Faculty Committee: Stephanie Batiste, Giles Gunn, Carl Guttiérez-Jones, Stephanie LeMenager,
Mark Maslan, Christopher Newfield, Candace Waid

It is assumed that students taking the qualifying examination in American Literature from 1865 will be familiar not only with the following primary texts but also with the principle 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 Norton Anthology of American Literature, Sixth Edition, Vol. C, D and E (New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, 1989).  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.

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

Booker T. Washington* and W.E.B. DuBois*

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Willa Cather, My Ántonia

Modern Poetry and Poetic Prose
Gertrude Stein*
Ezra Pound*
Robert Frost*
T. S. Eliot*
Hart Crane*
William Carlos Williams*
Wallace Stevens*
Marianne Moore*
H. D.*

Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes*
Claude McKay*
Countee Cullen*                                                          
         
Jean Toomer, Cane

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

Richard Wright, Native Son

Henry Roth, Call It Sleep

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge

Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Toni Morrison, Sula

Poetry 1945- (counts as two books)
Elizabeth Bishop*
John Berryman*
Robert Lowell*
Gwendolyn Brooks*
Robert Duncan*
James Merrill*
Robert Creeley*
Allen Ginsberg*
Frank O’Hara*
John Ashbery*
Adrienne Rich*
Sylvia Plath*
Amiri Baraka*                                                             

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior