This is the second volume in a series that should prove immensely useful to students of literature who wish to benefit from the careful reflection on a single text by someone who has thought long and hard about that text. The series itself represents a further development of the American Writers series. This second volume of American Classics is largely concerned with novels. A fair number of novels were chosen that must be considered central to the American tradition of literary fiction.
In this eighteenth supplement of American Writers, we offer eighteen articles on writers of fiction, drama (including film), and poetry (including song lyrics, in the case of Bob Dylan). Each of the writers discussed is accomplished, having made a major contribution to one or more of the genres of literature, and none of them has yet been featured in this series.
The writers studied in this supplement are mostly contemporary, although a few have roots in the early twentieth century. David Budbill, W. S. Di Piero, Mark Halliday, Ted Kooser, Molly Peacock, and Bruce Weigl are mainly poets by trade, though most of them have also worked in other areas. While each of the writers discussed in this supplement has already found an audience—a large one in the case of Robert B. Parker—few of them have yet to receive the kind of sustained attention they deserve, although each has been reviewed at length in periodicals.
Native Americans have produced some of the most powerful and lyrical literature ever written in North America. This volume examines some of the finest Native American writers, including Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, Samsom Occom, Zitkala-Sa, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Yale literature professor Harold Bloom introduces this new edition, which also features a bibliography, a chronology, and an index for easy reference. This title presents a well-rounded critical portrait of an influential group of writers by examining their body of work through full-length essays.
This volume is mostly about contemporary writers, many of whom have received little sustained attention from critics. For example, William Gass, Charles Johnson, Irving Howe, Susan Minot, Grace Paley, Reynolds Price, Stanley Elkin, and Jane Smiley have been written about in the review pages of newspapers and magazines, but their work has yet to attract significant scholarship.
