George and Barbara Perkins

THE PRIMIS AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE, George Perkins and Barbara Perkins (McGraw-Hill Primis, 2006).

ATIL Primis is a digitalized collection of 1,200 selections. It includes the bulk of the contents of the 11th edition of THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE and many additional authors and selections that are not found in the print format of the book.

ATIL Primis enables professors to tailor their books to their individual tastes and classes and to the abilities and interests of their students. They may use it to supplement the traditional print versions of ATIL, or may replace the standard volumes with volumes they themselves have designed. They may select from six pre-built readers (Exploration and Revolution; The Romantic Temper and Inevitable Conflict; The Nineteenth-century Age of Expansion to the Turn of the Century; The Modern Era: The Literary Renaissance and Social and Cultural Challenges; The Second World War and Its Aftermath; and Contemporary Literature), all of which may be individually modified. Other self-built possibilities inclue women’s or multicultural courses; genre courses featuring fiction, poetry, drama, or essays; and thematic courses focused on topics that include Personal Narratives; Systems of Belief; The Individual and Society; The People and the Land; and Women's Experience. They may select or omit the introductions the Perkinses have written for periods, subjects, and authors and the Cross-Current sections that add contexts to particular periods.

When the professor’s book is completed, it is printed and bound in either an 8 ½ by 11 or a 6 by 9 inch format in the number of copies ordered for a specific class.

BEGINNING A NEW HALF CENTURY

With its eleventh edition (2006), THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE enters its second half-century of scholarly and educational leadership. No other anthology of American literature has held favor so long or been so frequently admired and imitated. Its chosen authors and selections are repeated as the core readings of competing anthologies. It was the first American literature anthology to offer both a two-volume and a shorter one-volume edition, first to provide substantial representation for women and minorities, and it remains the only one to recognize the changes recently brought to our literature by the rapid globalization of our institutions, our people, and our writers.

Readers of this new edition will find its distinctive qualities of selection and scholarship continued and enhanced.

COHERENT VISION

Edited in its first three editions (1956-1967) by Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, eminent scholars who established its place at the center of American literary study, ATIL has been edited since the fourth edition by George and Barbara Perkins, who have maintained the idea of a book for students at all levels of understanding and achievement. Their partnership brings coherence to the confusions and contradictions of college and university anthologies of American literature compiled by committees or driven by political agendas. In reassessing the materials for each new edition, they strive to present the best and most necessary elements of American literature in volumes that accommodate the work of a college course, provide instructors and students with choices, and avoid the confusion of unnecessary excess. Maintaining that vision in this edition they have responded to changing pedagogic climates and have taken advantage of improved book-making technologies and advances in electronic support systems to incorporate major innovations.

CROSSCURRENTS

To assist students who may be overwhelmed by exponential increases in primary literature and in printed and electronic aids to understanding, the editors have looked again at a past that becomes less and less familiar to each succeeding generation. Students of literature find themselves increasingly out of touch with the contexts of earlier writings. To alleviate this condition, we have designed and incorporated a series of “Crosscurrents,” sections that highlight some of the passing intellectual and cultural developments that have helped determine the ongoing flow of our literature. Carefuly selected excerpts from various sources illuminate the times, suggest avenues for further exploration, and provide materials for discussion and writing.

For Volume I, these include PURITANS, INDIANS, AND WITCHCRAFT, featuring passages from William Wood, John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Mary Towne Easty, and Samuel Sewall; FREEDOM, RELIGION, AND REVOLUTION, with John Ponet, John Wise, Jonathan Mayhew, and Patrick Henry; TRANSCENDENTALISM, WOMEN, AND SOCIAL IDEALS, with Elizabeth Peabody, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Fanny Fern; THE ROMANTIC AND THE REAL, with Sir Walter Scott, William Gilmore Simms, Lydia Maria Child, Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, and Henry James; and SLAVERY AND THE CIVIL WAR, with Briton Hammon, William Cushing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Songs of Slavery and the Civil War (Follow the Drinking Gourd, Dixie, The Battle Hymn of the Republic), and Sarah Morgan.

For Volume II, they include FREEDOM AND THE GILDED AGE, including passages from Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, George Washington Cable, and Booker T. Washington; PROSPERITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE, with Andrew Carnegie, Stephen Crane, William Vaughn Moody, Zitkala-sa, and W. E. B. Du Bois; MODERNISM AND THE AMERICAN POETIC VOICE, with Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Archibald MacLeish; THE JAZZ AGE AND THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE, with James Weldon Johnson, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and St. James Infirmary Blues; THE AGE OF ANXIETY: POST-WAR MALAISE AND THE BEAT GENERATION, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Rachel Carson; and THE AGE OF ANXIETY: VIETNAM, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT, with Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Betty Friedan, and Tim O’Brien.

Intended to stimulate interest without exhausting their subjects, each of these Crosscurrents is crafted to resonate against other selections within the book and suggest avenues for exploration and writing outside of it.

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ONLINE LEARNING CENTER

For students enrolled in classes using THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE, this will provide help with literary analysis, understanding basic literary concepts, writing about literature, finding and evaluating online resources, avoiding plagiarism, and formatting bibliographies, as well as a sample research paper in MLA style.

For professors, a password-protected segment will provide supplemental information on more than 150 authors, historical overviews for each period, suggestions for connections between writers and works, Powerpoint lectures designed for major periods, sample quiz and exam questions, and an annotated bibliography.

CLASSROOM PERFOMANCE SYSTEM

A McGraw-Hill system designed for large lecture classes, CPS gives instructors the ability to solicit immediate wireless feedback from each student, thereby promoting classroom involvement and assisting understanding. CPS provides questions to encourage classroom discussion, outlines for Powerpoint lectures, and materials for multiple-choice and true-false quizzes.

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PRAISE FROM CURRENT USERS

"This is an amazing book."

"It is a book students would be apt to keep for a lifetime."

"ATIL is innovative, as with the inclusion of 'global' authors and a variety of graphics."

"What I like best . . . is that there is enough scholarship and detail to satisfy the more scholarly of our students, yet it is written in such a manner that the less scholarly are sufficiently stimulated to read."