Jonathan Raban (a British writer who now lives in Seattle) claims “living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living.” This course will be about the “arts” of urban living, both as literature depicts it and as we inhabitants experience it. In particular, we will be investigating the relationship between the evolution of American literature and the rise of the modern city. From the perspective of Puritan settlers, America was to be a “city on a hill,” a utopian community of true believers. However, it didn’t take long for the realities of urban living to create very different stories. This course will consider some of complex ways in which the actual cities gave rise to the writers and literary forms that mark important moments in our literary history. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s entrance into Philadelphia, we will look at the ways in which the city has shaped the stories and lives of Americans. Among the writers and works in the course, we will consider Nathaniel Hawthorne’s urban tales, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Leroi Jones’s Dutchman, and Paul Auster’s postmodern novel, City of Glass.