The Oxford Companion to American Literature

• The Oxford Companion to English Literature
• From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature
• American Literature (Barron's Ez-101 Study Keys)
• The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford Companions)
• The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford Paperback Reference)

Editors James D. Hart, until the time of his death, and Phillip Leininger have updated the Sixth Edition in light of what has happened in American literature since 1982. To this end, they have revised the entries on such established authors as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates, and they have added well over 180 new entries on novelists (T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Cormac McCarthy, Don De Lillo), poets (Rita Dove, Weldon Kees), playwrights (Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson), popular writers (Stephen King, Louis L'Amour), historians (James McPherson, David Herbert Donald, William Manchester), naturalists (Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey), and literary critics (Camille Paglia, Richard Ellman). In addition, the Companion boasts more women, African American, and ethnic voices with new entries on such luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M.F.K. Fisher and William Least Heat-Moon, Ursula Le Guin and Oscar Hijuelos, among many others.

These additions represent only part of the revisions for the new edition. Of course, the basic qualities of the Companion that readers have grown to know and love over the years are as superb as ever. With over 5,000 total entries, The Oxford Companion to American Literature reflects the dynamic balance between past and contemporary literature, surveying virtually every aspect of our national literature, from the Pulitzer Prize to pulp fiction, and from Walt Whitman to William F. Buckley, Jr. There are over 2,000 biographical profiles of important American authors (with information regarding their style, subjects, and major works) and influential foreign writers as well as other figures who have been important in the nation's social and cultural history. There are more than 1,100 full summaries of important American novels, stories, essays, poems (with verse form noted), plays, biographies and autobiographies, tracts, narratives, and histories. And the new edition provides historical background and astute commentary on literary schools and movements, literary awards, magazines, newspapers, and a wide variety of other matters directly related to writing in America. Finally, the book is thoroughly cross-referenced and features an extensive and fully updated index of literary and social history.

In all, there are over 5000 entries, with 1100 of them being significant summaries of major literary works, figures, or other significant literary topics. Of these, 104 were added by Leininger after Hart's death, which shows the great amount owed to Hart. This sixth edition includes information up to 1993/94. At the back of the book is a chronological index of American literary history and American social history laid out side by side, from 1577 to 1994. This shows the overall growth of America as a nation as well as a nation of literary artists.

American literature is broadly defined for this text, and includes not only the typical literary arts of novelists, poets, and playwrights, but also autobiographers and biographers, historians, newspaper and magazine writers. The colonies of America often being founded by religious persons looking for freedom of expression, a source of the American spirit that has never dissipated, there are entries for many religious leaders in American history. While previous editions have included an entry on each of the Presidents, this edition is more selective, including the Founding Fathers and only those later Presidents who had a significant role either in eras of change or notable literary output of their own (U.S. Grant and his autobiography, for example). Entries for universities have largely been eliminated here, but much of the deleted information is duplicated in other entries.

Entries on poems discuss publication history, poetic structure, influences on the composition, and, if appropriate, narrative of the meaning - for example, there is a brief synopsis of the 'plot' of Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Raven'. Entries on novels are much more plot summaries, with little of this background information, save where the novel is truly unique in style. Literary schools and awards are also entered - awards often have listings, such as the listing of all Pulitzer Prize winners from 1917 of the various types of literature; American Nobel Prize winners are also listed.

This is not a companion to high-brow literature only - popular writers from Louis L'Amour to Anne Rice are included. One thing that is not included, perhaps because it stretches the idea of literary art a bit further than the Oxford Companion would have it, are comic strips, comic books and their characters. The book is not exclusively American in scope - some born Americans who left or moved citizenship (T.S. Eliot), and those born elsewhere who became American (Isaac Bashevis Singer) are included; movements and influences from abroad are included also. There are also entries for major Native American tribes and personalities of North America. This is very much a book of the United States - the term 'American' is used in this context, so Canadians are not a subject of this volume (not to worry - there is an Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature).

This is a very useful book, handy and accessible, easy to use, and thorough in scope.