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The Norton Antology of American Literature #C-E
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2
Now available in a portable multi-volume format, The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present.
The Sixth Edition offers the work of 242 writers30 newly includedrepresenting the extraordinary wealth and diversity of American literature. Among the many major works included in their entirety are Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau's Walden, Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Clemens's Huckleberry Finn, Chopin's The Awakening, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Larsen's Quicksand, Ginsberg's "Howl," Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, and Parks's The America Play. Informative introductions, headnotes, footnotes, and bibliographies accompany the texts.
Package 2, "1865 to the Present," contains three slipcased volumes: "1965-1914" (Volume C), "Between the Wars: 1914-1945" (Volume D), and "Literature Since 1945" (Volume E).
2590 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
33 people are currently reading
389 people want to read
About the author
Nina Baym
39 books16 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 - 26 of 26 reviews
August 11, 2013
These volumes were my required texts for American Literature II, and they definitely served as an interesting companion to the class. I actually loved almost every author I read from these books, and came out of reading them a lot more informed about the literature of the mid-to-late 19th century in the United States and how it affected later literature coming into modernism. These volumes were even so compelling as to make me resist selling them back to the student store from which I purchased them.
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October 28, 2018The public university I just started working at worships at the foot of the great Norton. All literature lecturers are required to use these anthologies. While I understand the pressures that a public system faces in creating uniform curricula across departments, the idea of a "standard" selection of literary work flies in the face of everything we know about the dangers of canonization. Plus, it's incredibly lazy - in an ideal system, professors would put their years expertise and extensive training to good use by creating their own anthologies. Not to mention that it's not necessarily cheaper to buy these anthologies than a semester's worth of reading materials. And the constant updating of editions means that departments and students waste vast sums of money updating their editions so that everyone remains on the same page. All of that said, my real beef with Norton is that for reasons I can only presume to involve expenses, many famous authors are represented by their least-known work. Which defeats the entire purpose of having a "standard" for introductory survey courses. Also, there are typos and errors sprinkled throughout, which meant I was constantly needing to find the originals to ensure that the mistakes were Norton's and not the author's. The worst example of this was in Grace Paley's "A Conversation with My Father" where a misplaced quotation mark (Norton's mistake) changes the entire meaning of a crucial passage.
If those of us teaching literature have any self-respect, we should fight against corporate anthologizing and do the hard but rewarding work of creating our own trajectories of American letters. If we did so, we might be able to create a million little anthologies. They would all be different, yes, but the difference between one person's choice of a great text and another person's IS the entire point. It's what we DO when we talk about literature.
If those of us teaching literature have any self-respect, we should fight against corporate anthologizing and do the hard but rewarding work of creating our own trajectories of American letters. If we did so, we might be able to create a million little anthologies. They would all be different, yes, but the difference between one person's choice of a great text and another person's IS the entire point. It's what we DO when we talk about literature.
January 6, 2009
The sad thing about those literary survey classes is that you get to taste a little of everything within a respective time line. The first course of American Literature gives you a look at the writings of great people in history, such as Benjamin Franklin. The second course, starting in 1850, starts out well enough with Walt Whitman, but unfortunately ends with post-modernism. You get to read stupid crap about a big red balloon floating through Manhattan. You get to see literature get progressively worse and become total crap after WWII. Well, most of it. At least the stuff that gets critical acclaim.
July 1, 2011
Favorites(from the piece I read for the class):
The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman pg 508
Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath pg 1478
Robert Frost's poems, which begin at pg 776, especially After Apple Picking, Desert Places, and pg 787.
Emily Dickinson's poems, beginning on 93. (There are more in Vol 1, including most of the ones I like best.)
The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman pg 508
Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath pg 1478
Robert Frost's poems, which begin at pg 776, especially After Apple Picking, Desert Places, and pg 787.
Emily Dickinson's poems, beginning on 93. (There are more in Vol 1, including most of the ones I like best.)
May 12, 2016
Good selection of American literature post-Civil War, for an anthology, and for required reading for school. ;)
January 5, 2019
Norton is required reading but I still enjoyed every moment of it, as well as Volumes A and B.
June 4, 2024
Sometimes I feel guilty marking off an entire anthology as read, when clearly I didn't read everything within the anthology. However, I did read a good portion of it for class, and it was the text we used, so I feel that's important to note. Also, if I put every individual short story I read from this collection in separately, I would meet my Goodreads goal with relative ease. I don't think short stories should count as one piece of literature read toward my goal, but rather a collection of short stories would count. Therefore lies my conundrum. Counting the anthology as read means I used the textbook from class, and it only counts as one entry like I want. The downside is that my "pages read" section will be super skewed an inaccurate. Oh well, win some lose some.
ANYWAY, to the actual review. I think this was a super great collection of stories and poems. There was a wonderful range of both incredibly well-known authors and people I've personally never heard of - I'm glad to say that I read a good mix of both. I had a few personal annoyances with the chosen works of some authors though, some objective and some subjective. Subjectively, I wish that Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" was in the collection rather than "Good Country People". Or - and this is my more objective argument - add more than one of her stories. I recognize that "Good Country People" is one of her finest short stories, and do believe it is on par with "A Good Man is Hard to Find", I just prefer the latter. Therefore, I believe both should have been added. I was, however, genuinely surprised and delighted that both "Barn Burning" and "A Rose For Emily" were included for William Faulkner, one of my favorite authors. I was extremely happy that both stories were considered worthy of anthologizing rather than just "A Rose For Emily" - it is his most popular short story, but Faulkner has so much to offer.
Because this is such a large collection and we read so much from it for class, I will put my favorites in list order, with a very brief sentence on why I liked each one:
- A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner: Southern Gothic is my favorite genre and William Faulkner is one of my favorite authors.
- Good Country People by Flannery O'Connor: For the exact same reasons listed above.
- To Build a Fire by Jack London: I love stories of strong men who meet an immovable force that destroys them; it's such an interesting juxtaposition.
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Picturing the last paragraph is nightmare fuel; also, I love reading about women's struggles in different time periods, as it makes me appreciate the place I am in today, because of the work they did.
- The Wife of His Youth by Charles Chesnutt: His writing style was beautiful and I adored the ending.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot: I love the double meaning of the poem, and that the two derived meanings aren't mutually exclusive.
- The Snow of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway: The same reason I loved To Build a Fire.
ANYWAY, to the actual review. I think this was a super great collection of stories and poems. There was a wonderful range of both incredibly well-known authors and people I've personally never heard of - I'm glad to say that I read a good mix of both. I had a few personal annoyances with the chosen works of some authors though, some objective and some subjective. Subjectively, I wish that Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" was in the collection rather than "Good Country People". Or - and this is my more objective argument - add more than one of her stories. I recognize that "Good Country People" is one of her finest short stories, and do believe it is on par with "A Good Man is Hard to Find", I just prefer the latter. Therefore, I believe both should have been added. I was, however, genuinely surprised and delighted that both "Barn Burning" and "A Rose For Emily" were included for William Faulkner, one of my favorite authors. I was extremely happy that both stories were considered worthy of anthologizing rather than just "A Rose For Emily" - it is his most popular short story, but Faulkner has so much to offer.
Because this is such a large collection and we read so much from it for class, I will put my favorites in list order, with a very brief sentence on why I liked each one:
- A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner: Southern Gothic is my favorite genre and William Faulkner is one of my favorite authors.
- Good Country People by Flannery O'Connor: For the exact same reasons listed above.
- To Build a Fire by Jack London: I love stories of strong men who meet an immovable force that destroys them; it's such an interesting juxtaposition.
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Picturing the last paragraph is nightmare fuel; also, I love reading about women's struggles in different time periods, as it makes me appreciate the place I am in today, because of the work they did.
- The Wife of His Youth by Charles Chesnutt: His writing style was beautiful and I adored the ending.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot: I love the double meaning of the poem, and that the two derived meanings aren't mutually exclusive.
- The Snow of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway: The same reason I loved To Build a Fire.
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August 17, 2010I'm using the Norton mostly for poetry. Here's what I'm reading (I'll update periodically).
ROBERT FROST (love, love, love this man)
Mending Wall
The Death of the Hired Man
Home Burial
After Apple-Picking
Birches
The Wood-Pile
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Provide, Provide!
The Gift Outright
The Road Not Taken
Wallace Stevens (also love, but Robert Frost sill has my heart)
The Snow Man
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Sunday Morning
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The Death of a Soldier
The Idea of Order at Key West
A Postcard from the Volcano
The Plain Sense of Things
Moving on to Pound...
Ezra Pound (crazy but fascinating)
To Whistler, American
Portrait d'une Femme
A Virginal
A Pact
The Rest
In a Station of the Metro
The River-Merchan't Wife: A Letter
Villanelle: The Psychological Hour
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)
The Cantos: XLV ("With Usura")
e.e. cummings (surprisingly nice)
Thy fingers make early flowers of (1923)
in Just-- (1920, 1923)
O sweet spontaneous (1920, 1923)
Buffalo Bill 's (1920, 1923)
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls (1923)
next to of course god america i (1926)
i sing of Olaf glad and big (1931)
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond (1931)
anyone lived in a pretty how town (1940)
pity this busy monster,manunkind (1944)
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land (1922)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915, 1917)
Burnt Norton, from Four Quartets (1936, 1943)
The Hollow Men (1925)
Journey of the Magi (1935)
Gerontion (1920)
Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918-9)
Marianne Moore
Poetry (1921, 1935)
A Grave (1924)
To a Snail (1924)
What Are Years? (1941, 1967)
The Paper Nautilus (1941, 1967)
The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing (1944)
In Distrust of Merits (1944)
Hart Crane
Chaplinesque (1921, 1926)
At Melville's Tomb (1926)
III (From Voyages) (1926)
V (From Voyages) (1926)
To Brooklyn Bridge (From The Bridge) (1927, 1930)
Robinson Jeffers (very, supremely awesome)
To His Father
Suicide's Stone
Divinely Superfluous Beauty
The Excesses of God
Salmon Fishing
Wise Men in Their Bad Hours
To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House
The Cycle
Shine, Perishing Republic
Continent's End
ROBERT FROST (love, love, love this man)
Mending Wall
The Death of the Hired Man
Home Burial
After Apple-Picking
Birches
The Wood-Pile
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Provide, Provide!
The Gift Outright
The Road Not Taken
Wallace Stevens (also love, but Robert Frost sill has my heart)
The Snow Man
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Sunday Morning
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The Death of a Soldier
The Idea of Order at Key West
A Postcard from the Volcano
The Plain Sense of Things
Moving on to Pound...
Ezra Pound (crazy but fascinating)
To Whistler, American
Portrait d'une Femme
A Virginal
A Pact
The Rest
In a Station of the Metro
The River-Merchan't Wife: A Letter
Villanelle: The Psychological Hour
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)
The Cantos: XLV ("With Usura")
e.e. cummings (surprisingly nice)
Thy fingers make early flowers of (1923)
in Just-- (1920, 1923)
O sweet spontaneous (1920, 1923)
Buffalo Bill 's (1920, 1923)
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls (1923)
next to of course god america i (1926)
i sing of Olaf glad and big (1931)
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond (1931)
anyone lived in a pretty how town (1940)
pity this busy monster,manunkind (1944)
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land (1922)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915, 1917)
Burnt Norton, from Four Quartets (1936, 1943)
The Hollow Men (1925)
Journey of the Magi (1935)
Gerontion (1920)
Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918-9)
Marianne Moore
Poetry (1921, 1935)
A Grave (1924)
To a Snail (1924)
What Are Years? (1941, 1967)
The Paper Nautilus (1941, 1967)
The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing (1944)
In Distrust of Merits (1944)
Hart Crane
Chaplinesque (1921, 1926)
At Melville's Tomb (1926)
III (From Voyages) (1926)
V (From Voyages) (1926)
To Brooklyn Bridge (From The Bridge) (1927, 1930)
Robinson Jeffers (very, supremely awesome)
To His Father
Suicide's Stone
Divinely Superfluous Beauty
The Excesses of God
Salmon Fishing
Wise Men in Their Bad Hours
To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House
The Cycle
Shine, Perishing Republic
Continent's End
July 19, 2020
I'm not entirely sure how one rates an anthology since it's composed of multiple different writers from multiple different times, but as far as textbooks go, this is a pretty good one. The informational sections are detailed enough to give you an adequate amount of context during the actual passages, the color inserts were interesting, and the book itself had a wide array of authors, both good and shitty beyond all reason.
I'm sorry, I have to come out and say it. I really, really did not like reading "Song of Myself," by Walt Whitman. If I'm telling the truth, I don't understand why that was put in the anthology in the first place. It was ground-breaking and revolutionary for its time, but I didn't see anything ground-breaking or revolutionary. I saw ignorance, immorality, and a lecherous, self-absorbed old geezer rambling on about how he wished he could f*ck the ocean, or anything else that exists for that matter. Great, because that's what we need to teach the American youth. F*ck everything! That'll make this country great, fo' shizzle! *Sigh* The only thing I saw that was remotely ground-breaking was the free-form style of the poetry, which I will admit allowed for some pretty good lines. Other than that, it pretty much sucked. I'd rather read The Faerie Queene again. At least the wind didn't have genitals in that one.
Anyway, now that I got that off my chest, some of the other (and in my opinion, better) pieces that appear in this anthology are:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (the complete text)
The Yellow Wall-paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce
Poems by Emily Dickenson
"The Wasteland" and "The Hollow Men," by T.S. Eliot
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, by Ernest Hemingway
A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams
Good Country People, by Flannnery O'Connor
"I Have a Dream," by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Poems by Sylvia Plath
Recitatif, by Toni Morrison
Everyday Use, by Alice Walker
Poems by Sherman Alexie
Overall, this is a pretty good book for a literature class, or at least it was for me. I'm docking a star for having to sit through "Song of Myself," though. That whole stupid thing was just unnecessary.
EDIT: This also has Howl by Allen Ginsburg. It is terrible. Truly terrible. It is thoroughly one of the worst "poems" I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Don't @ me.
I'm sorry, I have to come out and say it. I really, really did not like reading "Song of Myself," by Walt Whitman. If I'm telling the truth, I don't understand why that was put in the anthology in the first place. It was ground-breaking and revolutionary for its time, but I didn't see anything ground-breaking or revolutionary. I saw ignorance, immorality, and a lecherous, self-absorbed old geezer rambling on about how he wished he could f*ck the ocean, or anything else that exists for that matter. Great, because that's what we need to teach the American youth. F*ck everything! That'll make this country great, fo' shizzle! *Sigh* The only thing I saw that was remotely ground-breaking was the free-form style of the poetry, which I will admit allowed for some pretty good lines. Other than that, it pretty much sucked. I'd rather read The Faerie Queene again. At least the wind didn't have genitals in that one.
Anyway, now that I got that off my chest, some of the other (and in my opinion, better) pieces that appear in this anthology are:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (the complete text)
The Yellow Wall-paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce
Poems by Emily Dickenson
"The Wasteland" and "The Hollow Men," by T.S. Eliot
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, by Ernest Hemingway
A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams
Good Country People, by Flannnery O'Connor
"I Have a Dream," by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Poems by Sylvia Plath
Recitatif, by Toni Morrison
Everyday Use, by Alice Walker
Poems by Sherman Alexie
Overall, this is a pretty good book for a literature class, or at least it was for me. I'm docking a star for having to sit through "Song of Myself," though. That whole stupid thing was just unnecessary.
EDIT: This also has Howl by Allen Ginsburg. It is terrible. Truly terrible. It is thoroughly one of the worst "poems" I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Don't @ me.
June 23, 2012
I definitely like American Literature more than British Literature and this volume featured a lot of authors I hadn't even HEARD of before. It offered a fairly broad overview of the literature at the time, although, as my professor pointed out, it still could have featured more women writers/native american authors/other minorities, but it highlighted some of the best known authors and their work. I really enjoyed the class because my teacher made the material interesting and as a class we looked at each text and discussed that time period and the different styles of writing.
*Taken from my book reviews blog: http://reviewsatmse.blogspot.com/2011...
*Taken from my book reviews blog: http://reviewsatmse.blogspot.com/2011...
June 19, 2017
"The Norton Anthology of American Literature is a compendium of various works by authors of specifically American birth or naturalization, ranging from short poems, pamphlets, and novellas to longer entries such as entire novels and philosophical pieces.
This collection proceeded from a series of other anthologies including English Literature and Poetry. It was first published in 1979 by W. W. Norton & Company..."wiki
It's a great collection and variety, but some of the longer works are only in part. Reading it in this format, a super fat paper back with rice paper thin pages, can be annoying--holding it, turning pages or reading a curved page. Breaking the spine helps lay it flat, but...
This collection proceeded from a series of other anthologies including English Literature and Poetry. It was first published in 1979 by W. W. Norton & Company..."wiki
It's a great collection and variety, but some of the longer works are only in part. Reading it in this format, a super fat paper back with rice paper thin pages, can be annoying--holding it, turning pages or reading a curved page. Breaking the spine helps lay it flat, but...
May 15, 2019
Novel Writing & Novel Reading - William Dean Howells - 9/6/18
The Art of Fiction - Henry James - 9/6/18
Miggles - Bret Harte - 9/18/18
Joel Chandler Harris - The Wonderful Tar Baby Story & How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox -10/01/18
Paul Laurence Dunbar - When Malindy Sings, An Ante-Bellum Sermon, We Wear the Mask - 10/07/18
Alice Dunbar Nelson - Sister Josepha - 10/07/18
Edith Wharton - The Other Two - 11/06/18
Jack London - The Law of Life & To Build A Fire - 11/13/18
Mary Austin - The Land of the Little Rain & The Walking Woman - 12/2/18
The Art of Fiction - Henry James - 9/6/18
Miggles - Bret Harte - 9/18/18
Joel Chandler Harris - The Wonderful Tar Baby Story & How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox -10/01/18
Paul Laurence Dunbar - When Malindy Sings, An Ante-Bellum Sermon, We Wear the Mask - 10/07/18
Alice Dunbar Nelson - Sister Josepha - 10/07/18
Edith Wharton - The Other Two - 11/06/18
Jack London - The Law of Life & To Build A Fire - 11/13/18
Mary Austin - The Land of the Little Rain & The Walking Woman - 12/2/18
October 17, 2008
I love the Norton books. Such good summaries of the various authors and time periods. My main problem with this particular book is which contemporary authors they have chosen to include and which to exclude, but I guess that's the fault of the canon and Norton is simply teaching to the trend.
May 14, 2009
Am Lit II books. Amazing. Depressing. Avoid Henry James.
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September 14, 2009The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Package 2: Volumes C-E, Sixth Edition (2002)
December 20, 2010
Probably the best reader I've been assigned for a class. Or maybe I just like American Literature post-Civil War through present.
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April 27, 2012Finished Plath, Miller and Dickinson, going through Whitman and Hawthorne now.
July 12, 2014
I read this in college.
March 22, 2015
One of three books I had to read for my American literature class. Some of the stories were eh and other I enjoyed.
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February 7, 2016read for class "modern American culture" 2007/2008
April 29, 2016
I didn't read every last page of this textbook but from the stuff I read I did like most of the pieces and the biographies of the authors as well.
May 14, 2016
it was for school so...
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December 11, 2016I've really enjoying using these Norton anthologies for my American Lit class. The footnotes provided are helpful in understanding the works and there is a broad selection of writers included.
March 3, 2017
Read this for my American lit class, there is a lot of great authors who paved the way for many of today's greats
May 7, 2017
A hefty book to read. It is a good piece to include in your collection for time to time reading of different authors.
July 15, 2019
This 1990s edition includes such timeless editorial takes as: The n word isn't "really" racist; and, Joyce Carol Oates writes too many books to be taken seriously. Woman too many word. Bad woman.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews