The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Seventh Edition, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1865

The classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present. This anthology offers the work of over 260 writers--34 newly included--representing the extraordinary wealth and diversity of American literature. Among the 36 major works included in their entirety are Franklin's "Autobiography"; Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"; Thoreau's "Walden"; Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave"; Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; Chopin's "The Awakening"; Cather's "My Antonia"; Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying"; Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire"; Larsen's "Quicksand"; Ginsberg's "Howl"; and Mamet's "Glengarry, Glen Ross." The Seventh Edition pays increased attention to cultural contexts through the inclusion of 45 color plates, 12 contextual clusters, updated maps and timelines, and through extensively revised section introductions, headnotes, footnotes, and bibliographies.

Firmly grounded in the core strengths that have made it the best-selling undergraduate survey in the field, The Norton Anthology of American Literature has been revitalized in this Seventh Edition through the collaboration between three new period editors and five seasoned ones.

Firmly grounded in the core strengths that have made it the best-selling undergraduate survey in the field, The Norton Anthology of American Literaturehas been revitalized in this Seventh Edition through the collaboration between three new period editors and five seasoned ones.

Under Nina Baym's direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and the entire apparatus to make the Shorter Edition an even better teaching tool for the one-semester and brief two-semester courses.

Nina Baym (Ph.D. Harvard) is Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Shape of Hawthorne's Career; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870; Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America; American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860; American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences and most recently, Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927. Some of her essays are collected in Feminism and American Literary History; she has also edited and introduced many reissues of work by earlier American women writers, from Judith Sargent Murray through Kate Chopin. In 2000 she received the MLA's Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies.Wayne Franklin (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh) is Professor and Head of English, University of Connecticut. He is the author of James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (the first volume of his definitive biography, from Yale University Press), The New World of James Fenimore Cooper, and Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. He is the editor of American Voices, American Lives: A Documentary Reader and The Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, A Norton Critical Edition, and co-editor, with Michael Steiner, of Mapping American Culture. Philip F. Gura (Ph.D. Harvard) is William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of many books, including The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance; A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660; Jonathan Edwards, America's Evangelical; and American Transcendentalism: A History. For ten years he was editor of the journal Early American Literature. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.Arnold Krupat (Ph.D. Columbia) is Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of, among other books, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature; Red Matters: Native American Studies; and, most recently, All That Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression (2009). He is the editor of a number of anthologies, including Native American Autobiography: An Anthology and New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. With Brian Swann, he edited Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, which won the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award for best book of nonfiction prose in 2001.Robert S. Levine (Ph.D. Stanford) is Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville; Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity; and Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. He has edited a number of books, including The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville; Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader; Hemispheric American Studies; and a Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.