This consise anthology offers a balanced approach to the enjoyment of reading American literature. Over 20 new authors representing diverse cultural backgrounds allow students to read about unique experiences through the eyes of esteemed writers including Sonia Sanchez, Sherman Alexie, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Frances E.W. Harper. New historical documents, including the romantic letters exchanged by John and Abigail Adams and an account of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a young soldier, provide an understanding for student readers. Four groundbreaking dramas (from the 18th century: Slaves in Algiers, by Susanna Haswell Rowson; from the 19th century: The Escape, by William Wells Brown; from the early 20th century: Trifles, by Susan Glaspell; and from the late 20th century: Fences, by August Wilson) help students understand the role of theater in America through the centuries. Speeches by Legendary Leaders include Martin Luther King’s unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech and Booker T. Washington’s historical Atlanta Exposition Address in addition to Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address.
JAMES S. LEONARD received his Ph.D. from Brown University, and is Professor of English (and former English Department chair) at The Citadel. He is the editor of Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom (Duke University Press, 1999), coeditor of Authority and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing (Locust Hill Press, 1994) and Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (Duke University Press, 1992), and coauthor of The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality
(University of Georgia Press, 1988). He has served as president of the Mark Twain Circle
of America (2010–2012), managing editor of The Mark Twain Annual (since 2004), and editor of the Mark Twain Circular (1987–2008), and is a major contributor to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Poets and Poetry (Greenwood Press, 2006) and American History Through Literature (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005).
SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of over forty books, including the award-winning Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (1993), From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (1988), and Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (2009), as well as Lighting Out for the Territory (1997), The Oxford Mark Twain (1996), The Historical
Guide to Mark Twain (2002), Mark Twain‘s Book of Animals (2009), The Mark Twain Anthology:Great Writers on his Life and Work (2010), Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts by Mark Twain (2003), People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (with Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky) (1996), Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (with Elaine Hedges)(1994), and Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar (with David Bradley) (2005). She has also published more than eighty articles, essays, or reviews in publications including American Quarterly, American Literature, Journal of American History, American Literary History, and the New York Times Book Review, and has lectured on American literature in Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea,
Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom,
and throughout the United States. A member of the first class of women to graduate from Yale College, she stayed on at Yale to earn her M.A. in English and her Ph.D. in American Studies. Before her arrival at Stanford, she directed the Poynter Fellowship
in Journalism at Yale and taught American Studies and English at the University
of Texas at Austin, where she chaired the American Studies Department. She co-founded the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and is a past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and the American Studies Association.
DAVID BRADLEY earned a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and a MA in United States Studies at the University of London in 1974. A Professor of English at Temple University from 1976 to 1997, Bradley has been a visiting professor at the San Diego State University, the University of California―San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Colgate University, the College of William &
Mary, the City College of the City University of New York and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. He is currently an Associate Professor of Fiction in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Bradley has read and lectured extensively in the United States and also in Japan, Korea, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia. He is the author of two novels, South Street (1975) and The Chaneysville Incident (1981) which was awarded the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His non-fiction has appeared in Esquire, Redbook, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts His most recent publication is semi-scholarly: The Essential Writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which he co-edited with Shelley Fisher Fishkin. His current works in progress include a creative non-fiction book, The Bondage Hypothesis: Meditations on Race, History and America, a novel-in-stories, Raystown, and an essay collection: Lunch Bucket Pieces: New and Selected Creative Nonfiction
DANA D. NELSON
received her Ph.D. from Michigan State, and she is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (1992), National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (1998), and Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (2008) as well as editor of several reprint editions of nineteenth-century American female writers (including Rebecca Rush, Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Kemble, and Frances Butler Leigh). Her teaching interests include comparative American colonial literatures, developing democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ethnic and minority literatures, women’s literature, and frontier representations in literature. She has served or is serving on numerous editorial boards, including American Literature, Early American Literature, American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, and American Quarterly. She is an active member of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association. She is currently working on a book that studies developing practices and representations of democracy in the late British colonies and the early United States.
JOSEPH CSICSILA is Professor of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University and a specialist in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture. He is the author and/or editor of five books including Canons by Consensus:
Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies (2004), which is the first systematic study of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the past century, Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (2009), and Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain (2010). He has also published numerous articles on such authors as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and William Faulkner. Csicsila has served as the editor of Journal of Narrative Theory and is currently book review editor for The Mark Twain Annual.
