Intended for high-intermediate/advanced level students of English as a foreign language, this book contains selections from the wide range of American literature, from its beginnings to the modern period. Each section begins with a general introduction to the literary period, and then presents essays about individual authors, selections from the author's writings, discussion questions at the end of each prose selection or group of poems, and discussion questions at the end of each chapter. The "National Beginnings" section discusses Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The "Romanticism and Reason" section discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Henry James. "The American Short Story: 19th Century Developments" section discusses Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Edgar Allan Poe, and Frank R. Stockton. The "Realism and Reaction" section discusses Theodore Dreiser, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, Henry L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck. The "Modern Voices in Prose and Poetry" section discusses Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Archibald Macleish, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Katherine Ann Porter, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and James Wright. The "Modern American Drama" section presents two short plays: "Return to Dust" (George Bamber) and "The Other Player" (Owen G. Arno). Suggestions to the teacher conclude the book. (RS)