George and Barbara Perkins

The American Tradition in Literature
The 12th edition, Graw-Hill, 2009, will soon be available. Here is a brief excerpt from its preface:

The most-honored American literature textbook, The American Tradition in Literature extends fifty years of leadership into a second half-century. Leading where others follow, this is the book that first:

--Defined the central canon of American literature (1956-1957).

--Included complete novels (1961).

--Enriched the canon to include better representation of women, African-Americans, and Native Americans (1974).

--Inserted colored plates of writers and iconic images of American history (1994).

--Gave prominent recognition to the substantial recent contributions of immigrant writers (1999).

--Added timelines, black and white photographs, portraits, and frontispieces (2002).

--Included Crosscurrents, brief sections that offer opportunities for further exploration and writing by providing social, intellectual, and political contexts for selected historical periods (2007).

Over the years, THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE has earned an unmatched reputation for concise, clearly written, and accurate introductions, notes and bibliographies. In order to provide instructors freedom to design their individual classes and to encourage critical thinking among students, the book provides generous selections, informs with pertinent facts, and avoids advancing specific political agendas. The goal is a book spacious enough for many choices in assignments, but compact enough to escape unattractive and unwieldy heft. Careful selection within these guidelines allows elimination of much that is superfluous and facilitates inclusion of significant writers who remain wholly absent from or under-represented in other anthologies. Among these are:

Isabel Allende, Ann Beattie, William Bartram, Robert Bly, Joseph Brodsky, Rachel Carson, Nash Candelaria, St. Jean Crevecoeur, Edwidge Danticat, Don DeLillo, Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Hamlin Garland, Ellen Glasgow, Woody Guthrie, Briton Hammon, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Red Cloud, Red Jacket, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Russell Lowell, James Merrill, Czeslaw Milosz, William Vaughan Moody, Sarah Morgan, Bharati Mukherjee, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Oliver, Francis Parkman, Annie Proulx, John Crowe Ransom, Sam Shepard, I. B. Singer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Stafford, Anne Tyler, Giovanni Da Verrazzano, August Wilson, James Wright, Jay Wright, and Elinor Wylie.

For the twelfth edition, editors George and Barbara Perkins have profited from the advice and contributions of two new Advisory editors, James P. Phelan, Ohio State University, and Elizabeth M. Renker, Ohio State University.

Prominent features of this edition include:

--New and newly enriched Crosscurrents on “Romanticism and the American Indian,” ”Nature and the Environment in a New World,” “Slavery, the Slave Trade, and the Civil War,” “Faith and Crisis,” “The Age of Anxiety: The Beat Generation and Social Responsibilities,” and “What is an American? Freedom and Responsibility.”

--Revised contents that add dates for periods and clarify thematic groupings.

--Integration of the Globalization of American Literature section into the general contents.

--New writers:

John James Audubon, Abraham Cahan, Alexander Falconbridge, George Fitzhugh, Al Gore, Francis Higginson, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Sarah Morgan Piatt, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft [Bamewawagezhikaquay], and John Edgar Wideman.

--New works by previously represented writers:

Ambrose Bierce, “Chickamauga;” Emily Dickinson, “I Know that He Exists;” Washington Irving, “Traits of Indian Character;” Robert Lowell. “Memories of West Street and Lepke;” Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick; Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail, “The Buffalo;” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart;” Carl Sandburg, “Chicago.”

--Unmatched electronic support from ATIL PRIMIS, a database of hundreds of writers and many hundreds of selections that enables instructors to add to the selections in THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE to create personalized textbooks to meet their own specifications.

--Online Learning Center, with separate portions for students and instructors.

--CPS, the Classroom Performance System, facilitating classroom interaction by means of wireless responses.

The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature
2nd edition, HarperCollins, 2002, George Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger.

A Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club selection in its first edition, this is the most comprehensive single-volume guide to the literature of the United States, and the only one that also includes entries for Canada, Latin American, and the Caribbean.

A Season in New South Wales
Commonwealth, 1998, George Perkins.

Experiences as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Newcastle, Australia, lead to a portrait of that country as seen through its landscape, its people, its history, and its literature

The Harper Handbook to Literature
2nd edition, Longman, 1997. Northrop Frye, Sheridan Baker, George Perkins, and Barbara Perkins.

A guide to literary history, terms, and concepts, in alphabetical order from Abbey Theatre and Abecedarius to Zeugma and Zoom Shot.

Women's Work
McGraw-Hill, 1994. Barbara Perkins, Robyn Warhol, and George Perkins.

A complete introduction to the literature of American women in anthology form, from colonial times to the present.

Kaleidoscope: Stories of the American Experience
Oxford, 1993. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins.

A multicultural reader that gathers diaries, histories, autobiographies, short stories, and excerpts from novels to provide a history of immigration and acculturation from the 16th to the 20th century.

Contemporary American Literature
Random House, 1988. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins.

A survey of fiction, poetry, and drama from the late 1940s through the four decades that ended with the 1980s, encompassing the changes of the postwar years, the upheaval of the sixties, and the new voices of the decade before the 1990s turned its attention to millennial concerns.

American Poetic Theory
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972. George Perkins.

An anthology of American poets writing on poetic theory and craft.

The Theory of the American Novel
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. George Perkins.

An anthology of American novelists writing on novelistic theory and craft.

Writing Clear Prose
Scott, Foresman, 1964. George Perkins.

A brief rhetoric for college writing classes.