Martin Luther College

"Depicting the gradual disintegration of the aristocratic Compson family through four fractured narratives, this novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centeredness. It features some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their Black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed...

"In 1803, when the United States purchased Louisiana from France, the great expanse of this new American territory was a blank - not only on the map but in our knowledge. President Thomas Jefferson keenly understood that the course of the nation's destiny lay westward and that a national "Voyage of Discovery" must be mounted to determine the nature and accessibility of the frontier." "He commissioned his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead...

Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes...

Huck tells of his adventures travelling down the Mississippi on a raft with an escaped slave, and of the many people they encounter, including a pair of swindlers and two families in a feud.

Concise discussions of the lives and principal works of American writers, thinkers, and cultural figures, written by subject experts.

"Reverberations of the Vietnam War can still be felt in American culture. The post-9/11 United States invasion and occupation of Iraq in particular, has evoked comparisons to the nearly two decades of American presence in Viet Nam (1954-1973). That evocation has renewed interest in the Vietnam War, resulting in the re-printing of older War narratives and the publication of new ones. This volume tracks those echoes as they appear in American, Vietnamese-American,...