This two-volume anthology represents America's literary heritage from colonial times through the American renaissance to the contemporary era of post-modernism. Volume I offers early contextual selections from Christopher Columbus and Gaspar Perez de Villagra, as well as an excerpt from the Iroquois League’s Constitution of the Five Nations, and ends with an extensive selection of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. This anthology is best known for its useful pedagogy, including extensive and straightforward headnotes and introductions, as well as its balanced approach to editorial selection process. Pick a Penguin Program* We offer select Penguin Putnam titles at a substantial discount to your students when you request a special package of one or more Penguin titles with this text. Among the many American Literature titles available from Penguin Putnam are: · Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage · Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass · Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter · James Fennimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans · Washington Irving ,The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories JAMES S. LEONARD received his Ph.D. from Brown University, and is Professor of English (and former English Department chair) at The Citadel. He is the editor of Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom (Duke University Press, 1999), coeditor of Authority and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing (Locust Hill Press, 1994) and Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (Duke University Press, 1992), and coauthor of The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality (University of Georgia Press, 1988). He has served as president of the Mark Twain Circle of America (2010–2012), managing editor of The Mark Twain Annual (since 2004), and editor of the Mark Twain Circular (1987–2008), and is a major contributor to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Poets and Poetry (Greenwood Press, 2006) and American History Through Literature (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005). SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of over forty books, including the award-winning Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (1993), From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (1988), and Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (2009), as well as Lighting Out for the Territory (1997), The Oxford Mark Twain (1996), The Historical Guide to Mark Twain (2002), Mark Twain‘s Book of Animals (2009), The Mark Twain Anthology:Great Writers on his Life and Work (2010), Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts by Mark Twain (2003), People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (with Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky) (1996), Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (with Elaine Hedges)(1994), and Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar (with David Bradley) (2005). She has also published more than eighty articles, essays, or reviews in publications including American Quarterly, American Literature, Journal of American History, American Literary History, and the New York Times Book Review, and has lectured on American literature in Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and throughout the United States. A member of the first class of women to graduate from Yale College, she stayed on at Yale to earn her M.A. in English and her Ph.D. in American Studies. Before her arrival at Stanford, she directed the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale and taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she chaired the American Studies Department. She co-founded the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and is a past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and the American Studies Association. DAVID BRADLEY earned a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and a MA in United States Studies at the University of London in 1974. A Professor of English at Temple University from 1976 to 1997, Bradley has been a visiting professor at the San Diego State University, the University of California—San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Colgate University, the College of William & Mary, the City College of the City University of New York and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. He is currently an Associate Professor of Fiction in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Bradley has read and lectured extensively in the United States and also in Japan, Korea, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia. He is the author of two novels, South Street (1975) and The Chaneysville Incident (1981) which was awarded the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award a