CHAPTER 1 Colonial Beginnings
CHAPTER 2 The Birth of a Nation
CHAPTER 3 The Rise of a National Literature
CHAPTER 4 An American Renaissance
CHAPTER 5 The Boston Brahmins
CHAPTER 6 The Civil War and the "Gilded Age"
CHAPTER 7 The Era of Realism and Naturealism
CHAPTER 8 At the Turn of the Century
CHAPTER 9 The Turning Point of American Literature
CHAPTER 10 Poetry from 1900 through the 1930s
CHAPTER 11 The Writers of the "Lost Generation"
CHAPTER 12 The Thirties
CHAPTER 13 The Forties and Fifties
CHAPTER 14 The Sixties and Seventies
CHAPTER 15 The Twentieth-Century Black Writer
CHAPTER 16 Drama
CHAPTER 17 Popular Fiction
Glossary of literary terms
Table of historical and literary events
Index