An anthology of short fiction stories by various authors which span the history of the United States.
Content Note
Part One : Romanticism and realism. Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving -- The Birthmark / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The tell-tale heart / Edgar Allan Poe -- Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville -- A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- The rovolt of "Mother" / Mary E. Wilkins Freeman -- The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- A respectable Women / Kate Chopin -- The bride comes to Yellow Sky / Stephen Crane -- The wife of his youth / Charles W. Chesnutt -- The man that corrupted Hadleyburg / Mark Twain -- Writers at home -- Part Two : The birth of the modern. -- The middle years / Henry James -- Sophistication / Sherwood Anderson -- The sculptor's funeral / Willa Cather -- Drenched in light / Zora Neale Hurston -- Soldier's home / Ernest Hemingway -- Glory in the daytime / Dorothy Parker -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The greatest man in the world / James Thurber -- Rope / Katherine Anne Porter -- The far and the near / Thomas Wolfe -- Writers as celebrities -- Part Three : Building a tradition. The manwho saw the flood / Richard Wright -- The tall man / William Faulkner -- A visit of charity / Eudora Welty -- t The patterns of love / William Maxwell -- The German / Martha Gellhorn -- Day after tomorrow / Dawn Powell The bride / Maeve Brennan -- Gimpel the fool / Issaac Bashevis Singer -- The Magic Barrel / Bernard Malamud -- Everything that rises must converge / Flannery O'Connor -- Regionalism -- Part Four: New voices and identities. Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen -- Sonny's blues / James Baldwin -- Roselily / Alice Walker -- The student's wife / Raymond Carver -- Snares / Louis Erdrich -- THe water-faucet vision / Gish Jen -- Daughter of invention / Julia Alvarez -- Divine Providence / Sandra Cisneros -- This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona / Sherman Alexie -- The night in question / Tobias Wolff -- The third and final continent / Jhumpa Lahiri -- The Gilgul of Park Avenue / Nathan Englander -- English as a second language / Lucy Honig -- Magazines in America.