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Unit 1 Genres and Techniques of Literature

Selection / Author	Page
The Oral Tradition: "Follow the Drinking Gourd" / Anonymous	4
Poetry: "Sonnet XXX" / Edna St. Vincent Millay	19
Fiction: "American History" / Judith Ortiz Cofer	31
Drama: from The Crucible / Arthur Miller	44
Nonfiction: "The Way to Rainy Mountain" / N. Scott Momaday	56

Unit 2 Origins of the American Tradition (to 1750)

Selection / Author	Page
from the Iroquois Constitution / Iroquois	87
"Song of the Sky Loom" / Tewa tribal song	92
from The Very Brief Relation... / Bartolomé de las Casas	96
from The General History of Virginia... / John Smith	102
from The New England Primer / Anonymous	110
"To My Dear and Loving Husband" / Anne Bradstreet	114
from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" / Jonathan Edwards	118

Unit 3 The American Revolution (1750-1800)

Selection / Author	Page
from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin / Benjamin Franklin	146
Speech in the Virginia Convention / Patrick Henry	153
"To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works" / Phillis Wheatley	159
Declaration of Independence / Thomas Jefferson	163
Letter to John Adams, May 7, 1776 / Abigail Adams	171

Unit 4 The New England Renaissance (1800-1860)

Selection / Author	Page
"Thanatopsis" / William Cullen Bryant	199
"The Chambered Nautilus" / Oliver Wendell Holmes	206
"The Village Blacksmith" / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow	211
"This is my letter to the World, " "The Soul selects her own Society—," "Because I could not stop for Death—," and "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—" / Emily Dickinson	216
"The Pit and the Pendulum" / Edgar Allan Poe	228
"The Raven" / Edgar Allan Poe	244
"Rappaccini's Daughter" / Nathaniel Hawthorne	251
from Self-Reliance / Ralph Waldo Emerson	276
"The Rhodora" / Ralph Waldo Emerson	283
from Walden / Henry David Thoreau	286

Unit 5 Slavery and the Civil War (1860-1865)

Selection / Author	Page
from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass... / Frederick Douglass	324
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"	330
"My Old Kentucky Home" / Stephen Foster	334
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" / Julia Ward Howe	339
The Gettysburg Address / Abraham Lincoln	344
"Ain't I a Woman?" / Sojourner Truth	350
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" / Ambrose Bierce	354
from "Song of Myself" and "O Captain! My Captain!" / Walt Whitman	365
"Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind" and "A Man Said to the Universe" / Stephen Crane	379

Unit 6 Frontiers (1860-1900)

Selection / Author	Page
"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" / Mark Twain	411
"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" / Bret Harte	419
"I Will Fight No More Forever" / Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé	432
"A White Heron" / Sarah Orne Jewett	437
"Woman's Right to Suffrage" / Susan B. Anthony	448
"The Story of an Hour" / Kate Chopin	454

Unit 7 The Modern Era (1900-1945)

Selection / Author	Page
"Lucinda Matlock" / Edgar Lee Masters	484
"Patterns" / Amy Lowell	489
"Grass" / Carl Sandburg	496
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" / T. S. Eliot	500
"Mending Wall" and "Home Burial" / Robert Frost	508
"The Snow Man" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" / Wallace Stevens	520
"This Is Just to Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow" / William Carlos Williams	529
"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" / E. E. Cummings	535
"A Wagner Matinee" / Willa Cather	539
"The Sensible Thing" / F. Scott Fitzgerald	548
"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" / Katherine Anne Porter	562
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" / Ernest Hemingway	572
"Newsreel LXVIII" / John Dos Passos	578
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech and "Darl" from As I Lay Dying / William Faulkner	585

Unit 8 The Harlem Renaissance (1920-1936)

Selection / Author	Page
"We Wear the Mask" / Paul Laurence Dunbar	619
"Yet Do I Marvel," "Any Human to Another" / Countee Cullen	624
"The Tropics in New York" / Claude McKay	632
"Storm Ending" / Jean Toomer	636
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "I, too, sing America" / Langston Hughes	643
"A Black Man Talks of Reaping" / Arna Bontemps	648
"The Richer, the Poorer" / Dorothy West	652
"How It Feels To Be Colored Me" / Zora Neale Hurston	658

Unit 9 Modern Drama (1900-1945)

Selection / Author	Page
The Glass Menagerie / Tennessee Williams Act 1	686
The Glass Menagerie / Tennessee Williams Act 2	721

Unit 10 Postwar Literature (1945-1960)

Selection / Author	Page
"Commander Lowell" / Robert Lowell	765
"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" / Randall Jarrell	771
"To Black Women" / Gwendolyn Brooks	775
"Elegy for Jane" / Theodore Roethke	780
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" / Flannery O'Connor	784
"A Worn Path" / Eudora Welty	796
"The Magic Barrel" / Bernard Malamud	808
from Black Boy / Richard Wright	824
"A Noiseless Flash" from Hiroshima / John Hersey	830

Unit 11 Early Contemporary Literature (1960-1980)

Selection / Author	Page
"Constantly risking absurdity" / Lawrence Ferlinghetti	869
"The Starry Night" / Anne Sexton	874
"Those Winter Sundays" / Robert Hayden	879
"Morning Song" / Sylvia Plath	883
"The Secret" / Denise Levertov	887
"House Guest" / Elizabeth Bishop	891
"The Slump" / John Updike	896
"Journey" / Joyce Carol Oates	902
Inaugural Address / John F. Kennedy	908
"On the Mall" / Joan Didion	915

Unit 12 Contemporary Literature (1980-the present)

Selection / Author	Page
"Hunger in New York City" / Simon Ortiz	949
"Wingfoot Lake" / Rita Dove	953
"Huy Nguyen: Brothers, Drowning Cries" / David Mura	958
"Celestial Music" / Louise Glück	964
"Reassurance" / Allan Gurganus	969
"Daughter of Invention" / Julia Alvarez	980
"Ambush" / Tim O'Brien	992
"Seeing" from Dakota / Kathleen Norris	998
"Why I Am Optimistic about America" / Daniel J. Boorstin	1004