The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1

Rating:
Summary: A Fine American Anthology
Review: It was 1994 and I was in my second semester since returning to college at the age of 30. At the time, I was unsure as to whether I should major in English to study History instead.

I decided to take an American literature course that Spring of 1994. The Heath Anthology was the assigned text. In considering this book ten years later, I feel that one of the benefits of such a text is that it provides a framework for more learning. The book contains excerpts of various works such as the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Harriet Ann Jacobs. If one is interested in reading more, the bookstore, library or yes, Amazon.com can be searched in order to obtain the complete work as well as other material by the same author.

The Heath Anthology also has complete works including Frederick Douglass' autobiography and fiction of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. Poetry, letters and songs are more of what lies in this quite large (but worth it) tome.

Despite the physical weight of the book, I carried it with me to my full-time job possibly every day and I no doubt read it during countless lunch hours. I can't say that I enjoyed all of the material - Thoreau in particular bored me, although I should open the book and give him another try now that I'm older and perhaps more patient. I enjoyed Douglass, Jacobs, Stowe, the Native American poetry, Franklin, Bradstreet, Whitman, Poe and Irving among others. Perhaps when I graduate next year, I can revisit them all again.

What I enjoyed about the American literature class that I took, of which this book was a major part, was that I got a sense of the historical events connected to the literature, which propelled me to pursue the study of history.

Rating:
Summary: Exhaustive and exhausting
Review: This anthology includes darn near everything you can think of. Though the works of major authors (say for instance Cooper) are sometimes given short shrift in favor of the "marginalized" voices of obscure writers (Frances Sargent Lock Osgood, to cite only one example), there is an abundance of worthwhile material for classroom study in its 3000-plus pages of fine print.
My complaint is that in the service of being inclusive, the editors have constructed such a painfully heavy and dense text that it will be a chore to read or to take anywhere. As a teacher I want to encourage wide reading of American literature, but I don't want to burden them with a book that is so reader-unfriendly that they'll bristle every time they have to crack open this hulking giant.