Part One: American Literature at the End of the Nineteenth

Century

To the Reader

Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910)

Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

Context and Response: Artemus Ward, from Artemus Ward (His Travels) Among the Mormons

Bret Harte (1836-1902)

The Outcasts of Poker Flat

W. D. Howells (1837-1920)

Editha

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)

Chickamauga

The Devil's Dictionary: selections

Context and Response: The poetry of Dorothy Parker

William James (1842-1910)

Pragmatism

Henry James (1843-1916)

The Pupil

Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908)

The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

The New Colossus

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

A White Heron

Kate Chopin (1850-1904)

Désirée's Baby

The Storm

Mary E Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)

The Revolt of “Mother”

Booker T. Washington (1856?-1915).

Up From Slavery: Chapter XIV. The Atlanta Exposition Address

Context and Response: Olaudah Equiano, Excerpt from Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah

Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

The Sheriff's Children

Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)

Under the Lion's Paw

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

The Yellow Wall-paper

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

The Other Two

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) (1865-1914)

Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963).

The Souls of Black Folk: Chapter III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

Old Rogaum and His Theresa

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

An Experiment in Misery

An Episode of War

War Is Kind

Jack London (1876-1916)

To Build a Fire

Gallery 1: The South Since Reconstruction

Frederick Douglass: The Future of the Negro

George Washington Cable: The Freedman's Case in Equity (excerpt)

Henry W. Grady: The New South (excerpt)

U.S. Supreme Court: Plessy v. Ferguson (excerpt)

Pauli Murray: Proud Shoes (excerpt)

Marion Post Wolcott, Entrance to a Movie House, Mississippi Delta

H. L. Mencken: The Sahara of the Bozart (excerpt)

Lizzie Woodworth Reese: A War Memory (1865)

Donald Davidson: A Mirror for Artists (excerpt)

Arthur Rothstein, Southern Movie Theater

Part Two: Modern American Literature

To the Reader

Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)

Lucinda Matlock

Davis Matlock

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Richard Cory

Miniver Cheevy

Eros Turannos

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

Lift Every Voice and Sing

O Black and Unknown Bards

Image: James Weldon Johnson

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

Sympathy

We Wear the Mask

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

Paul's Case

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

The Gentle Lena

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

The Captured Goddess

Venus Transiens

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

September, 1918

New Heavens for Old

The Taxi

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

The Pasture

Mending Wall

Home Burial

After Apple-Picking

The Wood-Pile

The Road Not Taken

Birches

“Out, Out–“

Fire and Ice

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Desert Places

Design

Neither out Far nor in Deep

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)

Winesburg , Ohio : Hands

Image: Sherwood Anderson

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948)

Trifles

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Chicago

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

The Snow Man

Sunday Morning

Anecdote of the Jar

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

The Death of a Soldier

The Idea of Order at Key West

Of Modern Poetry

The Plain Sense of Things

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The Young Housewife

Portrait of a Lady

Spring and All

To Elsie

The Red Wheelbarrow

Death

This Is Just to Say

The Dance (“In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess”)

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Portrait d'une Femme

A Pact

In a Station of the Metro

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

The Cantos: I (“And then went down to the ship”)

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

Oread

Leda

Helen

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

Poetry

A Grave

To a Snail

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

Piazza Piece

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

The Waste Land

Gerontion

The Hollow Men

Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

The Emperor Jones

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

If We Must Die

America

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

Flowering Judas

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

The Gilded Six-Bits

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Recuerdo

I Think I Should Have Loved You Presently

[I, being born a woman]

Apostrophe to Man

I Too beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex

Spring

I Forgot for a Moment

Context and Response: The poetry of Lisel Mueller

Archibald Macleish (1892-1982)

Ars Poetica

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

General Review of the Sex Situation.

e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

in Just--

Buffalo Bill's

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls.

“next to of course god america I”

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

anyone lived in a pretty how town

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

Georgia Dusk

Fern

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Babylon Revisited

Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

Medusa

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

That Evening Sun

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Context and Response: Pío Baroja, excerpt from The Chasm

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

At Melville's Tomb

Voyages: I (“Above the fresh ruffles of the surf”)

III (“Infinite consanguinity it bears-”)

V (“Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime”)

The Bridge: Poem: To Brooklyn Bridge

Allen Tate (1899-1979)

Ode to the Confederate Dead

Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989)

He Was a Man

Break of Day

Bitter Fruit of the Tree

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Mother to Son

The Weary Blues

The South

Ruby Brown

Let America Be America Again

Poet to Patron

Ballad of the Landlord

Too Blue

Theme for English B

Poet to Bigot

I, Too

Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Yet Do I Marvel

Incident

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Long Black Song

Image: Negro Tenant Farmer

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Effort at Speech Between Two People

Poem

Gallery 2: American Writers and the Great Depression

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address (excerpt)

Mary Heaton Vorse, School for Bums (excerpt)

Anonymous, Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt

Robert Johnson, Cross Road Blues

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again (excerpt)

Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (excerpt)

Agnes Smedley, China Fights Back (excerpt)

Kenneth Fearing, Devil's Dream

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (excerpt)

Dorothea Lange, Mexican Field Worker's Home, California

Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land

Dorothea Lange, The Mochida Family

Part Three: American Prose Since 1945

To the Reader

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

A Worn Path

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Context and Response: Carson McCullers, from The Member of the Wedding

John Cheever (1912-1982)

The Sorrows of Gin

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)

Battle Royal

Grace Paley (1922-2007)

The Loudest Voice

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Notes of a Native Son

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Revelation

Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

Recitatif

John Updike (1932-2009)

Separating

Philip Roth (b. 1933)

Defender of the Faith

Context and Response: Saul Bellow, excerpt from Herzog

Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)

Dutchman

Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

Where are you going, where have you been?

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

Cathedral

Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)

The Lesson

Terrance McNally (b. 1939)

Andre's Mother

Alice Walker (b. 1944)

Everyday Use

Tim O'Brien (b. 1946)

The Things They Carried

Mark Helprin (b. 1947)

White Gardens

Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)

Lullaby

Edward P. Jones (b. 1951)

Blindsided

Amy Tan (b. 1952)

Two Kinds

Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)

The Red Convertible

David Henry Hwang (b. 1957)

The Sound of a Voice

Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967)

Hell-Heaven

Gallery 3: Post-Modernism

Carl Andre, Equivalent VII; Frank Gehry, Walt Disney Concert Hall; Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and the Consumer Society (excerpt)

Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4; Batman and the Joker; Madonna at Super Bowl XLVI

Jonathan Franzen, On Rainer Maria Rilke

Cindy Sherman, Untitled

Diane Williams, Human Being

Charles Bernstein, thinking i think i think

Mitch Stevens, OMG! I just got born!

Alan Kirby, The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (excerpt)

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans; Mark Tansey, The Innocent Eye

Test; Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles

Part Four: American Poetry Since World War II

To the Reader

Robert Penn Warren (1905—1989)

Bearded Oaks

Mortal Limit

Theodore Roethke (1908—1963)

Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze

My Papa's Waltz

The Waking

Night Crow

I Knew a Woman

In a Dark Time

Charl

American Literature, Volume 2, 2nd edition

Paperback

Details

Explore

Products & Services

Support

Extend Your Learning

About us