Table of Contents

I. COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS
The Literature of Settlement (1607-1750)

John Smith (1580-1631)
from The General History of Virginia
William Bradford (1590-1657)
from Of Plymouth Plantation
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
Upon the Burning of Our House
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Edward Taylor (1642-1729)
Huswifery
Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
 

II. REASON AND REVOLUTION
The Literature of Independence (1750-1800)

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
from The Autobiography
from Poor Richard’s Almanack
Patrick Henry (1736-1799)
Speech in the Virginia Convention
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
from Common Sense
The Crisis, Number I
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
The Declaration of Independence
Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)
On Being Brought from Africa to America
To His Excellency, General Washington

III. COMING OF AGE
The Literature of Progress (1800-1840)

Washington Irving (1783-1859)
Rip Van Winkle
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Devil and Tom Walker
The Adventure of the German Student
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
Thanatopsis
To a Waterfowl
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
A Dream Within a Dream
To Helen
The Raven
The Bells
Annabel Lee
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Cask of Amontillado
 

IV. SHADES OF INSIGHT
The Literature of Contradiction (1840-1855)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
from Nature
from Self-Reliance
Concord Hymn
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
from Walden
from Civil Disobedience
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
The Minister’s Black Veil
Wakefield
The Birthmark
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Bartleby the Scrivener
 

V. NEW ENGLAND VERSE
Poetry of the Everyday (1840-1885)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls
A Psalm of Life
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
from Snowbound
Hampton Beach
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
Old Ironsides
The Chambered Nautilus
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Success is Counted Sweetest
Hope is the Thing with Feathers
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
I Never Saw a Moor
How Happy is the Little Stone

VI. A HOUSE DIVIDED
The Literature of War (1855-1865)

Frederick Douglass (1817?-1895)
from My Bondage and My Freedom
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Robert E. Lee (1807-1870)
Letter to His Son—On Duty
Letter to His Son—On Secession
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
from A House Divided
The Emancipation Proclamation
The Gettysburg Address
Letter to Mrs. Bixby
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
from Song of Myself
I Hear America Singing
Beat! Beat! Drums!
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
A Noiseless Patient Spider
O Captain! My Captain!
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
 

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