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sunnyviewmom
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If you were to chose 4 to 6 short stories as part of an Am. Lit. class, what would they be? There are so many choices, that I don't know how to narrow it down.
I'd appreciate any suggestions, whether you have a whole list, or just one or two "must reads".
By the way, this is for my 17 year old son.
Thanks so much!
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MaryM
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Definitely O. Henry, London, and Poe - lots to choose from there. Also would probably include something Twain and Irving.
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SallyT
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My own MO is to do the literature chronologically, so that short stories come up as examples of the literature of a particular era. That's partly because we always do history and literature side-by-side, but also because it just seems like a good organizing principle, especially for a course focused on the literature of a particular culture, rather than a general survey of literary genres.
There are examples of short fiction in the U.S. from the late-18th/early-19th centuries -- Washington Irving ("Legend of Sleepy Hollow") and James Fenimore Cooper ("The Deerslayer") are sort of the fathers of American fiction. The American short story really takes off, though, from the Transcendentalist period of the 1830's-40's, with writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne ("Young Goodman Brown" is a standard example). Poe is roughly contemporaneous, and is important.
Later 19th-century short-story authors who typically show up in AmLit surveys are Herman Melville ("Bartleby the Scrivener"), Stephen Crane ("The Open Boat"), Ambrose Bierce ("Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"), & Jack London ("To Build a Fire"). There's Twain, of course, also writing in the post-Civil War period.
Early-mid 20th century writers of the short story include Sara Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, O. Henry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor.
Honestly, short fiction is HUGE in American literature. I'd grant myself a lot more than 4-6 choices. A lot of these authors also wrote important novels, of course, but I'd probably opt to assign "Bartleby the Scrivener" rather than Moby Dick, in the interest of exposing a student to Herman Melville (who again, is important in American letters, as is every author on this list) without killing his desire ever to read Melville again. (though the Audible.com recording of Moby Dick is a lot of fun -- *I* didn't realize how funny the book was until I listened to it. It's still not my favorite novel, but it was a lot more palatable in that form).
American lit is what I taught, almost exclusively, in my high-school-teaching career, and from the college side of things I know some general parameters of what students are expected to have heard of, at least, if not actually read. If you wanted a whole reading list of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for an American lit course, I could bang you out a fairly complete one more or less off the top of my head. I've been thinking about American lit a lot lately anyway . . .
I hope this is remotely helpful and not pushy.
Sally
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Angie Mc
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Jackpot! From the archives
We LOVE short stories!
Love,
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Two that have never left me are:
"The Man Without a Country" by Edward Everett Hale
and
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Edward Connell Jr.
but many more have made an indelible impression, especially O'Henry, Poe, Hawthorne, and Twain.
I read Flannery O'Connor later, and we also read some stories by William Gilmore Simms, who was a Southern writer in antebellum times, so he often gets shoved aside.
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sunnyviewmom
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Wow! I came to the right place with my questions! Thanks for the great ideas!
Sally, I would like to see your (off the top of your head) reading list for a complete American Lit. course, if you don't mind. That would be great.
Question for Sally or anyone: WHY and HOW is the short story so important in American Literature?
THANKS!
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SallyT
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Why the short story in America? That's a really interesting question, and I hadn't given it that much thought, honestly, beyond just a feeling that this is a very American genre. In the 19th century, British periodicals were running serialized novels (think Dickens), and though British writers were writing some short fiction (think Dickens again), as were French writers, in America you had journalists -- Twain, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, and Jack London were all reporters and journalistic writers, as was the poet Walt Whitman, now that I think of it -- extending their reporters' sensibilities into fiction, mainly to report on the violence and unfeelingness of the universe, and man's puny place in it. The Civil War and its fallout seems to have made horrible cynics of the lot of them (not Whitman, but then he was a poet!), and we call that the Realist and the Naturalist school of fiction.
Anyway, the American reading public seems to have snapped all that up, and American periodicals seem to have provided a ready venue for that kind of writing, even as British ones encouraged the serialized novel.
Also, a number of American writers, for whatever reason, just found the form more congenial than the novel -- Poe, for example. He outlined his stories meticulously before writing, as if he were plotting chess moves, which level of calibration would be hard to maintain over a project as large as a novel.
Even today, Americans corner the market in the literary short story. The typical route for a budding writer is to publish short stories -- all U.S. literary journals publish a lot of short fiction -- first singly in journals, then in a collection (which would be your M.F.A. thesis or Ph.D dissertation if you are a student in a creative writing program), and only then would the writer tackle the project of a novel. Some American writers really excel at the short story and are far less famous for longer fiction: Andre Dubus, Tobias Wolff, Antonya Nelson, Raymond Carver . . . European fiction writers, on the other hand, seem by and large to be novelists, without this intermediate (or permanent) step of the short story.
So, there's my hypothesis, anyway!
Sally
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Steinbeck is an author not mentioned yet. I read a bunch of his in high school. I have my boys read Of Mice and Men in 8th and I am having my 11th grader read Grapes of Wrath this year. He has several others too.
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SallyT
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OK, my off-the-cuff U.S. literature/history course list, Part the First (well, sort of off-the-cuff -- I'm looking at what my first child did for AmLit, but tweaking a bit as I go):
1. Native Americans (you might or might not opt out of this segment, but it's an interesting starting place):
*Native American myths (creation, etc -- not hard to find examples). Interesting if you've done other mythology
*Iroquois Constitution
*possibly an excerpt from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, which is a 20th century nonfiction piece, full of lyrical writing
2. Early settlement
*New England Puritans:
-William Bradford, "Of Plimoth Plantation" (primary source)
-Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (poem)
-Edward Taylor, "Huswifery" (poem)
-Mary Rowlandson, "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" (primary source)
-Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (probably the most famous sermon ever preached by anyone anywhere . . . an interesting exercise in comparative theology. As my daughter said, "Boy, am I glad to be Catholic.")
*Catholic:
-something by/about Spanish colony at St. Augustine, FL (primary source)
-something by/about Fr. Junipero Serra/California missions (primary source)
I don't have something specific for these right now, but will do some research!
3. Becoming a nation/Early America
*something by Benjamin Franklin (excerpts from his Autobiography and/or Poor Richard's Almanack)
*Patrick Henry: "Give me liberty or give me death" speech (great for rhetorical analysis)
*Declaration of Independence (ditto)
*Phyllis Wheatley (poems)
*Irving short story ("Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Devil and Tom Walker," etc)
*William Cullen Bryant: "To a Waterfowl" (poem)
*Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Old Ironsides" (poem)
Poems of James Russell Lowell & Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
3. Transcendentalists (school of American writers/philosophers who all lived in and around Concord, MA, in the 1820s, 30s, & 40s. Many ideas underpinning our current culture may be traced to these writers and thinkers, which is why they're important, even though some of them are kind of out there . . . this was an era of utopian visions all over the place):
*Ralph Waldo Emerson: poems + excerpts from "Nature" and "Self-Reliance"
*Henry David Thoreau: excerpts from "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience"
*Nathaniel Hawthorne: short fiction ("Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil.") If time, read The Scarlet Letter.
Incidentally, all these people were Louisa May Alcott's childhood neighbors.
Same era but farther south (Virginia) and not a Transcendentalist:
Edgar Allan Poe: poems (chiefly "The Raven"), short stories
Catholic:
biographies of or writing by Sts. Elizabeth Ann Seton and Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (daughter of Nathaniel, above). Also consider the Carroll family, who produced the one Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, plus the famous Bishop.
OK, this takes us up to the Civil War. Back later with Part the Second of my reading list!
Sally
PS: Oh, yeah, Steinbeck! Forgot him!
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I will second the great selection that Sally has posted. I am copying it off for my high schooler this year. With my older higher schoolers, I assigned all the short stories in Seton readers and 2 other Catholic series out of the 50's.
Also I double the Steinbeck "unrecommendation". Leave Steinbeck for adulthood. He is so depressive. I suffered through Steinbeck in Catholic high school, telling myself that if I was called to motherhood, I would try to get my kids out of reading these books if possible.
Blessings,
Stephanie
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SallyT
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I'm not really a Steinbeck fan, either, though he is a major figure in 20th century American literature and represents, in much of his fiction, a voice of social outrage. I think he was a Socialist, actually -- though I'd have to go back and research that claim before I stood by it -- in the vein of many 1930s intelligentsia, many of whom were also Stalinist sympathizers (and totally hoodwinked with regard to that regime, thanks to selective reporting by American journalists of the era). Knowing this bit of backstory would help a student critically read a play like Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which was a protest against the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s: in the case of McCarthy, the "witches" weren't imaginary, as Miller would like the reader to believe. Many AmLit courses for high school read The Crucible as part of a unit on Puritans, but on reflection, I really think it ought to go in a unit on the 1950s political climate . . . with particular interest for a student who had read about the Puritans and knew about the Salem witch trials . . .
Meanwhile, although socialism inevitably turns writers into spreaders of depression, Steinbeck is not always a downer. Excerpts from his nonfiction Travels With Charley can be a lot of fun, a lot more so than, say, "The Red Pony," which is the story of his most often anthologized for high school, or The Pearl, which is his most anthologized short novella.
Sally
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Angie Mc
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sunnyviewmom wrote:
| WHY and HOW is the short story so important in American Literature? |
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I'll add that if fits and reflects who we are as Americans. It is a framework that lends itself toward excellence in precision, directness, and impact. I have found it is especially well-suited to feed the heart and souls of my sons. So while my daughter went on to earn advanced literature credits in college and swoons over British novels, my sons prefer the excellence of the short story and can state their case about its value in a way that engages them in academic discourse in a confident manner.
Love,
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SallyT
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Next installment of my Great AmLit List:
Civil War & Aftermath:
*Frederick Douglass, "My Bondage and My Freedom"
*slave spirituals ("Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Go Down Moses," "Follow the Drinking Gourd")
*Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman?"
*Mary Chesnut's Civil War diary/letters
*wartime letters of Robert E. Lee to his family
*Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
*Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
*poems of Herman Melville ("Shiloh," one about John Brown, the title of which escapes me at this moment)
*Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (novel-- very short)
*Catholic: poems of Fr. Ryan, "the poet-priest of the Confederacy," something by/about Pope Pius IX and his correspondence with Jefferson Davis
*Walt Whitman: "I Hear America Singing," "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," "Beat! Beat! Drums!," "O Captain, My Captain" (poems)
*Emily Dickinson: a selection of poems
Late 19th Century:
*Mark Twain: short fiction, nonfiction, Huckleberry Finn
*Bret Harte, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (short story)
*Jack London, "To Build a Fire" (short story)
*Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, "I Will Fight No More Forever"
*Willa Cather: short stories, My Antonia, O Pioneers (novels -- O Pioneers is short and very beautiful, though tragic. You could also assign Death Comes for the Archbishop as historical fiction in the early part of the year -- she was a late-19th/early20th-century writer, but that novel is set in the early days of the Spanish missions of New Mexico)
*Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"
*Poems of
Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology)
Edwin Arlington Robinson ("Richard Cory", "Miniver Cheevy")
Paul Laurence Dunbar (African-American poet)
Got to get ready for Mass now -- back later with the 20th century!
Sally
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sunnyviewmom
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I have been printing out and "poring over" these posts, especially Sally's list, of course! Thanks everyone!
Dana
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I just popped in to second this selection
Quote:
| *Jack London, "To Build a Fire" (short story) |
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Does anyone have a good "short story anthology" book to recommend? Or would I be better off just using the library? I haven't found an anthology that has enough of your recommendations to make a purchase worthwhile.
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A lot of the classic books will be free for the Kindle. And you can get the free app for your computer to read them. Just for another option.
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SallyT
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Anything in the public domain will be free for Kindle, as Jodie says, and also elsewhere on the net as a free e-text. You could just google down my list, for example, and see what turns up.
There are good short story anthologies -- you could try Norton. They are the granddaddy of all lit anthologies.
You could also just invest in a decent American lit textbook, which would contain most of these selections in one volume. We have used the Glencoe "Reader's Choice" American Literature text, ignoring a lot of the "extra" stuff and concentrating on the primary texts. That, in fact, is largely where my list comes from, though any Catholic add-ins are my own, and obviously not included in the secular text. In this regard, any standard text would do, and you could add on other readings as you saw fit.
i'm not a textbook person in general -- we focus on the literature itself and avoid the study questions and other "filler". It's important to pre-read and think about what vision of America the textbook publishers endorse (usually it's a kind of multi-culti relativist/radically individualist America). Often selections are included that have nothing to do with the time period at hand, except that the publisher wants the reader to view it in a particular light -- it's better to stick with the primary-source material of that era and ignore whatever contemporary pieces are included alongside it. But it is rather handy not to have to hunt all those readings down, which in essence means putting together your own anthology. Good to do if you have the time, and you might save money if you can find everything you want free online, but if not, judiciously chosen readings out of a single text work just as well.
I am planning to add AmLit to my Abandon Hopefully blog, with linked readings for each unit of the course, but that probably won't happen until next year. I'm still recovering from doing Medieval and Renaissance!
I hope this is helpful, and that I'm not being too pedantic about it all!
Sally
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sunnyviewmom
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This is all very helpful.
I have a rather battered but usable copy of the Seton High School American Literature book (originally titled American Profiles). It was a freebie that I haven't looked at much until now. It seems to have many of these selections.
Any opinions on the background information and study/discussion questions in this book?
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My daughters really enjoyed The Ransom of Red Chief by O'Henry
The Story of the Other Wise Man by Henry Van Dyke is a good short story for Christmas.
Adele
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4Real Forums : High School Years and Beyond
Topic: Am. Lit. Short Stories
