List of illustrations
Preface
AN AGE OF EXPANSION, 1865-1910
From Romanticism to Realism
Regionalism
The Gilded Age
Timeline: An Age of Expansion
NEW VOICES IN POETRY
WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
Song of Myself
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Cavalry Crossing a Ford
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
To a Common Prostitute
A Noiseless Patient Spider
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)
49 [I never lost as much but twice]
67 [Success is counted sweetest]
130 [These are the days when Birds come back—]
214 [I taste a liquor never brewed—]
241 [I like a look of Agony]
249 [Wild Nights—Wild Nights!]
252 [I can wade Grief—]
258 [There's a certain Slant of light]
280 [I felt a Funeral, in my Brain]
285 [The Robin's my Criterion for Tune—]
288 [I'm Nobody! Who are you?]
290 [Of Bronze—and Blaze—]
303 [The Soul selects her own Society—]
320 [We play at Paste—]
324 [Some keep the Sabbath going to Church]
328 [A Bird came down the Walk—]
341 [After great pain, a formal feeling comes—]
376 [Of Course—I prayed—]
401 [What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—]
435 [Much Madness is divinest Sense—]
441 [This is my letter to the World]
448 [This was a Poet—It is That]
449 [I died for Beauty—but was scarce]
465 [I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—]
511 [If you were coming in the Fall]
556 [The Brain, within its Groove]
579 [I had been hungry, all the Years—]
585 [I like to see it lap the Miles—]
632 [The Brain—is wider than the Sky—]
636 [The Way I read a Letter's—this—]
640 [I cannot live with You—]
650 [Pain—has a Element of Blank—]
657 [I dwell in Possibility—]
712 [Because I could not stop for Death—]
732 [She rose to His Requirement—dropt]
754 [My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—]
816 [A Death blow is a Life blow to Some]
823 [Not what We did, shall be the test]
986 [A narrow Fellow in the Grass]
1052 [I never saw a Moor—]
1078 [The Bustle in a House]
1082 [Revolution is the Pod]
1100 [The last Night that She lived]
1129 [Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—]
1207 [He preached upon "Breadth" till it argued him narrow—]
1263 [There is no Frigate like a Book]
1304 [Not with a Club, the Heart is broken]
1463 [A Route of Evanescence]
1540 [As imperceptibly as Grief]
1587 [He ate and drank the precious Words—]
1624 [Apparently with no surprise]
1732 [My life closed twice before its close—]
1760 [Elysium is as far as to]
CROSSCURRENTS: Freedom in the Gilded Age
WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
From Democratic Vistas
HENRY ADAMS (1838–1918)
From The Education of Henry Adams
Chapter XVII: President Grant (1869)
GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844–1915)
From The Freedman’s Case in Equity
[The Perpetual Alien]
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856–1915)
From Up from Slavery
The Struggle for an Education
REALISM AND NATURALISM, 1880–1920
Realism
Spiritual Unrest
Naturalism
Timeline: The Turn of the Century
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832-1888)
From Little Women
Playing Pilgrims
A Merry Christmas
The Laurence Boy
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)
The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
From Roughing It
[When the Buffalo Climbed a Tree]
From Life on the Mississippi
The Boys' Ambition
[A Mississippi Cub-Pilot]
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
How to Tell a Story
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837-1920)
From Criticism and Fiction
Chapter II [The True Standard of the Arts]
Chapter XIII [How Can an Art Decay?]
Chapter XXI [American and Old World Novelists]
Chapter XXIV [The Prudishness of the Anglo-Saxon Novel]
Editha
HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)
Daisy Miller
The Real Thing
The Beast in the Jungle
The Art of Fiction
BRET HARTE (1836-1902)
The Outcasts of Poker Flat
RED CLOUD (c. 1822-1909)
[All I Want Is Peace and Justice]
SARAH WINNEMUCCA HOPKINS (1844-1891)
From Life among the Piutes
Chapter 1: First Meeting of Piutes and Whites
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?)
*Chickamauga
GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844-1925)
Belles Demoiselles Plantation
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (1848-1908)
The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story
Mr. Rabbit Finds His Match at Last
HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918)
The Dynamo and the Virgin
SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909)
A White Heron
KATE CHOPIN (1851-1904)
The Story of an Hour
The Awakening
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1852-1930)
The Revolt of "Mother"
CHARLES W. CHESNUTT (1858-1932)
The Passing of Grandison
ABRAHAM CAHAN
*A Ghetto Wedding
CROSSCURRENTS: Prosperity and Social Justice at the Turn of the Century
ANDREW CARNEGIE (1835–1919)
From Wealth
STEPHEN CRANE (1871–1900)
The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY (1869–1910)
Gloucester Moors
On Soldier Fallen in the Philippines
ZITKALA-SA (1876–1938)
Retrospection
W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868–1963)
From The Souls of Black Folk
Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
HAMLIN GARLAND (1860-1940)
Under the Lion's Paw
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935)
The Yellow Wallpaper
FRANK NORRIS (1870-1902)
A Plea for Romantic Fiction
STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900)
A God in Wrath
Once I Saw Mountains Angry
A Man Saw a Ball of Gold in the Sky
God Lay Dead in Heaven
Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War Is Kind
The Wayfarer
A Man Said to the Universe
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
The Open Boat
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1872-1906)
We Wear the Mask
A Death Song
Life's Tragedy
At the Tavern
Sympathy
EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937)
The Muse's Tragedy
Roman Fever
THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945)
The Second Choice
EDITH MAUD EATON (SUI SIN FAR) (1865–1914)
In the Land of the Free
JACK LONDON (1876-1916)
To Build a Fire
LITERARY RENAISSANCE, 1910-1930
Twentieth-Century Renaissance
Poetry between the Wars
Timeline: Literary Renaissance
NEW DIRECTIONS: THE FIRST WAVE
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (1869-1935)
Luke Havergal
The House on the Hill
Richard Cory
Miniver Cheevy
Eros Turannos
Mr. Flood's Party
The Mill
Firelight
New England
WILLA CATHER (1873-1947)
Neighbour Rosicky
ELLEN GLASGOW (1873-1945)
Jordan's End
GERTRUDE STEIN (1873-1945)
From Tender Buttons
From The Making of Americans
JOHN MILTON OSKISON (1874–1947)
The Problem with Old Harjo
EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868-1950)
Petit, the Poet
Elsa Wertman
Hamilton Greene
Carl Hamblin
Lucinda Matlock
Davis Matlock
ROBERT FROST (1874-1946)
The Tuft of Flowers
Mending Wall
The Death of the Hired Man
Home Burial
After Apple-Picking
The Wood-Pile
The Road Not Taken
The Oven Bird
Birches
The Hill Wife
The Ax-Helve
Fire and Ice
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Desert Places
Design
Come In
Directive
CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967)
*Chicago
Fog
Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard
Gone
A Fence
Grass
Southern Pacific
Washerwoman
SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941)
The Book of the Grotesque
Adventure
SUSAN GLASPELL (1876?-1948)
Trifles
EZRA POUND (1885-1972)
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
From A Pact
In a Station of the Metro
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
From The Cantos
I: [And then went down to the ship]
XIII: [Kung walked]
From LXXXI: [What thou lovest well remains]
CXVI: [Came Neptunus]
T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Gerontion
The Waste Land
The Hollow Men
AMY LOWELL (1874-1925)
Patterns
A Decade
Meeting-House Hill
ELINOR WYLIE (1885-1928)
Wild Peaches
Sanctuary
Prophecy
Let No Charitable Hope
O Virtuous Light
H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) (1886-1961)
Heat
Heliodora
Lethe
Sigil
POETS OF IDEA AND ORDER
WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Sunday Morning
Depression before Spring
Ploughing on Sunday
Anecdote of the Jar
The Snow Man
Bantams in Pine-Woods
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
To the One of Fictive Music
The Idea of Order at Key West
A Postcard from the Volcano
Of Modern Poetry
No Possum, No Sop, No Taters
The Plain Sense of Things
Of Mere Being
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)
The Young Housewife
Tract
To Mark Anthony in Heaven
Portrait of a Lady
Queen-Anne's-Lace
The Great Figure
Spring and All
The Red Wheelbarrow
This Is Just to Say
A Sort of a Song
The Dance
The Ivy Crown
MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972)
Poetry
In the Days of Prismatic Color
An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
No Swan So Fine
The Pangolin
The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing
In Distrust of Merits
A Jelly-Fish
JOHN CROWE RANSOM (1888-1974)
Winter Remembered
Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter
Blue Girls
Antique Harvesters
HART CRANE (1899-1932)
At Melville's Tomb
From The Bridge
To Brooklyn Bridge
Van Winkle
The River
The Tunnel
A LITERATURE OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHALLENGE, 1920-1945
Drama between the Wars
Primitivism
The Roaring Twenties and the Lost Generation
The Harlem Renaissance
Depression and Totalitarian Menace
Timeline: A Literature of Social and Cultural Challenge
EUGENE O'NEILL (1888-1953)
The Hairy Ape
ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887-1962)
To the Stone-Cutters
Roan Stallion
Shine, Perishing Republic
Hurt Hawks
The Purse-Seine
CLAUDE MCKAY (1889-1948)
The Harlem Dancer
Harlem Shadows
America
Outcast
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892-1950)
First Fig
[I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore]
[What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why]
[She Had a Horror He Would Die at Night]
Justice Denied in Massachusetts
[This Beast That Rends Me in the Sight of All]
[Since of No Creature Living the Last Breath]
[Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink]
[Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss]
[Those Hours When Happy Hours Were My Estate]
[I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines]
E. E. CUMMINGS (1894-1962)
Thy Fingers Make Early Flowers Of
When God Lets My Body Be
In Just-
Buffalo Bill's
My Sweet Old Etcetera
I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big
If There Are Any Heavens
Somewhere I Have Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond
Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town
My Father Moved through Dooms of Love
Up into the Silence the Green
Plato Told
When Serpents Bargain for the Right to Squirm
I Thank You God
CROSSCURRENTS: The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871–1938)
[Negro Dialect]
PAUL ROBESON (1898- 1976)
Reflections on O'Neill's Plays
LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)
When the Negro Was in Vogue
ST. JAMES INFIRMARY BLUES
JEAN TOOMER (1894-1967)
Karintha
Reapers
November Cotton Flower
COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946)
Yet Do I Marvel
Heritage
For My Grandmother
For a Lady I Know
LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
The Weary Blues
Song for a Dark Girl
Trumpet Player
Dream Boogie
Motto
Green Memory
Harlem
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)
Babylon Revisited
JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970)
From The 42nd Parallel
Big Bill
From 1919
The House of Morgan
The Body of an American
From The Big Money
Newsreel LXVI
The Camera Eye (50)
Vag
WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)
That Evening Sun
Barn Burning
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)
Big Two-Hearted River: Part I
Big Two-Hearted River: Part II
THOMAS WOLFE (1900-1938)
An Angel on the Porch
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (1890-1980)
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891-1960)
From Their Eyes Were Watching God
[The Yellow Mule]
JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968)
The Chrysanthemums
RICHARD WRIGHT (1908-1960)
From Black Boy
[A Five Dollar Fight]
WOODY GUTHRIE (1912-1967)
This Land Is Your Land
Pastures of Plenty
The Sinking of the Reuben James
Hard Travelin’
Plane Wreck at Los Gatos
THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1945-1973
Postwar Drama
Postwar Poetry
Postwar Fiction
Multiculturalism
The Postmodern Impulse
Timeline: The Second World War and Its Aftermath
DRAMA
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983)
The Glass Menagerie
ARTHUR MILLER (1915- )
Death of a Salesman
EDWARD ALBEE (1928– )
The American Dream
CROSSCURRENTS: The Age of Anxiety—The Beat Generation and Social Responsibilities
JACK KEROUAC
*From On the Road
JOHN CLELLON HOLMES (1926–1988)
From The Philosophy of the Beat Generation
DWIGTH D. EISENHOWER
[The Military Industrial Complex]
RACHEL CARSON
From Silent Spring
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR (1929–1968)
I Have a Dream
POETRY
ROBERT PENN WARREN (1905-1989)
History among the Rocks
Founding Fathers, Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A.
Blow, West Wind
THEODORE ROETHKE (1908-1963)
Open House
Cuttings (later)
My Papa's Waltz
Elegy for Jane
The Waking
I Knew a Woman
The Far Field
Wish for a Young Wife
In a Dark Time
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-1979)
The Fish
At the Fishhouses
Questions of Travel
The Armadillo
Sestina
In the Waiting Room
One Art
CZESLAW MILOSZ (1911-2004)
Campo dei Fiori
Fear
Café
In Warsaw
Ars Poetica?
To Raja Rao
With Her
ROBERT HAYDEN (1913–1980)
Tour 5
Those Winter Sundays
Year of the Child
JOHN BERRYMAN (1914-1972)
From THE DREAM SONGS:
1 [Huffy Henry hid the day]
4 [Filling her compact & delicious body]
14 [Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so]
29 [There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart]
76 [Henry's Confession]
145 [Also I love him: me he's done no wrong]
153 [I'm cross with god who has wrecked this generation]
384 [The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done]
385 [My daughter's heavier. Light leaves are flying]
WILLIAM STAFFORD (1914-1993)
Before the Big Storm
Judgments
One Home
The Farm on the Great Plains
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917-2000)
a song in the front yard
The Bean Eaters
We Real Cool
The Lovers of the Poor
ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977)
Sailing Home from Rapallo
Waking in the Blue
*Memories of West Street and Lepke
Skunk Hour
The Neo-Classical Urn
For the Union Dead
For Theodore Roethke
Reading Myself
Epilogue
RICHARD WILBUR (1921- )
The Beautiful Changes
Museum Piece
The Death of a Toad
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
JAMES DICKEY (1923-1997)
The Lifeguard
Cherrylog Road
The Shark's Parlor
DENISE LEVERTOV (1923- )
The Third Dimension
To the Snake
The Room
The Willows of Massachusetts
Living
A. R. AMMONS (1926-2001)
Corsons Inlet
Cascadilla Falls
Poetics
ROBERT BLY (1926- )
Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
Watering the Horse
The Executive's Death
Looking at New-Fallen Snow from a Train
ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997)
A Supermarket in California
Howl
America
FRANK O'HARA (1926-1966)
Why I Am Not a Painter
A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island
The Day Lady Died
Ave Maria
SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)
Morning Song
The Rival
The Arrival of the Bee Box
The Applicant
Daddy
Lady Lazarus
Death & Co
Child
Mystic
AMIRI BARAKA (1934- )
In Memory of Radio
An Agony As Now
BOB DYLAN (1945– )
Blowin’ in the Wind
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Mr. Tambourine Man
Like a Rolling Stone
PROSE
EUDORA WELTY (1909-2001)
A Memory
VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977)
From Pnin
Chapter Five [Pnin at the Pines]
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER (1904-1991)
Gimpel the Fool
JOHN CHEEVER (1912-1982)
The Swimmer
RALPH ELLISON (1914- )
From Invisible Man
Chapter 1 [Battle Royal]
BERNARD MALAMUD (1914-1986)
The Mourners
SAUL BELLOW (1915- )
A Silver Dish
JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987)
Sonny's Blues
FLANNERY O'CONNOR (1925-1964)
Good Country People
JOHN BARTH (1930- )
Lost in the Funhouse
JOHN UPDIKE (1932- )
Separating
PHILIP ROTH (1933- )
The Conversion of the Jews
THOMAS PYNCHON (1937– )
Entropy
A CENTURY ENDS AND A NEW MILLENNIUM BEGINS, 1975-PRESENT
Drama
Poetry
Fiction
Multiculturalism
Globalization
Timeline: A Century Ends and a New Millennium Begins
DRAMA
SAM SHEPARD (1943- )
True West
AUGUST WILSON (1945– )
Fences
CROSSCURRENTS: What Is an American? Freedom and Responsibility
BOB DYLAN (1941- )
Masters of War
NORMAN MAILER (1923-2007)
*From Armies of the Night
BETTY FRIEDAN
The Problem That Has No Name
TIM O’BRIEN (1946– )
The Things They Didn’t Know
AL GORE (1948– )
*From An Inconvenient Truth
POETRY
W.S. MERWIN (1927- )
The Drunk in the Furnace
The Last One
Vision
Trees
JAMES WRIGHT (1927-1980)
A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
In Terror of Hospital Bills
Two Postures beside a Fire
JAMES MERRILL (1926-1995)
A Timepiece
Charles on Fire
The Broken Home
Samos
JOHN ASHBERY (1927- )
Some Trees
The Painter
Crazy Weather
A Prison All the Same
The Desperado
At North Farm
Down by the Station, Early in the Morning
ANNE SEXTON (1928-1974)
Her Kind
The Farmer's Wife
The Truth the Dead Know
With Mercy for the Greedy
ADRIENNE RICH (1929- )
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
Living in Sin
Necessities of Life
Diving into the Wreck
For the Dead
For the Record
GARY SNYDER (1930- )
The Late Snow & Lumber Strike of the Summer of Fifty-Four
Riprap
Not Leaving the House
Axe Handles
MARY OLIVER (1935- )
In Blackwater Woods
The Ponds
Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York, 1957
Early Morning, New Hampshire
Yes! No!
JAY WRIGHT (1935- )
A Month in the Country
Preparing to Leave Home
From Boleros
35 Indian Pond
The Buried Barn's Own Nocturne
CHARLES SIMIC (1938- )
Fear
Bestairy for the Fingers of My Right Hand
Fork
Euclid Avenue
Prodigy
My Weariness of Epic Proportions
JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-1996)
From Lullaby of Cape Cod
IV [The change of Empires is intimately tied]
Belfast Tune
A Song
To My Daughter
SIMON J. ORTIZ (1941- )
Vision Shadows
Poems from the Veterans Hospital
8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH
Travelling
From From Sand Creek
[At the Salvation Army]
RITA DOVE (1952- )
Champagne
Ö
Dusting
Roast Possum
LORNA DEE CERVANTES (1954- )
Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read
Person, Could Believe in a War Between the Races
For Virginia Chavez
Emplumadu
CATHY SONG (1955- )
Picture Bride
Heaven
Immaculate Lives
LI-YOUNG LEE (1957– )
I Ask My Mother to Sing
The Gift
The Hammock
Restless
PROSE
JOYCE CAROL OATES (1938- )
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
NASH CANDELARIA (1928- )
El Patrón
TONI MORRISON (1931- )
From Sula
1922
ANNIE PROULX (1935- )
The Half-Skinned Steer
DON DELILLO (1936- )
The Angel Esmeralda
RAYMOND CARVER (1938-1988)
A Small, Good Thing
BOBBIE ANN MASON (1940- )
Shiloh
BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940- )
The Management of Grief
ANNE TYLER (1941- )
Average Waves in Unprotected Waters
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN (1941- )
*Doc’s Story
ISABEL ALLENDE (1942- )
And of Clay Are We Created
ALICE WALKER (1944- )
Everyday Use
TIM O'BRIEN (1946- )
From Going After Cacciato
Night March
ANN BEATTIE (1947- )
Janus
LESLIE MARMON SILKO (1948- )
The Man to Send Rain Clouds
JAMAICA KINCAID (1949- )
Mariah
AMY TAN (1952- )
Half and Half
LOUISE ERDRICH (1954- )
The Red Convertible
SANDRA CISNEROS (1954– )
Woman Hollering Creek
BARBARA KINGSOLVER (1955- )
Homeland
SHERMAN ALEXIE (1966– )
What You Pawn I Will Redeem
JHUMPA LAHIRI (1967- )
The Third and Final Continent
EDWIDGE DANTICAT (1969– )
Seven
Historical-Literary Timeline
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
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