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The Norton Antology of American Literature #D
The Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature between the Wars, 1914-1945
The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present.
This volume, Volume D, covers American literature from 1914 to 1945.
This volume, Volume D, covers American literature from 1914 to 1945.
882 pages, Paperback
First published April 19, 2007
11 people are currently reading
274 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 25, 2020
3/5 Stars (%66/100)
Read my reviews for other volumes first!
As we move closer to our time, the style and purpose of literature keep changing. This volume especially deals with war literature. Two world wars really affected America as much as other countries. It also means that the literature is affected as well. This volume is probably the one that I read the most. There are a ton of writers that I keep coming back to.
Read my reviews for other volumes first!
As we move closer to our time, the style and purpose of literature keep changing. This volume especially deals with war literature. Two world wars really affected America as much as other countries. It also means that the literature is affected as well. This volume is probably the one that I read the most. There are a ton of writers that I keep coming back to.
February 10, 2016
The editors chosen poets and writers of 1914-1945 shaped the depressing, radical, self-loathing underbelly of American youth of that generation. The biographies favor the atheists, agnostics, promiscuous, womanizing, socialists, communists, traitors (Mussolini-supporter Ezra Pound went to trial, found insane, institutionalized for a decade), feminists, lesbians and black racists in preference to the very few - and shorter - biographies of those who were more conservative and traditionalist. What a shame. The collection and works may be worth a read considering the historical significance but because the editors are blatantly biased and most of the anti-American American writers presented are self-proclaimed socialists, I hate it and find this bulk of "American" literature garbage.
June 27, 2019
This was excellent.
March 18, 2022
modernism go fuck yourself
October 26, 2009
Textbook, No Comment.
November 23, 2010
Read this for an English class. Some of the poems I liked whereas others not so much. However, the poems are still great selections of the time periods.
January 14, 2016
I bought this at the Goodwill. Wish this was required reading in college.
April 22, 2013
Read My Ántonia from this book.
American Literature 2328 TCC dual credit.
American Literature 2328 TCC dual credit.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews