Studies in Classic American Literature, Volume 2

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 2003 - History - 632 pages
This book first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature from the previous six years, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Dana, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19, but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form; it contains the complete surviving 1918-19 text of the essays of the English Review period, including two previously unpublished essay versions; it offers five previously unpublished essays from 1919, as well as a host of other materials (for example, four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman are included).

From inside the book

Contents

I
v
II
vii
III
xi
IV
xvii
V
xxi
VII
xxiv
VIII
xxx
IX
xxxiv
XXXVIII
103
XL
120
XLI
131
XLII
146
XLIII
161
XLIV
165
XLVI
189
XLVIII
202

X
xxxvi
XI
xxxviii
XII
xl
XIII
xliii
XIV
xliv
XV
xlvi
XVI
xlix
XVII
liii
XVIII
liv
XIX
lvi
XX
lvii
XXI
lxiv
XXII
lxxii
XXIII
lxxix
XXIV
5
XXV
9
XXVI
11
XXVIII
18
XXIX
30
XXX
40
XXXI
50
XXXIII
64
XXXIV
79
XXXVI
94
L
213
LII
227
LIII
239
LV
258
LVI
270
LVII
286
LVIII
303
LIX
307
LX
317
LXI
332
LXII
341
LXIII
356
LXIV
369
LXVI
377
LXVIII
385
LXX
389
LXXII
399
LXXIII
417
LXXIV
429
LXXV
539
LXXVI
589
LXXVII
629
LXXVIII
630
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About the author (2003)

D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885. His father was a coal miner and Lawrence grew up in a mining town in England. He always hated the mines, however, and frequently used them in his writing to represent both darkness and industrialism, which he despised because he felt it was scarring the English countryside. Lawrence attended high school and college in Nottingham and, after graduation, became a school teacher in Croyden in 1908. Although his first two novels had been unsuccessful, he turned to writing full time when a serious illness forced him to stop teaching. Lawrence spent much of his adult life abroad in Europe, particularly Italy, where he wrote some of his most significant and most controversial novels, including Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who had left her first husband and her children to live with him, spent several years touring Europe and also lived in New Mexico for a time. Lawrence had been a frail child, and he suffered much of his life from tuberculosis. Eventually, he retired to a sanitorium in Nice, France. He died in France in 1930, at age 44. In his relatively short life, he produced more than 50 volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel journals, and letters, in addition to the novels for which he is best known. Ezra Greenspan is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He writes widely about modern American literature and is the co-editor of Book History.