Preface to the Fifth Edition

Preface to the Fifth Edition

Designed to serve as a useful companion for students and general readers, this volume provides ready references, first of all, to the authors and writings, past and present, popular and polite, that are included in the area of American literature. In addition, the references extend to the written word in America outside conventional literary criteria but relevant to them. The volume treats major nonliterary aspects of the American mind and the American scene as these are reflectedin and influenced by American literature. The scope of the work also embraces far more thanbelles lettres, yet, while it attempts to be as comprehensive as might be desirable for a reader concerned with the literature of this land, it excludes some forms of publication, such as cook-books and comic books. It is a companion to reading rather than to literature alone, but literature is its focus.

In alphabetic arrangement, the work includes short biographies and brief bibliographies of American authors, with information regarding their style and subjects. Next most common as a category are separate entries printing over 1,100 full summaries of important American novels, stories, essays, poems (with verse forms noted), plays, biographies and autobiographies, tracts, narratives, and histories, all of them long enough to provide a good sense of the original works, and many of them containing succinct but salient quotations. Other subjects that receive substantial treatment include definitions and historical outlines of literary schools and movements, literary awards (in many instances with lists of winners and their works), literary societies, scholarly organizations, magazines, newspapers, anthologies, cooperative publications, book collectors, printers, colleges and universities and their alumni in the world of letters, and a wide variety of other matters related to writing in America. Literary terms that are sufficiently defined in dictionaries are not cited unless they have a distinctive history in the United States or warrant definition by American examples. Thus there are no entries on the conventional terms of prosody, but existentialism, free verse, impressionism, polyphonic prose, and stream of consciousness are all treated, and there are full entries on such subjects as the ballad, local color, romanticism, and the tall tale.

As indicated even by a glance at the column of Literary History in the Chronological Index that concludes this book, much of the writing that is discussed in these pages may notbe distinguished as literature, but it is all important for a comprehensive review of expressionin America. The written word does not exist in a vacuum, and the author of this bookhas therefore constantly kept in mind the idea that the fullest understanding of major works in literature, let alone lesser pieces of writing, depends upon an informed knowledge of the social and cultural atmosphere of their place and time. This view has led to the inclusion of entries on some social, economic, aesthetic, scientific, military, political, and religious subjects that have affected the actions and thoughts, and hence the writings, in the lands now forming the United States, from the time of their discovery to the present day. However, to keep the book with-in compass, some entries on peripheral subjects that appeared in earlier editions have beenremoved to make room for the addition of more authors, mainly those of recent years, and their writings.

The work continues to include some biographies of persons who are not authors but who have been important in the nation's social history and culture, brief articles on religious sects, Indian tribes, wars, law and documents, educational institutions, important cities and regions, popular songs, and other subjects that may seem outside the purview of literature but whose relationshipswith it are genuine and significant. Entries will be found on subjects that range alphabetically from Abolitionist to the Zuñi Indians, the former entry, for example, including references to authors as various as Samuel Sewall, Franklin, Crèvecœur, Richard Hildreth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hinton Helper, Lowell, and Whittier, and the latter including a reference to an author as current as Edmund Wilson.

Just as American materials that lie on the periphery of literature are treated, so some foreign materials that are relevant to this country's writings are also represented. In a few instances these include significant explorers and colonial historians of neighboring lands, but the writers of Canada, treated in earlier editions, are now deleted because they have their own Companion. Foreign authors are thanked with more specific acknowledgment of their contributions. In that edition I also noted that “Frederic R. Gunsky, my typist and secretary during most of the time, has come to know the work as intimately as I, typing and retyping the various articles. He has gone far beyond the limits of the work required of him, from research and the compilation of materials to excellent suggestions concerning the general plan.” Later editions profited from the help of several student assistants, chief among them being Gordon O. Taylor for the fourth edition and Michael Griffith for this one.

When the work was first begun in 1936, my sister Ellen H. Barnsten rendered invaluable assistance to me. For the fourth edition I am happy to say that I again received help within the family, that time from my daughter Carol H. Field. I was always aided too by suggestions from my son Peter and from my brother-in-law, Joseph M. Bransten. But most of all I think back with happy memories to my wife Ruth. Over the years of our marriage she always provided interest and support to my concern with a work that has lasted so long as to have grown from the composition of a book into a part, almost a way, of life.

J.D.H.

Berkeley, California

March 1983

Note to The Sixth Edition

This Sixth Edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature has again been entirely reset, for there are 181 full new entries, and several hundred more which have significant revisions, in addition to the requisite updating throughout. In preparing the Sixth Edition, I have used all or part of the 77 new entries James Hart had finished at the time of his death in 1990, but have revised and made them current, and I have added 104 new entries of my own, seeking the dynamic balance between past and contemporary literature that James Hart always sought to maintain. To make room for new material and for other considerations I have omitted Presidents of the U.S. except for the founding fathers of the Enlightenment and of the early Republic, and those few thereafter who were age-shapers or who left a significant literary legacy. Colleges have been omitted, except for two: Harvard, as the first and pattern for the rest, and Black Mountain, a brief and brilliant creation of poets. Readers will notice, however, that many of the colleges, with founding dates, and all of the Presidents, appear in the Chronological Index, which contains a new twelve years' worth of literary and social notes since the last edition.

I wish to thank the kind people at the Lucy Scribner Library, Skidmore College, and Claudia Hayes, Reference Librarian at Saratoga Springs Public Library, who was an angel. The new material is of course my responsibility entirely.

P.W.L.

Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

April 1995