From the moment of their arrival on American soil, the Anglo settler began a process of reshaping identity from a “stale” European model into a uniquely American hybrid frontiersman—infusing old-world cultivation and Christian dogma with the get-up-and-go spirit necessary to survive in an inhospitable new terrain. This course will sample major American writers who have captured the essence of this spirit from the colonial period through the present. We will aim to track the development of American character as it morphed from persecuted emigrant to global superpower. While Puritan thought and the western frontier figure prominently as staging grounds for our readings, the focus of the class will be to recognize how our national mythology was first created and later reconfigured, giving rise to such figures as the robber barons of the Gilded Age or the heroes of hard-boiled detective fiction.

Our reading will include a small handful of novels and a significantly larger selection of short stories and poetry by authors tentatively to include: William Bradford, Jonathan Edwards, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Theodore Roosevelt, and others. The following texts will be available through the University Bookstore: Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick; Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntley; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; Additionally, a course pack will be available at Ave. Copy on University Way.

Course requirements: The final grade will be based on regular contribution to class discussion, several writing assignments, and the final exam. As this is a “W” course, writing will play a key role in analyzing the assigned literature. Each student will be required to write two short analytical essays (3-4 pages in length each), one major essay (5-7 pages), as well as revisions of each.