Preface

This is the third edition of an anthology of American literature that has met with our colleagues' favor in its first and second editions. Since time has brought changes in the prevailing evaluations of American literature, we endeavor to reflect these here, preserving at the same time that organization and editorial attitude which has best served the ever-evolving American tradition in literature. The most significant revaluation is, perhaps, the desire to study in greater depth certain nineteenth-century masters-Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Henry James. Another revaluation results in the greater attention paid to the best writers of our own century.

To Herman Melville's prose works we have therefore added the four central sketches from the seldom anthologized but significant Encantadas, and his appreciation of a great contemporary in "Hawthorne's Mosses." We have doubled the number of Melville's poems. For Thoreau, we are proud to offer a complete text of Walden, carefully edited in accordance with the 1854 edition. The present American Tradition in Literature thus adds to the two great nineteenth-century works introduced complete in the second edition-The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn —a third, Thoreau's masterpiece of prose. The addition of Emerson's essays, "The Poet" and "Illusions," provides new materials for the understanding of this influential figure and, altogether, gives the reader eight essays besides "Nature" in its entirety.

The writers of our Colonial and Federalist periods are now regarded as more complex men than earlier critics supposed. Other additions in this third edition include two more of Edward Taylor's "Meditations"; selections from Cotton Mather's Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good; Jonathan Edwards's A Divine and Supernatural Light and Dissertation: Concerning the End for which God Created The World; John Woolman's Considerations and Conver

sations on the true Harmony of Mankind; one of the Sketches of Eighteenth Century America by Jean de Crèvecœur; and Benjamin Franklin's "The Speech of Polly Baker."

The new Volume 1 also contains Cooper's "Preface to The Leather-Stocking Tales"; Bryant's "To Cole, the Painter"; Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"; Poe's "Masque of the Red Death"; and Thoreau's poem, "To the Maiden in the East." In the revision of the second volume, Henry James gains properly increased recognition. We have supplied a novel of major interest, The Aspern Papers, with its Preface; the early stories, "A Bundle of Letters" and "The Chaperon"; and the later masterpiece, "The Jolly Corner." Whitman, Clemens, and Howells, masters of the period following the Civil War, also receive broader attention. Whitman's "The Sleepers” and a much richer selection of his prose are included; so is the "darker Clemens," in Letters from the Earth and The Damned Human Race; there is also more of Howells, the critic, in Criticism and Fiction. We include also two more poems by William Vaughn Moody.

A greater range of poems by Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings gives them the same significance as Robinson, Frost, and Eliot among avowed masters of twentieth-century poetry. An excerpt from Paterson and the late love poem, "The Ivy Crown," show the triumph of Dr. Williams' mature years. Among the poets at mid-century, Robert Lowell's and Richard Wilbur's recent advances are newly represented. To this group we add Theodore Roethke, their late brilliant contemporary. Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Howard Nemerov, Denise Levertov, W. D. Snodgrass, James Wright, W. S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and LeRoi Jones are included in a final section that reveals experimentation and the directions of our poetry since 1955.

Contemporary developments in short fiction are shown in work by its able practitioners, Bernard Malamud, the late Flannery O'Connor, and John Updike. Elsewhere in Volume 2, the reader will find significant alterations in the fiction selections. Sarah Orne Jewett's "The White Heron" is new. Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," and two important stories apiece by Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck substitute for the single selections by these writers hitherto reprinted. We also include another story by Thomas Wolfe.

Headnotes for individual authors have been thoroughly revised, incorporating the best results of recent research and criticism.

Many footnotes, the general bibliography, and the author bibliographies have been scrutinized and brought up to date.

In each of these new selections, as in previous editions, we have gone to considerable lengths to provide a faithful copy of the text which in our judgment is the best edition of the work. The text of Franklin's Autobiography has been newly collated with the Yale Edition, while our Whitman selections now incorporate the findings of the definitive Comprehensive Reader's Edition of the Writings in progress. Our present text of Billy Budd is that of the "Reading Text" prepared by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962). The textual source of any text, unless it is obvious, will be stated in the bibliographical note or a footnote. In editing the difficult texts of Colonial writers we have been guided by the condition of the particular texts. Those, like Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, in which archaic spelling, punctuation, and abbreviations are a mechanical handicap for many readers, have been normalized in accordance with present practice. But the language has not been altered or "modernized"; the texts of Colonial poets are untouched, and like most of the prose, clarified only by annotation. Significant dates appear at the end of a selection; that of first publication in a volume by the author at the right margin, preceded by the date of first serial publication; an established date of composition, if of significance, in the left margin. In all instances the omission of text has been indicated by three asterisks, and titles are those of the original except where printed between square brackets.

It should be emphasized that the alteration of selections and other editorial changes in this edition are in accordance with principles that were set down in the preface to the first edition. Since prefaces to both earlier editions are incorporated in this, and since the anthology seeks, as we have said, to reflect an American tradition in literature, it seems appropriate to quote here something of what was said in that first preface.

"In compiling this work we have intended to provide a freshly considered collection of great American writings representing the range and power of our literature as a whole. Our effort has been to represent major authors in the fullness of their stature and variety. Besides the titans, we have included writers of lesser stature whose works endure; but no author was introduced primarily for the purpose of illustrating literary or social history. * *

"While we have made literary merit our final criterion for selection, we have attempted in our critical apparatus to empha