Student's History of American Literature

Before American literature had its modern canon, a professor at Knox College traced the Republic of Letters from its colonial origins to the close of the nineteenth century. William Simonds wrote this history for students, but his purpose was larger: to show how American writing emerged from and responded to the nation's own turbulent becoming. Beginning with the earliest colonial voices and moving through the flowering of Romanticism, the rise of Regionalism, and the emergence of Realism, Simonds weaves literary movements into the broader currents of national history. His is a nineteenth-century mind surveying a nineteenth-century past, which means the reader gets something rare: a contemporary view of American literature as it was being shaped, before the canon hardened into tradition. For students, scholars, and anyone curious about how American writing first understood itself.