented. In addition, 199 manuscript items (525 pages of drafts, letters, and miscellaneous items) have been transcribed and 124 non-text items (photos, engravings, etc.) have been included in the collection.
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