#American Lit reading list

1. After 8 weeks of reading only French books….
2. it is time to shift gears!
3. Here is my reading list for the coming months:
4. American Literature 1820-1920

Update 25 August 2022

• James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823) – FINISHED!
•  
• Review
•   Can you read J.F. Cooper for pleasure, is it possible?
• Update: Reading a book list I never had a chance to study in college.
• I’m determined to read the books any
• college kid is required for a course in American Literature.
• Good news: I’ve read 7/30 already so a bit of a kick start.
• Bad news: James Fennimore Cooper’s book “The Pioneers” (1823)
• with Natty Bumppo is driving me to drink!
• The first 25 chapters are so difficult to get through…
• …character descriptions in excruciating detail, history, religion.
• But just when you want to toss the book….it gets better!
• Romance blooms, intrigue, secrets, concealed identity
• …so don’t give up on this book!

2) William Apess, A Son of the Forest (1829) – NOT AVAILABLE
Impossible to find this book, not widely in print.

3) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” and Selected Essays (1836) – FINISHED!

Review:

I know this is a classic…but goodness, gracious
this was a disappointment.
Written in another age…for a different reading public
…the book is hard to digest in 21st C.
I did learn: Does a Transcendentalist believe in God?
They believe in the idea of a personal knowledge of God,
…. no intermediary (church) was needed for spiritual insight.
So I guess my time was not completely wasted….
Not conforming with the general opinions about this book….
(…Emerson would be so proud of me…)
and giving it only 2 stars.

1. 
   4) Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
2. 21) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
   22) Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces (1900)
3. 25) Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908)
   26) Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909)
   27) Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912)
   28) James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
   29) Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)
   23) Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (1901)
   5) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave(1845)
4. 7) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
   8) Solomon Northup,12 Years a Slave (1853)
   9) Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855)
   10) Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
   11) Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861)
   12) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
   13) Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems (1865)
5. 19) Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman (1899)
6. Maria Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885)
   16) William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
   14) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) – FINISHED
   17) Henry James, The Bostonians (1886)– FINISHED – REVIEW
   18) Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) – FINISHED
   6) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850) – FINISHED
   20) Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899) – FINISHED
   24) Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905) – FINISHED
   30) Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919) – FINISHED