Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today - Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction - Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers - Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years - Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society - Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers "Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers." ( Literary Review ) "This book is the first comprehensive, single volume history of American literature since The Columbia Literary History of the United States edited by Elliott Emory and published sixteen years ago. It is a puzzle, given the extraordinary interest in American literature at home and abroad, that so few full histories of American literature have been published. Consider the fact that the Columbia history arrived nearly four decades after R. E. Spiller's Literary History of the United States. What makes Gray's book so extraordinary is that it supercedes the Spiller and Emory texts in nearly every respect, and even challenges the supremacy of the titanic (this pun is intentional), multi-volume, still-evolving Cambridge History of American Literature. How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. [...] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. [...] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi-dimensionality of its subject." ― Norman Weinstein , Boise State University Praise for the First Edition: "Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers." Literary Review "Highly readable, jargon-free, and engaging." American Literary Scholarship "How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. […] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. […] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi-dimensionality of its subject." Norman Weinstein, Boise State University First published in 2004, A History of American Literature is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed surveys of American literature from pre-Columbian times to the present available today. This widely anticipated second edition features a wealth of fresh updates and new material, including a detailed survey of the fiction, drama, and poetry written in response to 9/11 and the "war on terror." Other additions include coverage of the cultural consequences of the new era in American politics ushered in by the election of President Obama, and the development of new literary and cultural movements such as the New Formalists. Written in an informed and approachable style by Richard Gray, one of the leading authorities in the field, this survey helps the reader develop a deeper understanding of and insight into the immense breadth of American literary traditions within the context of American social and cultural history. While focusing on the full range of fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction that has been incorporated into the mainstream literary canon, Gray also considers popular American literary traditions such as oral literature, folktales, spirituals, Westerns, detective stories, thrillers, and science fiction. Compelling and authoritative, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, continues its tradition of representing an unparalleled introduction to the full breadth and diversity of the American literary tradition. Richard Gray is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex and former Distinguished Visiting Professor at a number of universities in the United States. He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy and has published over a dozen books on the topic, including the award-winning Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (1986) and The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (1994). His History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2004) is widely considered to be one of the standard