American Reader:

Bridging literature and history, this reader provides a richly textured pen-portrait of the nineteenth century in America. It includes more than 550 pages of essays, travels, sketches, poems, stories, autobiography, memoirs, and speeches. M. Thomas Inge, Professor of English at Randolph-Macon College, edited this fine volume in the series published by the U.S. Information Agency in 1988. The readings fit into four main headings -- "Geographic Expansion and National Character," "Transcendental Inquiry and Individual Conscience," "Internal Dissension and Sense of Union," and "Industrial Triumph and Confrontation with Reality." There's much on the frontier, progress, disunion, and industrialization, and much on their discontents. The reader will encounter many familiar names -- Irving, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Greeley, Garrison, Lincoln, Lee, Bryan, Riis, Barnum, Carnegie, Harte, and Henry James among them -- but to develop themes, Professor Inge presented many of their less-well-known pieces.