Course Description

Instructor: Ellery McLanahan

Eight pairs of American authors will be examined and compared, using an American Studies approach to understand the lives and intentions of these writers.

1. Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson
3. John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair
4. Sinclair Lewis and John Updike
5. T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings
6. Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau
7. William Faulkner and Nathaniel Hawthorne
8. Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain

No additional materials are needed to appreciate this course. The literary works of these authors are generally well known and are illustrative of the life and intent of the author. This course is provided from an American Studies point of view and focused on the writers’ accounting of the circumstances they are portraying.