The literature of America is a crucial part of the American experience. In this course, we will focus on exciting and influential classics from two dynamic centuries. We will explore why these works have become canonical, what stylistic and thematic qualities both connect and distinguish them, and what marks them as distinctly American. Fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose by such authors as Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Douglas, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Gilman, Twain, Henry James, Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane, Toomer, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.E.B. DuBois, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker.