Let's face it, most people won't be buying this volume by choice--they'll buy it for a class. Still, it's good to know what you're getting into. This is a pretty good anthology of American literature, starting all the way back with Native American myths and Columbus's journals and continuing through Puritan, Enlightenment, Transcendentalist, Romantic, and modern periods of literature in America.

The introductions to the pieces are good--as good or better than Norton's--and the selections themselves are generally good. Still, though, there are a few notable things missing, but that is to be expected in any compendium, I suppose.

One of the highlights of this volume is the full reprints of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. If you have to buy this book, it should be useful and may even be worth keeping around after the class is over. I know I'm going to keep mine.

Few literary textbooks equal "An Anthology of American Literature" in length and dryness. While the book is a collection of mediocre stories who are now only seeing the light of day due to the baneful effects of political correctness, the editor of this work delves deeper to not include a single illustration that may have shed some light of this terrible experience of reading this collection of pointless stories,

I, on the other hand, think its a great collection of American literature, but maybe just a bit too pricey for what it offers. I would suggest it more as something to use as a reference than as something that should be read cover to cover, I mean, geeze, its 2060 pages long.

This huge textbook is a steal: hundreds of major works from the last century and a half, printed on quality paper, bound with a strong but flexible gum binding. If this were a hardcover, you'd pay twice the price for what it includes. It's thorough and scholarly, a tome that defines the Big League of anthologies. It's not for the shallow reader, though, who's accustomed to the sensuous audio-visuals of TV and the Internet. This is TEXT. Time to resuscitate the thinking mind, the patient intellect, the autonomous imagination.

The footnotes are numbered strangely and they don't elaborate on the footnoted item very well.

This was the textbook used in my American Literature I class last semester. Volume Two is being used in the second half that I am taking this semester. The book offers a good collection of American Literature from the earliest European Explorers to the late 1800's. The additional information offered in the introductions to each author and literary time period adds to the student's understanding of the works.