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Table of Contents

*indicates new to this edition

Emily Dickinson, There is no Frigate like a Book  

Why we read literature  

Reading actively and critically  

Strategies for reading fiction  

The Methods of Fiction  

Tone  

Plot  

Characterization  

Setting  

Point of View  

Irony  

Theme  

Questions for Exploring Fiction  

Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer  

Word Choice  

Figurative Language  

Metaphor  

Simile  

Personification  

Allusion  

Symbols  

The Music of Poetry  

Questions for Exploring Poetry  

Stages and Staging  

The Elements of Drama  

Characters  

Dramatic Irony  

Plot and Conflict  

Questions for Exploring Drama  

Types of Nonfiction  

Narrative Nonfiction  

Descriptive Nonfiction  

Expository Nonfiction  

Argumentative Nonfiction  

Analyzing Nonfiction  

The Thesis  

Structure and Detail  

Style and Tone  

Questions for Exploring Nonfiction  

Responding to Your Reading  

Exploring and Planning  

Thinking Critically  

Asking Good Questions  

Establishing a Working Thesis  

Gathering Information  

Organizing Information  

Drafting the Essay  

Opening with an Argument  

Supporting Your Thesis  

Revising the Essay  

Editing Your Draft  

Selecting Strong Verbs  

Eliminating Unnecessary Modifiers  

Grammatical Connections  

Proofreading Your Draft  

Some Common Writing Assignments  

Explication  

Analysis  

Comparison and Contrast  

The Research Paper  

An Annotated Student Research Paper  

Some Matters of Form and Documentation  

Titles  

Quotations  

Brackets and Ellipses  

Quotation Marks and Other Punctuation  

Documentation  

Documenting Online Sources  

A Checklist for Writing about Literature

Questions for Thinking and Writing

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Naguib Mahfouz, Half a Day

John Updike, A & P

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

Camden Joy, Dum Dum Boys

*Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Likes

CONNECTING STORIES: Crushes

James Joyce, Araby

Rivka Galchen, Wild Berry Blue

CASE STUDY IN ARGUMENT: Finding Grace in Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Flannery O’Connor, from Mystery and Manners

Bob Dowell, from The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor

Michael Clark, Flannery O’Connor’s "A Good Man Is Hard to Find": The Moment of Grace

*Joe Fassler, What Flannery O'Connor Got Right: Epiphanies Aren't Permanent

William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper

William Blake, The Lamb

William Blake, The Garden of Love

William Blake, London

William Blake, The Tyger

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Emily Dickinson, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

A. E. Housman, When I Was One-and-Twenty

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost, Birches

e. e. cummings, in Just–

Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning

Stevie Smith, To Carry the Child

Countee Cullen, Incident

*W.H. Auden, Archeology

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity

Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse

Audre Lorde, Hanging Fire

Alicia Ostriker, The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz

Jean Nordhaus, A Dandelion for My Mother

Louise Glück, A Myth of Innocence

*Linda Hogan, Innocence

Sandra Cisneros, My Wicked Wicked Ways

Sandra M. Castillo, Christmas, 1970

*A.E. Stallings, Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother

*Soul Vang, Song of the Cluster Bomblet

CONNECTING POEMS: Mothers, Helping

*Borghild Lee, My Mother's Mother Speaks

Langston Hughes, Mother to Son

Robert Mezey, My Mother

Gary Soto, Behind Grandma’s House

*CONNECTING POEMS: Teaching and Learning

*Howard Nemerov, To David, About His Education

*Yehuda Amichai, The School Where I Studied

*Rebecca McClanahan, Teaching a Nephew to Type

*Gary Soto, Teaching English from an Old Composition Book

*Elizabeth Powell, Pledge

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

Suzan-Lori Parks, Father Comes Home from the Wars

Langston Hughes, Salvation

Judith Ortiz Cofer, American History

Brian Doyle, Pop Art

CONNECTING NONFICTION: Graduating

David Sedaris, What I Learned

David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech, Kenyon College

Questions for Thinking and Writing

Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

Amy Tan, Two Kinds

CONNECTING STORIES: Rebellious Imaginations

*Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron

George Saunders, The End of FIRPO in the World

Richard Crashaw, But Men Loved Darkness rather than Light

William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest Sense

Emily Dickinson, She rose to His Requirement

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Carl Sandburg, I Am the People, the Mob

Claude McKay, If We Must Die

Langston Hughes, Harlem

W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen

*Faiz Ahmed Faiz, You Tell Us What to Do

Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

Donald Davie, The Nonconformist

*Heather McHugh, What He Thought

Carolyn Forché, The Colonel

Natasha Trethewey, Flounder

*Reginald Dwayne Betts, Shahid Reads His Own Palm

*CONNECTING POEMS: Testimony

*Jane Hirshfield, On the Fifth Day

*Ilya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily During the War

*Catherine Pierce, In Which the Country Is an Abandoned Amusement Park

CONNECTING POEMS: Soldiers’ Protests

Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Hanan Mikha’il ’Ashrawi, Night Patrol

Kevin C. Powers, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

Sophocles, Antigonê

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First Time

*CONNECTING NONFICTION: Where We Are From

*James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

*Joan Didion, Notes from a Native Daughter

CASE STUDY IN ARGUMENT: Making Change

Bill McKibben, A Call to Arms: An Invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change

Rebecca Solnit, Revolutions Per Minute

*Naomi Klein, The Lesson from Standing Rock: Organizing and Resistance Can Win

*Dave Zirin, Player Protests Are Not a Spectator Sport

Questions for Thinking and Writing

Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

Sherman Alexie, War Dances

CONNECTING STORIES: Insiders and Outcasts

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Ha Jin, The Bridegroom

Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself

Emily Dickinson, I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask

Georgia Douglas Johnson, Old Black Men

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

e. e. cummings, the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

Howard Nemerov, Money

Etheridge Knight, Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane

Gregory Djanikian, Sailing to America

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Latin Women Pray

Marilyn Chin, How I Got That Name

Joshua Clover, The Nevada Glassworks

Taslima Nasrin, Things Cheaply Had

*Claudia Rankine, from Citizen: "Some years there exists a wanting to escape..."

Omar Pérez, Contributions to a Rudimentary Concept of Nation

Chris Abani, Blue

Kevin Young, Negative

Terrance Hayes, Root

*Ross Gay, Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others

Alexandra Teague, Adjectives of Order

Tishani Doshi, The Immigrant’s Song

Tishani Doshi, Lament I

*Danez Smith, The Bullet Was a Girl

*CONNECTING POEMS: Time and Place

*Naomi Shihab Nye, To Jamyla Bolden of Ferguson Missouri

*Blas Manuel de Luna, Bent to the Earth

*dg nanouk okpik, For-The-Spirits-Who-Have-Rounded-The-Bend IIVAQSAAT

CONNECTING POEMS: Women, Working

Tess Gallagher, I Stop Writing the Poem

Julia Alvarez, Woman’s Work

Rita Dove, My Mother Enters the Work Force

Deborah Garrison, Sestina for the Working Mother

CONNECTING POEMS: America Through Immigrants’ Eyes

Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

Léopold Sédar Senghor, To New York

Kofi Awoonor, America

Richard Blanco, América

*CASE STUDY IN ARGUMENT: Building Fences

*August Wilson, Fences

*Bonnie Lyons and George Plimpton, August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14

*Ben Brantley, It’s No More Mr. Nice Guy for This Everyman

*Elizabeth J. Heard, August Wilson on Playwriting: An Interview

*Allison Keyes, Troy Maxson: Heart, Heartbreak as Big as the World

David Henry Hwang, Trying to Find Chinatown

Virginia Woolf, What If Shakespeare Had Had a Sister?

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

*Naomi Shihab Nye, This Is Not Who We Are: Arab-Americans in a Post-9/11 World

CONNECTING NONFICTION: Fitting In

Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America

Lacy M. Johnson, White Trash Primer

Questions for Thinking and Writing

Kate Chopin, The Storm

Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Lydia Millet, Love in Infant Monkeys

CONNECTING STORIES: Confusing Loves

Junot Díaz, Drown

*Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Apollo

CONNECTING STORIES: Having It All

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

David Foster Wallace, Good People

Sappho, With His Venom

Catullus, 85

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?"

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29, "When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes"

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"

William Shakespeare, 　Sonnet 130, "My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun"

Ben Jonson, Song, To Celia

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband

William Blake, A Poison Tree

Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Robert Frost, Fire and Ice

*César Vallejo, To my Brother Miguel in Memoriam

Dorothy Parker, One Perfect Rose

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Lisel Mueller, Happy and Unhappy Families I

Carolyn Kizer, Bitch

Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Adrienne Rich, Living in Sin

Seamus Heaney, Valediction

Daisy Fried, Econo Motel, Ocean City

*Camille Dungy, Daisy Cutter

*Ross Gay, To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian

*CONNECTING POEMS: Adoptions

*Maram Al-Masri, Samir

*Shane McCrae, Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Visits His Adoptive Parents After the War

*Nicky Sa-Eun Schildkraut, Blackout

CONNECTING POEMS: Remembering Fathers

Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone

CONNECTING POEMS: Love Stinks

Catullus, 70

Aphra Behn, Love in Fantastique Triumph satt

Edna St. Vincent Millay, I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Be Near Me

Andrea Hollander, Betrayal

CASE STUDY IN ARGUMENT: Seductive Reasoning

*Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

*Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

Annie Finch, Coy Mistress

William Shakespeare, Othello

Susan Glaspell, Trifles

Lynn Nottage, Poof!

Paul, 1 Corinthians 13

Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman

Stuart Lishan, Winter Count, 1964

Grace Talusan, My Father’s Noose

Sonya Chung, Getting It Right

*CONNECTING NONFICTION: Loving Work

*Josh Roiland, A Shot in the Arm

*Miya Tokumitsu, In the Name of Love

Questions for Thinking and Writing

Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Iván Ilýich

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Helena María Viramontes, The Moths

CONNECTING STORIES: Mourning Rituals

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Man to Send Rain Clouds

Allegra Goodman, Apple Cake

CONNECTING STORIES: Between Life and Death

Katherine Anne Porter, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Tobias Wolff, Bullet in the Brain

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold"

William Shakespeare, Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun

John Donne, Death, Be Not Proud

Jonathan Swift, A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Emily Dickinson, After great pain, a formal feeling comes

Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz—when I died

A. E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young

William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking

Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Pablo Neruda, The Dead Woman

Czesław Miłosz, A Song on the End of the World

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Donald Hall, Affirmation

*Philip Levine, It’s Mother

Marvin Klotz, Requiem

*Lucille Clifton, friday 9/14/01

Seamus Heaney, Mid-term Break

Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come

Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It

Victor Hernández Cruz, Problems with Hurricanes

Marie Howe, What the Living Do

*Joy Harjo, Perhaps the World Ends Here

Dilruba Ahmed, Snake Oil, Snake Bite

CONNECTING POEMS: Animal Fates

Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

William Greenway, Pit Pony

John Updike, Dog’s Death

CONNECTING POEMS: Seizing the day

Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo

James Wright, Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Barbara Ras, You Can’t Have It All

Tony Hoagland, I Have News for You

CASE STUDY IN WORDS AND IMAGES: Poems about Paintings

W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

Pieter Brueghal the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, In Goya’s Greatest Scenes

Francisco de Goya, The Third of May, 1808, Madrid

Anne Sexton, The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night

Donald Finkel, The Great Wave: Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Edward Albee, The Sandbox

John Donne, Meditation XVII, from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

E. B. White, Once More to the Lake

Jill Christman, The Sloth

CONNECTING NONFICTION: Missing Mothers

Jonathan Lethem, 13, 1977, 21

Ruth Margalit, The Unmothered

Authors

Richard Abcarian

Richard Abcarian (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirty-seven years. During his teaching career, he won two Fulbright professorships. In addition to editing Literature: The Human Experience and its compact edition, he is the editor of a critical edition of Richard Wright's A Native Son, as well as several other literature textbooks.

Marvin Klotz

Marvin Klotz (PhD, New York University) was a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirty-three years and won Northridge's distinguished teaching award in 1983. He was also the winner of two Fulbright professorships (in Vietnam and Iran) and was a National Endowment for the Arts Summer Fellow twice. In addition to editing Literature: The Human Experience and several other textbooks, he coauthored a guide and index to the characters in Faulkner's fiction.

Samuel Cohen

Samuel Cohen (PhD, City University of New York) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, co-editor (with James Peacock) of The Clash Takes on the World: Transnational Perspectives on The Only Band that Matters, co-editor (with Lee Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Series Editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and has published in such journals as Novel, Clio, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Basic Writing, and Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he is author of 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology and coauthor of Literature: The Human Experience.

Richard Abcarian

Richard Abcarian (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirty-seven years. During his teaching career, he won two Fulbright professorships. In addition to editing Literature: The Human Experience and its compact edition, he is the editor of a critical edition of Richard Wright's A Native Son, as well as several other literature textbooks.

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