Widely known as the anthology that best unites tradition with innovation, The American Tradition in Literature is proud to enter its fifth decade of leadership among textbook anthologies of American literature. Each volume continues to offer a flexible organization, with literary merit as the guiding principle of selection. The new photos and illustrations illuminate the texts and literary/historical timelines help students put works in context. Read more

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who--with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning--most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes--in every area, including language itself--brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War. For generations of readers, this work has represented and embodied a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail.Restored and updated, this new edition includes an introduction by historian Jay Winter that takes into account the legacy and literary career of Paul Fussell, who died in May 2012. Read more

AP Teachers’ #1 Choice!Built for success on the brand-new AP Precalculus exam! Our 5 Steps to a 5 guide will explain the tough stuff, offer tons of practice and explanations, and help make the most efficient use of review and prep time. The 5 Steps series is more than a set of review guides, it’s a system that has helped thousands of students walk into test day feeling prepared and confident.Everything Needed to score a 5:• Three full-length practice tests• Strategies developed by AP Precalculus teachers• Practice exercises with thorough answer explanations• Comprehensive overview of all test topicsA Great In-class Supplement:• 5 Steps is an ideal companion to a main AP text• Includes an AP Precalculus Teacher’s Manual offering practical guidance to teachers and tips for teaching this brand-new courseResourcesTeacher ResourcesSample Chapter Read more

As featured in AMC's Breaking Bad, given by Gale Boetticher to Walter White and discovered by Hank Schrader."I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass."So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literature. The publication of Leaves of Grass in July 1855 was a landmark event in literary history. Ralph Waldo Emerson judged the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." Nothing like the volume had ever appeared before. Everything about it--the unusual jacket and title page, the exuberant preface, the twelve free-flowing, untitled poems embracing every realm of experience--was new. The 1855 edition broke new ground in its relaxed style, which prefigured free verse; in its sexual candor; in its images of racial bonding and democratic togetherness; and in the intensity of its affirmation of the sanctity of the physical world.This Anniversary Edition captures the typeface, design and layout of the original edition supervised by Whitman himself. Today's readers get a sense of the "ur-text" of Leaves of Grass, the first version of this historic volume, before Whitman made many revisions of both format and style. The volume also boasts an afterword by Whitman authority David Reynolds, in which he discusses the 1855 edition in its social and cultural contexts: its background, its reception, and its contributions to literary history. There is also an appendix containing the early responses to the volume, including Emerson's letter, Whitman's three self-reviews, and the twenty other known reviews published in various newspapers and magazines.This special volume will be a must-have keepsake for fans of Whitman and lovers of American poetry. Read more

Jorie Graham claims Clover's poetry as "a poetic manifesto as well as a prayer-book for the millennial generation." Winner of the 1996 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the poetry collection says more about the state of art in American poetry than it illuminates its subject matter which deftly jumps from referencing death camps to Rodney King. The language is beautiful, delirious, a little hallucinatory, and so, finally, in love with itself that it fails to touch any one of its subjects deeply. Yes, profoundly postmodern, a virtual world of accidental information with very little understanding of knowledge's depths. Paper edition (unseen), $11.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or. Read more

The text of Wharton’s richly allusive Pulitzer Prize–winning 1921 novel of desire and its implications in Old New York has been rigorously annotated by a prominent Wharton scholar. "Contexts" constructs the historical foundation for this very historical novel. Many documents are included on the "New York Four Hundred," elite social gatherings, archery (the sport for upper-crust daughters), as well as Wharton’s manuscript outlines, letters, and related writings. "Criticism" collects eleven American and British contemporary reviews and nine major essays on The Age of Innocence, including a groundbreaking piece on the two film adaptations of the novel. “A Chronology and Selected Bibliography” are also included. Read more

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background.CliffsNotes on Catch-22 takes you into this unforgettable novel that is full of satire, exaggeration, grotesque and comic caricatures, and telling allusions. Heller’s main characters are two Jewish boys from Brooklyn at the end of World War II – one from an orthodox family, one from a secular background. The growing friendship between the boys reflects the tensions within American society.With this study guide, you’ll be able to follow the unique structure of the novel and supplement your reading with insights into the life and background of author Joseph Heller. Other features that help you study includeLife and background of the authorCharacter analyses of major playersA character map that graphically illustrates the relationships among the charactersCritical essaysReview questionsClassic literature or modern modern-day treasure — you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides. Read more

From the time of its first appearance, the story of Pocahontas has provided the terms of a flexible discourse that has been put to multiple, and at times contradictory, uses. Centering around her legendary rescue of John Smith from the brink of execution and her subsequent marriage to a white Jamestown colonist, the Pocahontas convention became a source of national debate over such broad issues as miscegenation, racial conflict, and colonial expansion. At the same time, Pocahontas became the most frequently and variously portrayed female figure in antebellum literature. Robert S. Tilton draws upon the rich tradition of Pocahontas material to examine why her half-historic, half-legendary narrative so engaged the imaginations of Americans from the earliest days of the colonies through the conclusion of the Civil War. Drawing upon a wide variety of primary materials, Tilton reflects on the ways in which the Pocahontas myth was exploded, exploited, and ultimately made to rationalise dangerous preconceptions about the native American tradition. Read more

Sister Elizabeth Donderstock is Squeamish, has been her whole life. She makes cheese balls (traditional and smoky) that sustain the existence of her entire religious community, Clusterhaven. However, she feels unappreciated among her Squeamish brethren, and she decides to try her luck in the outside world. Along the way, she meets a Cockney-speaking Ukrainian immigrant couple who find her a job waiting tables at Plymouth Crock, a family restaurant run almost entirely by recovering alcoholics. The alcoholics love her. The customers love her. Her Danderfrock fits right in. Read more

THE HEATH ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, CONCISE, VOLUME 2 brings the expansive, inclusive approach of Volumes C, D, and E of THE HEATH ANTHOLOGY, to a single-volume format. While other one-volume texts anthologize primarily familiar canonical works, the new HEATH CONCISE, VOLUME 2 offers a fresh perspective for courses in American literature and showcases the extraordinary diversity of literature written between 1865 and today. Read more

F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise is the opening statement of his literary career. Published originally in 1920, the novel captures the rhythm and feel of the gaudy decade that was to follow in America. This Side of Paradise made Fitzgerald simultaneously famous and infamous: famous for the stylish exuberance of his writing and infamous for the errors--in spelling, fact, grammar, and chronology--that peppered his text. This new edition, prepared with the most recent techniques of modern scholarly editing, brings into being an accurate, fully annotated text based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. Read more

A play by Stephen Adly Guirgis portraying life on New York's trodden streets. Read more

This is the only authoritative text of this late novel. It reproduces the manuscript which Mark Twain wrote last, and the only one he finished or called the "The Mysterious Stranger." Albert Bigelow Paine's edition of the same name has been shown to be a textual fraud. Read more

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer a look into key elements and ideas within classic works of literature. The latest generation of titles in this series also features glossaries and visual elements that complement the familiar format.CliffsNotes on The Grapes of Wrath explores John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning—and controversial—novel, a work based on the what the author saw for himself as a reporter covering migrant worker camps.Following the story of the Joad family as they travel from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California in search of farming opportunities and wealth, this study guide provides summaries and critical commentaries for each part within the novel.  Other features that help you figure out this important work includePersonal background on the author, including career highlightsIntroduction to and synopsis of the bookIn-depth character analysesCritical essays to take you into the author's personal philosophyReview section that features interactive questions and suggested essay topics and practice projectsResource Center with books, films, and Web sites that can help round out your knowledgeClassic literature or modern-day treasure—you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides. Read more

Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices." Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought. Read more

As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS, no Gestapo, that it was a professional force little touched by Nazi politics. But in this compelling account Omer Bartov reveals a very different history, as he probes the experience of the average soldier to show just how thoroughly Nazi ideology permeated the army.In Hitler's Army, Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastrn front, he writes, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov describes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months--often depicted as a time of easy victories--undermanned and ill-equipped German units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance. Facing scarce supplies and enormous casualties, the average soldier sank to ta a primitive level of existence, re-experiencing the trench warfare of World War I under the most extreme weather conditions imaginable; the fighting itself was savage, and massacres of prisoners were common. Troops looted food and supplies from civilians with wild abandon; they mercilessly wiped out villages suspected of aiding partisans. Incredible losses led to recruits being thrown together in units that once had been filled with men from the same communities, making Nazi ideology even more important as a binding force. And they were further brutalized by a military justice system that executed almost 15,000 German soldiers during the war. Bartov goes on to explore letters, diaries, military reports, and other sources, showing how widespread Hitler's views became among common fighting men--men who grew up, he reminds us, under the Nazi regime. In the end, they truly became Hitler's army.In six years of warfare, the vast majority of German men passed through the Wehrmacht and almost every family had a relative who fought in the East. Bartov's powerful new account of how deeply Nazi ideology penetrated the army sheds new light on how deeply it penetrated the nation. Hitler's Army makes an important correction not merely to the historical record but to how we see the world today. Read more

Empire Writing is the first anthology to gather together British imperial writing alongside native and settler literature, interweaving short stories, poems, essays, travel writing, and memoirs from the phase of British expansionist imperialism known as high empire. This wide-ranging selection reveals the diversity of responses to colonial experience, and encompasses some of the empire's key symbols and emblematic moments. Comprehensive notes and full biographies ensure that this is one of the most compelling, readable and academically valuable source books on the period.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. Read more

Introduction to Afrofuturism delivers a fresh and contemporary introduction to Afrofuturism, discussing key themes, understandings, and interdisciplinary topics across multiple genres in Black literature, film, and music. From Afrofuturism’s origins to the present, this critical volume features scholarly works, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction which illuminates on the contributions of notable Afrofuturists such as Octavia Bulter, Sun Ra, N.K. Jemisin, Janelle Monáe, Nnedi Okorafor, Saul Williams, Prince, and more. The volume highlights the impact of films such as Black Panther (2018, 2022), The Woman King (2022), and They Cloned Tyrone (2023) and covers a variety of essential topics giving students a comprehensive view of the legacy of storytelling and the tradition of “remixing” in Black literature and arts. This volume makes connections across academic subject areas and is an engaging reader for pop culture and media film studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Black and Africana studies, hip-hop studies, creative writing, and composition and rhetoric. Read more

This definitive history of African-American theatre embraces companies from across the U.S., as well as the anglophone Caribbean and African-American companies touring Europe, Australia and Africa. Representing a catholicity of styles, from African ritual to European forms, amateur to professional, and political nationalism to integration, the volume covers all aspects of performance. It includes minstrel, vaudeville, and cabaret acts, as well as shows written by whites that used black casts. Read more

Kellner offers a group of essays on Stein by some recent authorities, such as Marianne DeKoven, Ulla Dydo, Majorie Perloff. A section of writings about Stein includes poems by Mina Loy, Vassar Miller, and others. The most valuable section is the 156-page biographical dictionary, a bio-sketch listing most, if not all, of the people mentioned in Stein's writings, including published letters; it is a godsend to initiates needing landmarks and to aficionados wanting quick review for accuracy of reference. A collection, `Gertrude Stein's ABC,' forms a handy encapsulated survey of her pronouncements from a wide range of her writings. . . . No book on the market is even remotely like it. It stands alone in its simplicity, range, and helpfulness. ChoiceGertrude Stein's rejection of literary conventions and formal genre poses formidable challenges for even the most committed of readers. Although some two dozen full-length critical studies have been published in the forty years since her death, much of her work remains impenetrable to the reading public as well as to many scholars. With this comprehensive literary guide, Kellner brings together a wide variety of source materials and selected original essays to assist students, researchers, and other readers in interpreting and appreciating the career and writings of this important twentieth-century literary figure.In his introduction, Kellner provides an overview of Stein's work and some illuminating insights concerning her methods and themes. The first part of the book is a descriptive alphabetical catalog of Stein's published writings. Part II begins with essays by several Stein scholars, who examine the writer's place in literary tradition, her process of composition, and the various styles she employed. This section concludes with a selection of poems inspired by the writer's work. Part III is a biographical dictionary of Stein's friends, enemies, and other associates. Part IV, entitled Gertrude Stein's ABC, catalogs her opinions and observations on a wide range of subjects. An annotated bibliography of Stein criticism, a list of works cited, and tn index are included. This detailed literary guide helps to make Stein's unique creative vision accessible to general readers and offers the student many exciting new avenues for exploration and research. Read more