Faculty Committee: Giles Gunn, Yunte Huang, Stephanie LeMenager, Mark Maslan, Christopher Newfield
It is assumed that students taking the first qualifying examination in American Literature to 1865 will be familiar not only with the following primary texts but also with the principal critical and interpretive issues concerning these texts and the period as a whole. Students are thus encouraged to read widely in the relevant secondary literature. Figures and selections marked with an asterisk (*) indicate that the relevant material can be found in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1, (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, MA., 2002). Those marked with a cross (+) indicate material collected in a supplemental reader that will be available for purchase at the desk of the Staff Graduate Adviser.
Native American Voices
Native American Traditions*
Native American Oral Poetry*
The Literature of Discovery
Christopher Columbus*
Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca*
Samuel de Champlain*
Samuel Purchas* (Heath, 1990)
Early Settlers I
John Smith*
Thomas Morton*
Early Settlers II
John Winthrop*
William Bradford*
New England Poets
Anne Bradstreet*
“To My Dear Children”+
Michael Wigglesworth*
Edward Taylor*
Anne Hutchinson+
Mary Rowlandson*
Cotton Mather*
Southern Writers
Robert Beverley+
William Byrd*
William Bartram+
Jonathan Edwards
“A Divine and Supernatural Light”* (Heath, 1990)
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”*
The Nature of True Virtue
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer
John and Abigail Adams*
Thomas Paine*
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of VirginiaThe Federalist Papers
No. 1+ (Alexander Hamilton)
No. 10* (James Madison)
Gustavus Vassa (Oloudah Equiano), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself
Eighteenth-Century Poets
Philip Freneau*
Phyllis Wheatley*
Joel Barlow*
Royall Tyler, The Contrast
Hannah Foster, The Coquette
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
Washington Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers
Ralph Waldo Emerson*
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Edgar Allan Poe*
American Oratory
Abraham Lincoln*
Elizabeth Cady Stanton*
Wendell Phillips*
Sojourner Truth (“Speech at the New York City Convention” and “Address to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association”)*
William Apes*
Elias Boudinot*
Chief Seattle*
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Walt Whitman*
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Emily Dickinson*
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Letter to Mrs. Higginson on Emily Dickinson”*
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Reading List 4
