The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865

by Nina Baym

The classic survey of American literature from its origins to the present, The Norton Anthology of American Literature offers the work of 212 writers--38 newly included. From trickster tales of the Native American tradition to bestsellers of early women writers to postmodernism, the new edition conveys the diversity of American literature. Thirty works are included in their entirety in the two volumes, among them The Scarlet Letter, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Huckleberry Finn, and, new to this edition, Willa Cather's My Antonia.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Reference, Classics, Anthologies, Textbooks, Poetry

2611 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1998

About the author

Nina 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.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A selection of American writing from the time the Puritans landed to the beginning of the Civil War. It begins with histories of the early settlements, personal diaries and journals of the settlers, and their sermons and poems. This is followed by the revolutionary writings by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin (including the text of the Declaration of Independence).

The latter two-thirds of the book includes work by the great nineteenth century writers: the guilty pleasures of Edgar Allen Poe, the romanticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the heroic individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the profound conscience of Henry David Thoreau, the epic perspective of Herman Melville, the eccentricity of Emily Dickinson and the democratic spirit of Walt Whitman.

As often happens with anthologies, one notices not only what is included, but what is left out. Here, there is very little from James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe. There is only one chapter from Moby Dick (but if you had this anthology and a copy of Melville’s novel, you’d have a pretty good representation of American writing of this period). I think Joel Barlow’s 9-page poem “The Hasty Pudding” could have been left out. However, the book includes the texts both of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and of Thoreau’s Walden. Royal Tyler’s “The Contrast” is an interesting play with some metafictional devices that may remind some of Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. Plus, the anthology includes letters by some of the writers represented, supplying an additional perspective on their work.

Acquired Oct 11, 2008
G & A Book Exchange, London, Ontario

[Autumn]

(NO RATING- TEXTBOOK) Read excerpts of this volume for my American Literature course and honestly might just continue to peruse the unread stories after the course. It's informative and honest about the history of the country (or seemed to account for the colonization and slavery ever-present) with great selections from well-known and not-so-well-known authors. I found a few new favorite authors and found more appreciation for well-known ones.

[Amber Ellison]

Of course my first review is a textbook. I love anthologies though. Typical biography followed by a few works format. No new invention of the wheel, but a good beginning representation of early American lit that wasn't ridiculously expensive as a textbook.

[T. Sendi · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love love LOVE Norton Anthology books– especially this one! it served me well in my senior year.

[Dav · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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 it does break it and pages loosen.

[Molly Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Book of Love" piece in the goodreads' newsletter reminded me of this wonderful anthology--which I purchased in a travel shop in Barcelona during the Summer of 1990. I anticipated that the various narratives found in the collection would teach me more about American history. But, what surprised and touched me was the unique blend of history, insight, support and love found in the letters between John and Abigail Adams. Although there are separate books that contain the Adams' letters alone, I think part of the joy for me came from reading them after getting somewhat settled into the writing of the period by reading some of the earlier letters included in this volume.

[Adam Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should have reviewed parts as they came along. I spent most of the last 6 months reading this, so some parts are vague and I don't feel motivated to push myself toward writing higher literary criticism. I would just advise readers to pay good attention to some of the lesser known works of Jonathan Edwards compiled here, as they give an indication that his sermons and works were not all fire and brimstone but mostly filled with grace and pleasure toward God. In fact, from guys like John Piper I've learned that "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is the exception to the norm in Edwards' output. I was pleased to see what he meant.

[crystalline · Rating 5 out of 5]

As ever Norton has produced a wonderful reference book with some of the best American Literature excerpts for readers to explore. These excerpts are made even better by the historical background given for each author, placing it firmly in a time of change and influence. With this context and the helpful footnotes, it's easy to become immersed in literature written hundred of years ago.
I look forward to reading every piece in this book.

[Stefanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a class

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I read this book, I was a hater. Now, having been enlightened, I genuinely do not play about Early American literature.

[Nanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great collection! Terrific contextualization, editorial, and footnotes. A wonderful introduction to early American literature and a lifesaver for both teachers and students as a survey of this time period in America’s literary history. The compact nature makes it especially useful. As an instructor, I certainly added additional readings to my syllabus but felt confident in having students get this one text as our course book. Incidentally, I added readings like “Declaration of Sentiments,” excerpts from “The Book of Mormon,” Douglass’s entire “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, Harper’s 1866 speech “ we are all bound up together” and Stowe’s complete “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” With this text I was able to create a gender-balanced sampling of literature as well as include BIPOC writers such that America’s colonial, religious, gender, and racial ideologies and conflicts were well contextualized and represented in our readings to most accurately convey a literary portrait of the U.S. during these formative centuries. Most importantly, this text is a tool for understanding how we arrived at our current moment in history.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, so not as good as the British versions, both because the British ones are three times as big and the early American writing isn't my favorite, but still enjoyable. I breezed through the first two sections, namely because I didn't have to read anything except a short biography of Anne Bradstreet according to GRE test prep material, and read only the third section in detail. I have always wanted to read Bartleby, the Scrivener and this book gave me that chance. I also enjoyed the excerpt from Walden more than I expected to, namely the chapter on economy. A lot of what Thoreau had to say still has much relevance today, particularly with regard to people's obsession with possessions. And I had no idea that Walt Whitman was gay and wrote such sexual poetry. That was definitely left out when I studied his poems in elementary school. Shame.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd forgotten about this until I came across a posting mentioning this anthology. I read it in my Freshman English Class in College, although at the time Michigan State had termed the course American Thought & Language.

I don't think that I ever read the entire anthology but many of the works were assigned reading back then.

It's probably symbolic in a way that MY copy of this book was lost in the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 I'd taken it to work to resolve some debate that came up among co-workers and kept it at my desk.

[Jeremiah]

I'd hold my head high if I could say I read this cover to cover. But I read the highlights for American Lit class so I still hold my head semi-high. I encountered people I already knew I'm fond of, like Jack London, Hemingway, Frost and T.S. Eliot. But I also ran into people I hadn't known about. Like Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein with her perplexing Tender Buttons, undertook a Long Day's Journey Into Night, and saw memory differently through Jarrell's poem The Lost World. Being Norton is well Norton, all the biography, footnotes and analysis were marvelous.

[Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

This contains a lot of really important texts. I gave it a 4 because some of the inclusions were absolutely terrific (some were pretty mediocre). I have not read all of it, but enough to say its a great anthology that I will definitely want to pick through more of sometime in the future.

[Monzenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a blast! To go through early American history up to the Civil War, through the eyes of her writers. It's a full library of emotion and thought, anyone would likely have his favorite. And more importantly, it's a good jumping off point to read more about any of the authors. Great stuff.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another great package from Norton, although I prefer the British anthologies... largely because I prefer British literature.

[Jack Shoegazer]

This is for my Survey of American Lit class.

[Elizabeth]

Anne Bradstreet was a favorite in this.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book for a college class.

I read most of Volume A, and a about 22 stories in Volume B.

[Chantel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read every story, but a large portion and I found some really great works in there. Stories I hope to tell my children one day!

[CJ Orbitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a textbook, it was done fairly well. The stories within were great reads.

[Tessa]

read for class "Early American culture" 2006/2007

[Megan]

This is the first half of my textbook for American Lit this year. The Puritan and super early writers aren't my favorite, but there were definitely some really great pieces in here too!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865 by Nina Baym - This has everything you expect for Early American lit! Norton is always a good choice! Happy Reading!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.75
I used this book for my American Lit. I class during my junior year of college. It was a great textbook. I'm a fan of most all the Norton texts I used during college.