AMERICAN II
READING LIST
Please note that there are two lists below. The first is the full list with the core readings in bold;
the second is the core list separated out. You are responsible for all core readings and may
incorporate readings from the full list into your tailored list.
I. PRIMARY TEXTS
A. Realism & Naturalism
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted
Rebecca Harding Davis. "Life in the Iron Mills"
Mark Twain. "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Essays: "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," "The United States of
Lyncherdom"
William Dean Howells. A Hazard of New Fortunes; "Criticism and Fiction"
Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams
Ambrose Bierce. "Chickamauga," "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
William James. Pragmatism (selections)
Henry James. Daisy Miller: A Study; The Portrait of a Lady (1881 edition); The Turn of the
Screw; The Ambassadors. Literary Criticism: Hawthorne; "The Art of Fiction"; and a selection of
James's prefaces to his own works in the New York Edition
Joel Chandler Harris. Selected "Uncle Remus" stories, "Free Joe and the Rest of the
World." Essays: "The Negro as the South Sees Him"
Sarah Orne Jewett. The Country of the Pointed Firs
Edward Bellamy. Looking Backward
Kate Chopin. The Awakening, "Desiree's Baby," "The Story of an Hour"
Booker T. Washington. Up From Slavery
Charles Waddell Chesnutt. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, ed. Richard
Brodhead (Duke UP); "The Wife of his Youth"; "The Sheriff's Children"
Pauline Hopkins. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and
South
Hamlin Garland. Main-Travelled Roads (selections)
Jane Addams. Twenty Years at Hull-House
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. "The Yellow Wallpaper"; "Why I Wrote the Yellow
Wallpaper"
Abraham Cahan. The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories
Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth or Ethan Frome
W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903); "The Souls of White Folk" (1920)
Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Frank Norris. McTeague; selections from The Responsibilities of the Novelist
Stephen Crane. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; The Red Badge of Courage; "The Open
Boat"; "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"
Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin.
Paul Laurence Dunbar. Selected poems, including "We Wear the Mask," "When Malindy
Sings," "An Antebellum Sermon," "Frederick Douglass." Fiction: "Mr. Cornelius Johnson,
Office Seeker"
B. Modernism
Willa Cather. My Ántonia or Death Comes for the Archbishop
Mary Austin. The Land of Little Rain
Gertrude Stein. Fiction: Three Lives. Experimental writing: Tender Buttons (selections).
Autobiography and essays: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; "Poetry and Grammar"
Robert Frost. A Boy's Will (1913), North of Boston (1914), selected poems from the rest of his
books. Letters on "the sound of sense" from 1913-14, "Education By Poetry" (1931),"The Figure
a Poem Makes" (1939), "`Letter' to The Amherst Student" (1935)
Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio
Jack London. The Call of the Wild
Wallace Stevens. Harmonium; Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction; selected poems from the rest
of his books. Prose: "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
Jesse Redmon Fauset. Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral
Anzia Yezierska. Bread Givers; "America and I"
William Carlos Williams. Poetry: Paterson, selected poems; Spring and All; Prose: "Excerpts
from a Critical Sketch: A Draft of XXX Cantos by Ezra Pound," "The Work of Gertrude Stein,"
"Marianne Moore," "A 1 Pound Stein," "Pound's Eleven New Cantos," "The Poem as Field of
Action"
Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt or Main Street
Alain Locke. "The New Negro," found in The New Negro Anthology edited by Locke in 1925.
This collection contains a number of significant Harlem Renaissance texts, including poetry by
Hughes and Cullen and prose by Johnson, Toomer, and DuBois
Ezra Pound. Lustra (selections), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, selected "Cantos," selected
poems from his first few books. (Useful guides are Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound
and Selected Poems of Ezra Pound.) "A Retrospect," reviews of Frost's books A Boy's Will and
North of Boston
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Marianne Moore. Selected Poems
T.S. Eliot. Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (in its entirety). The Waste Land and Other Poems, "The
Metaphysical Poets," "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "Reflections on vers libre," "Ulysses,
Order, and Myth," "Hamlet and His Problems"
John Crowe Ransom.
Eugene O'Neill. Long Day's Journey Into Night
Claude McKay.
Katherine Anne Porter.
Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Nella Larsen. Passing
Edna St. Vincent Millay. A Few Figs From Thistles
Dorothy Parker (poetry and prose).
e.e. cummings.
Jean Toomer. Cane
John Dos Passos. Manhattan Transfer
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying
Allen Tate. "Ode to the Confederate Dead"
Hart Crane. The Bridge
Ernest Hemingway. In Our Time; The Sun Also Rises
Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel
Langston Hughes. Weary Blues; selected additional poems. "The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain" (1926)
John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath
Darcy McNickle. The Surrounded
Gwendolyn Bennet. Selected poems, including "Heritage" and "To Usward"
Countee Cullen. Selected poems, including "Heritage." Preface to Caroling Dusk (a
landmark 1926 volume of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by one of its central figures)
Nathanael West. Day of the Locust
Richard Wright. Native Son; Black Boy (American Hunger) (in the 1992 Library of
America edition); "How Bigger Was Born"
Carson McCullers. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
II. SECONDARY SOURCES
A. Reference Works:
Elliot, Emory, ed., et al. Columbia Literary History of the United States. 1988
Hutner, Gordon, ed. American Literature, American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Contains a useful selection of the more significant critical statements on American literature
from the past two centuries.
Minter, David. A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996
Spiller, Robert, ed., et al. Literary History of the United States. 3rd ed. 1963
B. Criticism:
The following brief bibliographies are intended to suggest further avenues for research.
Students are strongly encouraged also consult the Hutner collection noted above, as well as the
“Further Reading” sections found in: Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American
Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. 2003.
Kaplan, Amy, and Donald Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. 1993.
Levenson, Michael H. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. New York, NY:
Cambridge UP, 1999
Mizruchi, Susan. The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915.
2008.
Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry,
1865-1917. 2005.
Realism and Naturalism
Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993
Fisher, Philip K. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1985
Fleissner, Jennifer. Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism.
2004.
Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1988
Quirk, Tom, and Gary Scharnhorst. eds. American Realism and the Canon. Newark: U of
Delaware P, 1994
Warren, Kenneth. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1993
Modernism
Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of
Modernism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989
Baker, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973
Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural
Memory, 1910-1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989
North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century
Literature. NY: Oxford UP, 1994
Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. 1993.
Core List: Primary Sources
1) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881 edition)
2) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3) William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes
4) Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"
5) Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
6) Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
7) Kate Chopin, The Awakening
8) Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales
9) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
10) EdithWharton, The House of Mirth
11) Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
12) Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
13) Robert Frost, North of Boston
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Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs From Thistles
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
Jean Toomer, Cane
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro Anthology
Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues
Ezra Pound, Personae
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Nella Larsen, Passing
Marianne Moore, Selected Poems
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Richard Wright, Native Son
Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night
Core List: Secondary Sources
1) Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003)
2) Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word
(1991)
3) Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism
(2004)
4) Amy Kaplan & Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993)
5) Susan Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915
(2008)
6) Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of
Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (1989)
7) Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century
Literature (1998)
8) Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American
Poetry, 1865-1917 (2005)
9) Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (1993)
10) Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993)