A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press Reference Library)

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic , Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan , Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter , Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye , and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn . From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life , Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new. Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information. America Is A Nation Making Itself Up As It Goes Along--a Story Of Discovery And Invention Unfolding In Speeches And Images, Letters And Poetry, Unprecedented Feats Of Scholarship And Imagination. In These Myriad, Multiform, Endlessly Changing Expressions Of The American Experience, The Authors And Editors Of This Volume Find A New American History. In More Than Two Hundred Original Essays, This Book Brings Together The Nation's Many Voices. From The First Conception Of A New World In The Sixteenth Century To The Latest Re-envisioning Of That World In Cartoons, Television, Science Fiction, And Hip Hop, The Book Gives Us A New, Kaleidoscopic View Of What Made In America Means. Literature, Music, Film, Art, History, Science, Philosophy, Political Rhetoric--cultural Creations Of Every Kind Appear In Relation To Each Other, And To The Time And Place That Give Them Shape--from Publisher Description. 1507, The Name America Appears On A Map / Toby Lester -- 1521, Mexico In America / Kirsten Silva Gruesz -- 1536, Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca / Ilan Stavans -- 1585, Counterfeited According To The Truth / Michael Gaudio -- 1607, Fear And Love In The Virginia Colony / Adam Goodheart -- 1630, A City Upon A Hill / Elizabeth Winthrop -- 1643, A Nearer Neighbor To The Indians / Ted Widmer -- 1666, Anne Bradstreet / Wai Chee Dimock -- 1670, The American Jeremiad / Emory Elliott ; The Stamp Of God's Image / Jason D. Lafountain -- 1673, The Jesuit Relations / Laurent Dubois -- 1683, Francis Daniel Pastorius / Alfred L. Brophy -- 1692, The Salem Witchcraft Trials / Susan Castillo -- 1693-1694, Edward Taylor / Werner Sollors -- 1700, Samuel Sewall, The Selling Of Joseph / David Blight -- 1722, Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters / Joyce E. Chaplin -- 1740, The Great Awakening / Joanne Van Der Woude -- Late 1740s 1814, Two National Anthems / John Picker -- 1765, Michel-guillaume Jean De Crèvecoeur / Leo Damrosch -- 1773, Phillis Wheatley / Rafia Zafar -- 1776, The Declaration Of Independence / Frank Kelleter -- 1784, Charles Willson Peale / Michael Leja -- 1787, James Madison, Notes Of The Debates In The Federal Convention / Mitchell Meltzer -- 1787-1790, John Adams, Discourses On Davila / John Diggins -- 1791, Philip Freneau And The National Gazette / Jeffrey L. Pasley -- 1796, Washington's Farewell Address / François Furstenberg -- 1798, Mary Rowlandson And The Alien And Sedition Acts / Nancy Armstrong -- 1798, American Gothic / Marc Amfreville. 1801, Jefferson's First Inaugural Address / Jan Ellis Lewis -- 1804, The Matter Of Haiti / Kaiama Glover -- 1809, Cupola Of The World / Judith Richardson -- 1819, The Missouri Crisis / John Stauffer -- 1820, Landscape With Birds / Christoph Irmscher -- 1821, Sequoyah, The Cherokee Syllabary / Lisa Brooks ; Junius Brutus Booth / Coppélia Kahn -- 1822, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, The Ojibwe Firefly, And Longfellow's Hiawatha / Davie Treuer -- 1825, Thomas Cole And The Hudson River School / Alan Wallach -- 1826, Songs Of The Republic / Steve Erickson ; Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales / Richard Hutson -- 1826 ; 1927 Transnational Poetry / Stephen Burt -- 1827, Joseph Smith And The Book Of Mormon / Terryl L. Givens -- 1828, David Walker, Appeal, In Four Articles / Tommie Shelby -- 1830, Jump Jim Crow / W.t. Lhamon, Jr. -- 1831, The Cherokee Nation Decision / Philip Deloria -- 1832, President Jackson's Bank Veto / Dan Feller -- 1835, Democracy In America / Ted Widmer ; William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee / Jeffrey Johnson ; The Sacred Harp / Sean Wilentz -- 1836, The Alamo And Texas Border Writing / Norma E. Cantú ; Richard Henry Dana, Jr. / Kirsten Silva Gruesz -- 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar / James Conant -- 1838, The Divinity School Address / Herwig Friedl ; The Slave Narrative / Caille Millner -- 1841, The Murders In The Rue Morgue / Robert Clark -- 1846, James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers / Shelley Streeby ; Henry David Thoreau / Jonathan Arac. 1850, The Scarlet Letter / Bharati Mukherjee ; Margaret Fuller And The Transcendentalist Movement / Lawrence Buell, Nathaniel Hawthorne And Herman Melville / Clark Blaise -- 1851, Moby-dick / Greil Marcus ; Uncle Tom's Cabin / Beverly Lowry -- 1852, Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance And Utopian Communities / Winifried Fluck ; Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? / Liam Kennedy -- 1854, Maria Cummins And Sentimental Fiction / Cindy Weinstein -- 1855, Walt Whitman, Leaves Of Grass / Angus Fletcher -- 1858, The Lincoln-douglas Debates / Michael T. Gilmore -- 1859, The Science Of The Indian / Scott Richard Lyons -- 1861, Emily Dickinson / Susan Stewart -- 1862, The Journeys Of Little Women / Shirley Samuels -- 1865, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address / Ted Widmer ; Conditions Of Repose / Robin Kelsey -- 1869, Carl Schurz / Michael Boyden -- 1872, All Men And Women Are Created Equal / Laura Wexler -- 1875, The Winchester Rifle / Merritt Roe Smith -- 1876, Melville In The Dark / Kenneth W. Warren ; The Art Of Telephony / Avital Ronell -- 1878, How To Make Our Ideas Clear / Christopher Hookway -- 1879, John Muir And Nature Writing / Scott Slovic -- 1881, Henry James, Portait Of A Lady / Alide Cagidemetrio -- 1884, Mark Twain's Hairball / Ishmael Reed ; The Linotype Machine / Lisa Gitelman ; The Southwest Imagined / Leah Dilworth -- 1885, The Problem Of Error / James Conant ; Limits To Violence / James Dawes ; Writing New Orleans / Andrei Codrescu -- 1888, The Introduction Of Motion Pictures / Jonathan Lethem -- 1889, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court / Yael Schacher -- 1893, Chief Simon Pokagon And Native American Literatuer / David Treuer -- 1895 / Ida B. Wells, A Red Record / Jacqueline Goldsby -- 1896, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics Of Lowly Life / Judith Jackson Fossett ; Queen Lili'uokalani / Rob Wilson -- 1897, The Robert Gould Shaw And 54th Regiment Monument / Richard Powers -- 1898, Literature And Imperialism / Amy Kaplan -- 1899; 1924, Mcteague And Greed / Gilberto Perez. 1900, Henry Adams / T.j. Jackson Lears ; The Wizard Of Oz / Gerald Early ; 1900; 1905, Sister Carrie And The House Of Mirth / Farah Jasmine Griffin -- 1901, Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow Of Tradition / John Edgar Wideman -- 1901; 1903, The Problem Of The Color Line / Arnold Rampersad -- 1903, The Real American Has Not Yet Arrived / Aviva Taubenfeld ; The Invention Of The Blues / Luc Sante ; One Sees What One Sees / Daniel Albright -- 1904, Henry James In America / Ross Posnock -- 1905, Little Nemo In Slumberland / Kerry Roeder ; 1906, The Azusa Street Revival / Rj Smith ; The San Francisco Earthquake / Kathleen Moran -- 1911, Alexander's Ragtime Band / Philip Furia -- 1912, Lifeboats Cut Adrift / Alan Ackerman ; The Lure Of Impossible Things / Heather Love ; Tarzan Begins His Reign / Gerald Early -- 1913, A Modernist Moment / Bonnie Costello -- 1915, D.w. Griffith, The Birth Of A Nation / Richard Schickel ; Robert Frost / Christian Wiman -- 1917, The Philosopher And The Millionaire / Richard J. Bernstein -- 1920, Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues / Daphne A. Brooks -- 1921, Jean Toomer / Elizabeth Alexander -- 1922, T.s. Eliot And D.h. Lawrence / Anita Patterson -- 1923, Chaplinesque / David Thomson -- 1942, F.o. Matthiessen Meets Russell Cheney / Robert Polito ; The Johnson-reed Act And Ethnic Literature / Yael Schacher -- 1925, The Great Gatsby / Lan Tran ; Sinclair Lewis / Jeffrey Ferguson ; The Scopes Trial / Michael Kazin ; Dorothy Parker / Catherine Keyser -- 1926, Fire! / Carla Kaplan ; Hardboiled / Walter Mosley ; The Book-of-the-month Club / Joan Shelly Rubin -- 1927, Carl Sandburg And The American Songbag / Paul Muldoon ; Free To Develop Their Faculties / Jeffrey Rosen -- 1928, Dilsey Gibson Goes To Church / Werner Sollors ; John Dos Passos / Phoebe Kosman ; The Mouse That Whistled / Karal Ann Marling -- 1930, You're Swell! / Robert Gottlieb ; The Silent Enemy / Micah Treuer ; Grant Wood's American Gothic / Sarah Vowell -- 1931, Nevada Legalizes Gambling / David Thomson -- 1932, Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters / Anthony Grafton ; Arthur Miller / Andrea Most -- 1932, The River Rouge Plant And Industrial Beauty / John M. Staudenmaier, S.j. ; Ned Cobb / Robert Cantwell -- 1933, Baby Face Is Censored / Stephanie Zacharek ; Fdr's First Fireside Chat / Paula Rabinowitz -- 1934, Robert Penn Warren / Howell Raines -- 1935, The Popular Front / Angela Miller ; The Skyscraper / Sarah Whiting ; Alcoholics Anonymous / Michael Tolkin ; Porgy And Bess / John Rockwell -- 1936, Gone With The Wind And Absalom, Absalom! / Carolyn Porter ; Two Days In Harlem / Adam Bradley ; Life Begins / Michael Lesy -- 1938, Superman / Douglas Wolk ; Jelly Roll Morton Speaks / Marybeth Hamilton -- 1939, Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit / Robert O'meally -- 1939, 1981, Up From Invisibility / Josef Jařab -- 1940, No Way Like The American Way / Erika Doss -- 1940-1944, Preston Sturges / Douglas Mcgrath -- 1941, An Insolent Style / Carrie Tirado Bramen ; Citizen Kane / Joseph Mcbride ; The Word Multicultural / Werner Sollors -- 1943, Hemmingway's Paradise, Hemingway's Prose / Keith Taylor -- 1944, The Second Bill Of Rights / Cass R. Sunstein -- 1945, Bebop / Ingrid Monson ; Thomas Pynchon And Modern War / Glenda Carpio ; The Atom Bomb / Sharon Ghamari-tabrizi -- 1946, Integrating The Military / Gerald Early -- 1947, Tennessee Williams / Camille Paglia -- 1948, Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics / David A. Mindell ; Saul Bellow / Ruth Wisse -- 1949-1950, The Birth Of The Cool / Ted Gioia. 1950, Damned Busy Painting / T.j. Clark -- 1951, A Poet Among Painters / Mark Ford ; The Catcher In The Rye / Gish Jen ; James Jones, From Here To Eternity / Lindsay Waters ; A Soft Voice / M. Lynn Weiss -- 1952, Elia Kazan And The Blacklist In Hollywood / Michael Ventura ; C.l.r. James / Donald E. Pease -- 1953, The Song In Country Music / Dave Hickey -- 1954, Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems / Helen Vendler -- 1955, The Self-respect Of My People / Monica L. Miller ; A.j. Liebling And The Marciano-moore Fight / Carlo Rotella ; A Generation In Miniature / Richard Cándida Smith ; Nabokov's Lolita / Stephen Schiff -- 1956, Roll Over Beethoven / James Miller -- 1957, Dr. Seuss / Philip Nel -- 1959, Nobody's Perfect / William J. Mann -- 1960, Psycho / William Beard ; More Than A Game / Michael Maccambridge -- 1961, Jfk's Inaugural Address And Catch-22 / Charles Taylor ; The Author As Advertisement / David Thomson -- 1962, Bob Dylan Writes Song To Woody / Joshua Clover ; White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art / Howard Hampton -- 1963, Letter From Birmingham Jail / George Hutchinson -- 1964, Robert Lowell, For The Union Dead / Peter Sacks ; The Last Stand On Earth / Gary Kamiya -- 1965, The Council On Interracial Books For Children / Dianne Johnson ; The Autobiography Of Malcolm X / David Bradley -- 1968, Norman Mailer / Mary Gaitskill ; The Illusory Babels Of Language / Hal Foster ; The Plight Of Conservative Literature / Michael Kimmage -- 1969, Eilzabeth Bishop, Complete Poems / Laura Quinney ; The First Asian Americans / Hua Hsu ; The Eye Of Vietnam / Thi Phuong-lan Bui -- 1970, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker / Cheryl A. Wall -- 1970; 1972, Linda Lovelace / Ann Marlowe -- 1973, Loisaida Literature / Frances R. Aparicio ; Adrienne Rich, Diving Into The Wreck / Maureen N. Mclane -- 1975, Gayl Jones / Robert O'meally -- 1981, Toni Morrison / Farah Jasmine Griffin -- 1982, Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story / Sarah Shun-lien Bynum ; Wild Style / Hua Hsu ; Maya Lin's Wall / Anne M. Wagner ; Harriet Wilson / Saidiya V. Hartman -- 1985, Henry Roth / Mario Materassi -- 1987, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey / Seo-young Chu -- 1995, Philip Roth / Hana Wirth-nesher -- 2001, Twenty-first-century Free Verse / Stephen Burt -- 2003, Richard Powers, The Time Of Our Singing / Greil Marcus -- 2005, Hurricane Katrina / Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors -- 2008, Barack Obama / Kara Walker. Edited By Greil Marcus And Werner Sollors. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Introduction 1507 The name “America” appears on a map 1521, August 13 Mexico in America 1536, July 24 Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 1585 “Counterfeited according to the truth” 1607 Fear and love in the Virginia colony 1630 A city upon a hill 1643 A nearer neighbor to the Indians 1666, July 10 Anne Bradstreet 1670 The American jeremiad 1670 The stamp of God’s image 1673 The Jesuit relations 1683 Francis Daniel Pastorius 1692 The Salem witchcraft trials 1693–1694, March 4 Edward Taylor 1700 Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph 1722 Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters 1740 The Great Awakening Late 1740s; 1814, September 13–14 Two national anthems 1765, December 23 Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur 1773, September Phillis Wheatley 1776 The Declaration of Independence 1784, June Charles Willson Peale 1787 James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention 1787–1790 John Adams, Discourses on Davila 1791 Philip Freneau and The National Gazette 1796 Washington’s farewell address 1798 Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts 1798 American gothic 1801, March 4 Jefferson’s first inaugural address 1804, January The matter of Haiti 1809 Cupola of the world 1819, February The Missouri crisis 1820, November 27 Landscape with birds 1821 Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary 1821, June 30 Junius Brutus Booth 1822 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha 1825, November Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school 1826, July 4 Songs of the republic 1826 Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales 1826; 1927 Transnational poetry 1827 Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon 1828 David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles 1830, May 21 Jump Jim Crow 1831, March 5 The Cherokee Nation decision 1832, July 10 President Jackson’s bank veto 1835, January Democracy in America 1835 William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee 1835 The Sacred Harp 1836, February 23–March 6 The Alamo and Texas border writing 1836, February 28 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 1837, August 15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” 1838, July 15 “The Divinity School Address” 1838, September 3 The slave narrative 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 1846, June James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers 1846, late July Henry David Thoreau 1850 The Scarlet Letter 1850, July 19 Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement 1850, August 5 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville 1851 Moby-Dick 1851 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1852 Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and utopian communities 1852, July 5 Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” 1854 Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction 1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1858 The Lincoln-Douglas debates 1859 The science of the Indian 1861 Emily Dickinson 1862, December 13 The journeys of Little Women 1865, March 4 Lincoln’s second inaugural address 1865 “Conditions of repose” 1869, March 4 Carl Schurz 1872, November 5 All men and women are created equal 1875 The Winchester Rifle 1876, January 6 Melville in the dark 1876, March 10 The art of telephony 1878 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” 1879 John Muir and nature writing 1881, January 24 Henry James, Portrait of a Lady 1884 Mark Twain’s hairball 1884, July The Linotype machine 1884, November The Southwest imagined 1885 The problem of error 1885, July Limits to violence 1885, October Writing New Orleans 1888 The introduction of motion pictures 1889, August 28 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 1893 Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature 1895 Ida B. Wells, A Red Record 1896 Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life 1896, September 6 Queen Lili‘uokalani 1897, Memorial Day The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument 1898, June 22 Literature and imperialism 1899; 1924 McTeague and Greed 1900 Henry Adams 1900 The Wizard of Oz 1900; 1905 Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth 1901 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition 1901; 1903 The problem of the color line 1903, May 5 “The real American has not yet arrived” 1903 The invention of the blues 1903 One sees what one sees 1904, August 30 Henry James in America 1905, October 15 Little Nemo in Slumberland 1906, April 9 The Azusa Street revival 1906, April 18, 5:14 a.m. The San Francisco Earthquake 1911 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” 1912, April 15 Lifeboats cut adrift 1912 The lure of impossible things 1912 Tarzan begins his reign 1913 A modernist moment 1915 D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation 1915 Robert Frost 1917 The philosopher and the millionaire 1920, August 10 Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” 1921 Jean Toomer 1922 T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence 1923, October Chaplinesque 1924 F. O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney 1924, May 26 The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature 1925 The Great Gatsby 1925, June Sinclair Lewis 1925, July The Scopes trial 1925, August 16 Dorothy Parker 1926 Fire!! 1926 Hardboiled 1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club 1927 Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag 1927, May 16 “Free to develop their faculties” 1928, April 8, Easter Sunday Dilsey Gibson goes to church 1928, Summer John Dos Passos 1928, November 18 The mouse that whistled 1930 “You’re swell!” 1930, March The Silent Enemy 1930, October Grant Wood’s American Gothic 1931, March 19 Nevada legalizes gambling 1932 Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters 1932 Arthur Miller 1932, April or May The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty 1932, Christmas Ned Cobb 1933 Baby Face is censored 1933, March FDR’s first Fireside Chat 1934, September Robert Penn Warren 1935 The Popular Front 1935 The skyscraper 1935, June 10 Alcoholics Anonymous 1935, October 10 Porgy and Bess 1936 Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom! 1936, July 5 Two days in Harlem 1936, November 23 Life begins 1938 Superman 1938, May Jelly Roll Morton speaks 1939 Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” 1939; 1981 Up from invisibility 1940 “No way like the American way” 1940–1944 Preston Sturges 1941 An insolent style 1941 Citizen Kane 1941 The word “multicultural” 1943 Hemingway’s paradise, Hemingway’s prose 1944 The second Bill of Rights 1945, February Bebop 1945, April 11 Thomas Pynchon and modern war 1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m. The atom bomb 1946, December 5 Integrating the military 1947, December 3 Tennessee Williams 1948 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics 1948 Saul Bellow 1949–1950 “The Birth of the Cool” 1950, November 28 “Damned busy painting” 1951 A poet among painters 1951 The Catcher in the Rye 1951 James Jones, From Here to Eternity 1951 A soft voice 1952, April 12 Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood 1952, June 10 C. L. R. James 1953, January 1 The song in country music 1954 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems 1955, August 11 “The self-respect of my people” 1955, September 21 A. J. Liebling and the Marciano-Moore fight 1955, October 7 A generation in miniature 1955, December Nabokov’s Lolita 1956, April 16 “Roll Over Beethoven” 1957 Dr. Seuss 1959 “Nobody’s perfect” 1960 Psycho 1960, January More than a game 1961, January 20 JFK’s inaugural address and Catch-22 1961, July 2 The author as advertisement 1962 Bob Dylan writes “Song to Woody” 1962 “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” 1963, April “Letter from Birmingham Jail” 1964 Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead” 1964, October 27 “The last stand on Earth” 1965, September 11 The Council on Interracial Books for Children 1965, October The Autobiography of Malcolm X 1968 Norman Mailer 1968, March The illusory babels of language 1968, August 28 The plight of conservative literature 1969 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems 1969, January 11 The first Asian Americans 1969, November 12 The eye of Vietnam 1970 Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker 1970; 1972 Linda Lovelace 1973 Loisaida literature 1973 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck 1975 Gayl Jones 1981, March 31 Toni Morrison 1982 Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story 1982 Wild Style 1982 Maya Lin’s wall 1982, November 8 Harriet Wilson 1985, April 24 Henry Roth 1987 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey 1995 Philip Roth 2001 Twenty-first-century free verse 2003 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing 2005, August 29 Hurricane Katrina 2008, November 4 Barack Obama Contributors Index America is a nation making itself up as it goes along a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, "A New Literary History of America" brings together the nation s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what Made in America means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood s "American Gothic," Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on "Tarzan," Bharati Mukherjee on "The Scarlet Letter," Gish Jen on "Catcher in the Rye," and Ishmael Reed on "Huckleberry Finn." From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, "Life," Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new. Please visit (http://www.newliteraryhistory.com) www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information. "