Selected American Literature

To call Elliott, Kerber, Litz, and Martin's editorial project in American Literature massive is hardly an overstatement, for at 2,429 pages of poetry, narrative, and drama, the book, which is itself a second volume of a two-volume work, is an imposing collection of material by a range of writers both familiar and unexpected, compared to similar anthologies. Indeed, the editors make clear that an important objective of the collection is to make certain that American writing long acknowledged for its excellence remain strongly represented. As well, however, the editors are engaged in a project of what popular culture refers to as diversity or multiculturalism, through inclusion of material by writers not usually represented in general anthologies. As Elliott puts it: "newly valued texts . . . had been misunderstood, overlooked, or consciously rejected by the professors who were in positions to make such decisions, most of whom were themselves male and primarily interested in the English heritage of Am

e Great Depression, and the beginnings of wholesale transformation of social, class, and race roles. If it is the case that the Progressive Era was marked by the impetus toward reform, it is also the case that reform itself implies social and economic conditions that require reforming. As Elliott, Kerber, Litz, and Martin note, John Dos Passos "depicts the fragmentation of American society, caused by class divisions and by the Great Depression" (913). The content of poetry and prose in Langston Hughes's premiere position in the Harlem Renaissance is one of social criticism as well, notably in the urgent and bitter energy of "The boogie-woogie rumble / Of a dream deferred" (Hughes 1176). There is also evidence that late-nineteenth-century American poetic, nonfiction, and fictional expressions of irony are in the early twentieth century complicated by expressions of bitterness, partly in response to imperfections in the American myth. Such expressions find resonance as far forward as the modern period. Edward Arlington Robinson's "bleak view of life" (Elliott, Kerber, Litz, and Martin 921) illustrates the last-named point. "Richard Cory" has a modern tone, finding resonance in the narrative line of a Simon and Garfunkel song of the