This course surveys American writing from its origins before the United States existed as a nation until the middle of the 20th century (WWII). Emphasizing the interrelationship between the literature and its historical background, the course includes the study of important prose and poetry from the colonial, revolutionary, Romantic and Modern periods. Attention is given to this literature’s diverse cultural strands, the contested space of exploration and colonization (including Puritanism), Enlightenment rationalism and individual liberty, transcendentalism, slavery and civil war, race relations, realism, naturalism, Imagism and Modernism.