Literature: A Portable Anthology Book

Preface for Instructors

PART ONE: 40 STORIES

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Edgar Allan Poe, A Cask of Amontillado

Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

* Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

* Anton Chekhov, A Blunder

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Willa Cather, Paul’s Case

James Joyce, Araby

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

* D. H. Lawrence, The Rocking-Horse Winner

Katherine Anne Porter, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

William Faulkner, Barn Burning

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

Eudora Welty A Worn Path

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

* Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

* Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

* Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

Ganriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

John Updike, A & P

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

* Margaret Atwood, Death by Landscape

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

* Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

* Zoe Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Capetown

Amy Tan, Two Kinds

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

* Murthan Mungan, Muradhan and Selvihan or The Tale of the Crystal Kiosk

* Ha Jin, The Bridegroom

Lorrie Moore, How to Become a Writer

* Sherman Alexie, What You Pawn I Will Redeem

* Edwidge Danticat, Night Women

PART TWO: 200 POEMS

Anonymous, Lord Randal

Sir Thomas Wyatt, They flee from me

Edmund Spenser, One day I wrote her name upon the strand

Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?")

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold")

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 ("My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun")

John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

* John Donne, Death, be not proud

Ben Jonson, On My First Son

* Lady Mary Wroth, My pain, still smothered in my grieved breast

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

George Herbert, Easter-wings

George Herbert, The Pulley

John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent

Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband

Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

Jonathan Swift, A Description of the Morning

* Alexander Pope, from "An Essay on Criticism"

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

William Blake, The Lamb

William Blake, The Tyger

William Blake, London

Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose

William Wordsworth, I wandered lonely as a cloud

William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality

William Wordsworth, The world is too much with us

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

George Gordon, Lord Byron, She walks in beauty

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

John Keats, When I have fears that I may cease to be

* John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

* Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself

Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

* Emily Dickinson, Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Emily Dickinson, I felt a funeral in my Brain

* Emily Dickinson, I like to see it lap the Miles

Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest sense

Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz — when I died

Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death

Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

A. E. Housman, Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

A. E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young

* William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan

William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask

Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost, Birches

* Robert Frost, "Out, Out — "

Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

* Robert Frost, Design

Gertrude Stein, Susie Asado

Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Wallace Stevens, Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

Marianne Moore, Poetry

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot, Preludes

John Crowe Ransom, Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter

Claude McKay, America

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wild Swans

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

e. e. cummings, in Just —

e. e. cummings, pity this busy monster, manunkind

Jean Toomer, Reapers

Hart Crane, My Grandmother’s Love Letters

Sterling A. Brown, Riverbank Blues

* Langston Hughes, Theme for English B

Langston Hughes, Harlem

Countee Cullen, Incident

* Lorine Niedecker, My Life by Water

W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening

W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz

Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

John Frederick Nims, Love Poem

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

* Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters

Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

Robert Duncan, The Torso

Charles Bukowski, my old man

Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Philip Larkin, High Windows

* Denise Levertov, In Thai Binh (Peace) Province

* Maxine Kumin, Credo

* Kenneth Koch, Thank You

* Gerald Stern, The Dog

Frank O’Hara, The Day Lady Died

Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California

* W. S. Merwin, The Nails

Galway Kinnell, The Bear

James Wright, A Blessing

Philip Levine, What Work Is

* Donald Hall, Names of Horses

Conrad Hilberry, Player Piano

Samuel Hazo, For Fawzi in Jerusalem

Anne Sexton, Cinderella

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

Gary Snyder, Hitch Haiku

Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes

Geoffrey Hill, In Memory of Jane Fraser

Sylvia Plath, Metaphors

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Etheridge Knight, Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane

Sonia Sanchez, An Anthem

Audre Lorde, Coal

Charles Wright, March Journal

* Mary Oliver, First Snow

Jayne Cortez, Into This Time

Lucille Clifton, at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989

Nancy Willard, Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him

Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll

Charles Simic, Begotten of the Spleen

Michael S. Harper, Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Seamus Heaney, Digging

* Margaret Atwood, True Stories

* Ted Kooser, Old Cemetery

Al Young, A Dance for Ma Rainey

James Welch, Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat

Robert Pinsky, Shirt

* Billy Collins, Nostalgia

Richard Garcia, Why I Left the Church

Simon J. Ortiz, Speaking

Toi Derricotte, A Note on My Son’s Face

Sharon Olds, I Go Back to May 1937

Marilyn Hacker, Villanelle

* Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

James Tate, The Wheelchair Butterfly

* Quincy Troupe, Poem for the Root Doctor of Rock n Roll

Eavan Boland, The Pomegranate

Ai, Why Can’t I Leave You?

Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It

* Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come

Heather McHugh, What He Thought

Leslie Marmon Silko, Prayer to the Pacific

Sekou Sundiata, Blink Your Eyes

Victor Hernandez Cruz, Problems with Hurricanes

Ray A. Young Bear, From the Spotted Night

Carolyn Forché, The Colonel

* Medbh McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach

Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Yellow Light

Rita Dove, The Satisfaction Coal Company

Naomi Shihab Nye, The Small Vases from Hebron

Alice Fulton, You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain

* Alberto Ríos, Indentations in the Sugar

* Mary Ruefle, Naked Ladies

Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin

Jimmy Santiago Baca, Family Ties

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Cold as Heaven

Anita Endrezze, The Girl Who Loved the Sky

Ray González, Praise the Tortilla, Praise Menudo, Praise Chorizo

Mark Doty, Tiara

Richard Jones, Cathedral

* Jane Hirshfield, At Night

Lorna Dee Cervantes, Freeway 280

* Thylias Moss, "The Lynching

Louise Erdrich, A Love Medicine

* Kim Addonizio, The Sound

* Donald Revell, Mignonette

Cornelius Eady, My Mother, If She Had Won Free Dance Lessons

Marilyn Chin, Turtle Soup

Cathy Song, Girl Powdering Her Neck

* Kimiko Hahn, Mother’s Mother

* Li-Young Lee, The Gift

Martín Espada, The Saint Vincent de Paul Food Pantry Stomp

* Lucia Perillo, Long Time Too Long

* Carl Phillips, To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness

* Bob Hicok, Plus Shipping

* Denise Duhamel, One Afternoon when Barbie Wanted to Join the Military

* Virgil Suárez, Tea Leaves, Caracoles, Coffee Beans

Timothy Liu, Thoreau

Sherman Alexie, Postcards to Columbus

* Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Outlandish Blues (The Movie)

Allison Joseph, On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person

PART THREE: 9 PLAYS

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (Translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald)

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House (Translated by Rolf Fjelde)

Susan Glaspell, Trifles

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

* August Wilson, Fences

* David Ives, The Sure Thing

* Wendy Wasserstein, Tender Offer

Appendix: Writing About Literature

The Role of Good Reading

The Writing Process

Some Common Types of Writing Assignments

Writing About Stories

Writing About Poems

Writing About Plays

Writing a Literary Research Paper

Biographical Notes on the Authors

Glossary of Literary Terms

Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines

* new to this edition