Selected readings and course materials
This essay responds to a set of thirteen separate readings on American literature, including works by Jonathan Edwards, Ben Franklin, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Philip Freneau, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. It also includes two five-hundred-word essays, one about Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "Young Goodman Brown" and the other about Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". In all cases, historical information about the period of American history before the Civil War is adduced to help interpret the literary works.