About the series (from the Publisher): Elements of Literature, Grades 7-12, offers a combination of fine literature and creative instruction to spark students' interest and imagination. Every level offers a core of classic literature, enriched and expanded with the best of contemporary selections. Elements of Literature introduces students to the literature that has shaped the minds--and hearts-- of Homer's Odyssey, the Book of Ruth, Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote, Walden, and poetry of John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. Here, too, are many fresh, new, or rarely anthologized Tim O'Brien's award-winning stories about Vietnam Andrea Lee's account of growing up black in the sixties the lively stories of Sandra Cisneros poems by John Haines and Julia Alvarez