Contents: Vol. I. Chronology of the period of the colonial mind. Introduction. 1. Captain John Smith. 2. William Strachey. 3. William Bradford. 4. Thomas Morton. 5. John and Margaret Winthrop. 6. Nathaniel Ward. 7. Roger Williams. 8. The bay psalm book. 9. Anne Bradstreet. 10. Michael Wigglesworth. 11. The New England primer. 12. Mary Rowlandson. 13. Increase Mather. 14. Cotton Mather. 15. Samuel Sewall. 16. William Byrd. 17. Jonathan Edwards. 18. Benjamin Franklin. 19. Benjamin Franklin. 20. Ebenezer Cook. 21. John Woolman. 22. St. Jean De Creveceur. 23. John Dickinson. 24. Thomas Paine. 25. Songs and ballads of the revolution. 26. George Washington. 27. The federalist. 28. Thomas Jefferson. 29. John Trumbull. 30. Timothy Dwight. 31. Joel Barlow. 32. Philip Freneau. 33. Charles Brockden Brown.
Vol. II A. Chronology of the period of the romanticism. Map of Boston and vicinity. Introduction. 1. Washington Irving. 2. James Fenimore Cooper. 3. William Cullen Bryant. 4. Edgar Allan Poe. 5. Nathaniel Hawthorne. 6. William Ellery Channing. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 8. Henry Thoreau.
Vol. II B. 1. The dial. 2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 3. James Russell Lowell. 4. Oliver Wendell Holmes. 5. John Caldwell Calhoun. 6. Daniel Webster. 7. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 8. John Green-leafw hittier. 9. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 10. Herman Melville. 11. William Hickling Prescott. 12. John Lothrop Motley. 13. Francis Parkman. 14. Songs and ballads of the war of the secession Maryland! My Maryland (James R. Randall). 15. Abraham Lincoln. 16. Henry Timrod. 17. Paul Hamilton Hayne. 18. William Gilmore Simms. 19. Walt Whitman. Index.
Vol. III. Chronology of the period of realism. Introduction. 1. William Dean Howells. 2. Henry James. 3. John Fiske. 4. Thomas bailey Aldrich. 5. Edward Rowland Sill. 6. Sidney Lanier. 7. Emily Dickinson. 8. The humorists. 9. Mark Twain. 10. Joaquin Miller. 11. Bret Harte. 12. Songs and ballads. 13. John Hay. 14. George Washington Cable. 15. Lafcadio Hearn. 16. Joel Chandler Harris. 17. Mary Noailles Murfree. 18. James Whitcomb Riley. 19. Sarah Orne Jewett. 20. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. 21. Richard Hovey. 22. Hamlin Garland. 23. William Vaughn Moody. 24. Edwin Markham. 25. Stephen Crane. 26. Frank Norris. 27. Jack London. 28. O. Henry. 29. Frederick Jackson Turner. 30. Henry Adams. 31. Paul Elmer More. 32. Edith Wharton. 33. Dorothy Canfield Fisher. 34. Edwin Arlington Robinson. 35. Amy Lowell. 36. Nuit Blauche. 37. Robert Frost. 38. Vachel Lindsay. 39. Carl Sandburg. 40. William Ellery Leonard. 41. Willa Cather. 42. Sherwood Anderson. 43. Theodore Dreiser. 44. Sinclair Lewis. 45. James Branch Cabell. 46. Henry Louis Mencken. 47. Irving Babbitt. 48. Eugene O'Neill. 49. T.S. Eliot. 50. Edna St. Vincent Millay. 51. Stephen Vincent Benet. 52. Archibald Mac Leish. 53. Robinson Jeffers. 54. Ernest Hemingway. 55. William Faulkner. Index.
"The present work entitled American Poetry and Prose edited by Norman Foerster is undoubtedly an outstanding literary history of American literature in three volumes: the Colonial Mind, the Romantic Movement (in two parts) and the Realistic Movement.
Volume I, Colonial Mind, includes earlier writings of American poets and essayists on different imaginative and realistic themes.
The Volume II in two parts, deals with the Romantic movement in American poetry and prose. The romantic movement replaced the rational man of the eighteenth century with the emotional man of the early nineteenth. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had written under the rich traditions of Christian and classical authority.
The Volume III, Realistic movement in American poetry and prose, includes more realistic and powerful writings of 19 and early 20 century Europe as well as western cultural and literacy trends.
Realistic prose entered upon its great age in the 70's and continued crescendo, but poetry had to wait for a revival until 1912. True, the new poetry had been announced by Whitman, and Emily Dickinson had written imagist verse in the middle of the century, but both Whitman and Miss Dickinson were dead by the time a movement became evident in the later 90's.
Undoubtedly, in the modern world culture and field of literature, changed economic scene and technological advances American literature occupies an important place, but simultaneously owns much to European land in almost every field." (jacket)
