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The Norton Antology of American Literature #A-B
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Package 1: Volumes A-B
Published in two volumes, the newest edition of THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE presents the work of 212 writers--38 newly included. From trickster tales of the Native American tradition to bestsellers of early women writers to postmodernism, this edition conveys the diversity of American literature from its origins to the present. Volume 2 covers the period of 1865 to the present.
2600 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Nina Baym
40 books17 followersNina Baym (born 1936) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She is best known as the General Editor of the renowned The Norton Anthology of American Literature, from 1991 - 2018. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for over 40 years, from 1963 to 2004.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 8, 2008
Great book for a short read...just pick an author and read their short story, poem or even novel. One of them has the Scarlet Letter included.
Read
May 2, 2026Read many stories for my American Literature class. I loved seeing the emphasis religion placed on so many people's livelihoods. Works read: Native American creation stories, John Smith, John Winthrop, Ann Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson
July 15, 2016
I'm not going to enter a Date Finished for this book.
I was an English Literature major in college (also majored in mathematics and computer science).
I have a very early version of this on my shelf. I decided to update it, because the editors added new material.
Is this anthology perfect? No. There will always be controversy surrounding what texts should and shouldn't be included in an anthology used in a year long course on American Literature. There will always be critics who will say that it's a travesty that _____ isn't in the anthology or that _____ doesn't deserve its place.
However, the editors have done a good job selecting representative texts--and that includes some texts that rarely get anthologized--in this set. There is much that is thought provoking. Yes, there are a lot of selections from longer texts in this... and sometimes the selections are too short. That happens when you have to deal with space constraints.
I highly recommend this text (as well as the Norton's Anthology of English Literature) as a good starting point for someone who is starting a good, serious reading library.
I have two faults with this: 1: it's paperback and 2: it's printed on thin, onion paper. I wish it was in hardcover and printed on heavier duty paper. That would make, what is already a generous anthology even more heftier.
I was an English Literature major in college (also majored in mathematics and computer science).
I have a very early version of this on my shelf. I decided to update it, because the editors added new material.
Is this anthology perfect? No. There will always be controversy surrounding what texts should and shouldn't be included in an anthology used in a year long course on American Literature. There will always be critics who will say that it's a travesty that _____ isn't in the anthology or that _____ doesn't deserve its place.
However, the editors have done a good job selecting representative texts--and that includes some texts that rarely get anthologized--in this set. There is much that is thought provoking. Yes, there are a lot of selections from longer texts in this... and sometimes the selections are too short. That happens when you have to deal with space constraints.
I highly recommend this text (as well as the Norton's Anthology of English Literature) as a good starting point for someone who is starting a good, serious reading library.
I have two faults with this: 1: it's paperback and 2: it's printed on thin, onion paper. I wish it was in hardcover and printed on heavier duty paper. That would make, what is already a generous anthology even more heftier.
March 23, 2008
This is an incredible collection of American literature that begins with the Puritan settlers. There is of course a good deal of work by the revolutionary fathers. Also, I never realized that the story of Rip Van Winkle was so political.
July 22, 2015
Read probably 85% of contents.
July 27, 2011
I read them for a class
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews