Table of Contents

Timeline Introduction
Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
1507 The name "America" appears on a map
Toby Lester 1521, August 13 Mexico in America
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
1536, July 24 Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca
Ilan Stavans 1585 "Counterfeited according to the truth"
Michael Gaudio
1607 Fear and love in the Virginia colony
Adam Goodheart 1630 A city upon a hill
Elizabeth Winthrop
1643 A nearer neighbor to the Indians
Ted Widmer 1666, July 10 Anne Bradstreet
Wai Chee Dimock
1670 The American jeremiad
Emory Elliott 1670 The stamp of God's image
Jason D. LaFountain
1673 The Jesuit relations
Laurent Dubois 1683 Francis Daniel Pastorius
Alfred L. Brophy
1692 The Salem witchcraft trials
Susan Castillo 1693--94, March 4 Edward Taylor
Werner Sollors
1700 Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph
David Blight 1722 Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters
Joyce E. Chaplin
1740 The Great Awakening
Joanne van der Woude 1740s, September 13-14 1814, Yankee Doodle goes to town; Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner 1765, December 23 Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur
Leo Damrosch
1773, September Phillis Wheatley
Rafia Zafar 1776 The Declaration of Independence
Frank Kelleter
1784, June Charles Willson Peale
Michael Leja 1787 James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention
Mitchell Meltzer
1787--1790 John Adams, Discourses on Davila
John Diggins 1791 Philip Freneau and The National Gazette
Jefrey L. Pasley
1796 Washington's farewell address
Francois Furstenberg 1798 Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts
Nancy Armstrong
1798 American gothic
Marc Amfreville 1801, March 4 Jefferson's first inaugural address
Jan Ellen Lewis
1804, January The matter of Haiti
Kaiama Glover 1809 Cupola of the world
Judith Richardson
1819 The Missouri crisis
John Stauffer 1820, November 27 Landscape with birds
Christoph Irmscher
1821 Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary
Lisa Brooks 1821, June 30 Junius Brutus Booth
Coppelia Kahn
1822 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow's Hiawatha
David Treuer 1825, November Thomas Cole and the Hudson River
Alan Wallach
1826, July 4 Songs of the republic
Steve Erickson 1826 Cooper's Leatherstocking tales
Richard Hutson
1826; 1927 Transnational poetry
Stephen Burt 1827 Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
Terryl L. Givens
1828 David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles
Tommie Shelby 1830, May 21 Jump Jim Crow
W. T. Lhamon, Jr.
1831, March 5 The Cherokee Nation decision
Philip Deloria 1832, July 10 President Jackson's bank veto
Dan Feller
1835, January Democracy in America
Ted Widmer 1835 William Gilmore Simms, The Yemasseee
Jefrey Johnson
1835 The Sacred Harp
Sean Wilentz 1836, February 23--March 6 The Alamo and Texas border writing
Norma E. Cantu
1836, February 28 Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz 1837, August 31 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"
James Conant
1838, July 15 "The Divinity School Address"
Herwig Friedl 1838, September 3 The slave narrative
Caille Millner
1841 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
Robert Clark 1846, June James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers
Shelley Streeby
1846, late July Henry David Thoreau
Jonathan Arac 1850 The Scarlet Letter
Bharati Mukherje
1850, July 19 Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement
Lawrence Buell 1850, August 5 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
Clark Blaise 1851, Moby-Dick 1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin
Beverly Lowry
1852 Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and utopian communities
Winfried Fluck 1852, July 5 Frederick Douglass, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?"
Liam Kennedy
1854, March Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction
Cindy Weinstein 1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Angus Fletcher
1858 The Lincoln-Douglas debates
Michael T. Gilmore 1859 The science of the Indian
Scott Richard Lyons
1861 Emily Dickinson
Susan Stewart 1862, December 13 The journeys of Little Women
Shirley Samuels
1865, March 4 Lincoln's second inaugural address
Ted Widmer 1865 "Conditions of repose"
Robin Kelsey
1869, March 4 Carl Schurz
Michael Boyden 1872, November 5 All men and women are created equal
Laura Wexler
1875 The Winchester Rifle
Merritt Roe Smith 1876, January 6 Melville in the dark
Kenneth W. Warren
1876, March 10 The art of telephony
Avital Ronell 1878 "How to Make Our Ideas Clear"
Christopher Hookway
1879 John Muir and nature writing
Scott Slovic 1881, January 24 Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Alide Cagidemetrio
1884 Mark Twain's hairball
Ishmael Red 1884, July The Linotype machine
Lisa Gitelman
1884, November The Southwest imagined
Leah Dilworth 1885 The problem of error
James Conant
1885, July Limits to violence
James Dawes 1885, October Writing New Orleans
Andrei Codrescu 1888, The introduction of motion pictures 1889, August 28 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Yael Schacher
1893 Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature
David Treuer 1895 Ida B. Wells, A Red Record
Jacqueline Goldsby
1896 Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life
Judith Jackson Fossett 1896, September 6 Queen Lili'uokalani
Rob Wilson
1897, Memorial Day The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument
Richard Powers 1898, June 22 Literature and imperialism
Amy Kaplan
1899; 1924 McTeague and Greed
Gilberto Perez 1900 Henry Adams
T. J. Jackson Lears
1900 The Wizard of Oz
Gerald Early 1900; 1905 Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth
Farah Jasmine Grifin
1901 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
John Edgar Wideman 1901-1903, The problem of the color line 1903, May 5 "The real American has not yet arrived"
Aviva Taubenfeld
1903 The invention of the blues
Luc Sante 1903 One sees what one sees
Daniel Albright
1904, August 30 Henry James in America
Ross Posnock 1905, October 15 Little Nemo in Slumberland
Katherine Roeder
1906, April 9 The Azusa Street revival
R. J. Smith 1906, April 18 , 5:14 a.m. The San Francisco Earthquake
Kathleen Moran
1911 "Alexander's Ragtime Band"
Philip Furia 1912, April 15 Lifeboats cut adrift
Alan Ackerman
1912 The lure of impossible things
Heather Love 1912 Tarzan begins his reign
Gerald Early
1913 A modernist moment
Bonnie Costello 1915 D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation
Richard Schickel
1915 Robert Frost
Christian Wiman 1917 The philosopher and the millionaire
Richard J. Bernstein
1920, August 10 Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues"
Daphne A. Brooks 1921 Jean Toomer
Elizabeth Alexander
1922 T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence
Anita Patterson October 1923, Chaplinesque 1924 F. O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney
Robert Polito
1924, May 26 The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature
Yael Schacher 1925 The Great Gatsby
Lan Tran
1925, June Sinclair Lewis
Jefrey Ferguson 1925, July The Scopes trial
Michael Kazin
1925, August 16 Dorothy Parker
Catherine Keyser 1926 Fire!!
Carla Kaplan
1926 Hardboiled
Walter Mosley 1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club
Joan Shelley Rubin
1927 Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag
Paul Muldoon 1927, May 16 "Free to develop their faculties"
Jefrey Rosen
1928, April 8, Easter Sunday Dilsey Gibson goes to church
Werner Sollors 1928, Summer John Dos Passos
Phoebe Kosman
1928, November 18 The mouse that whistled
Karal Ann Marling 1930 "You're swell!"
Robert Gottlieb
1930, March The Silent Enemy
Micah Treuer October 1930, Grant Wood's American Gothic" 1931, March 19 Nevada legalizes gambling
David Thomson
1932 Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters
Anthony Grafton 1932 Arthur Miller
Andrea Most
1932, April or May The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty
John M. Staudenmaier, S.J. 1932, Christmas Ned Cobb
Robert Cantwell
1933 Baby Face is censored
Stephanie Zacharek 1933, March FDR's first Fireside Chat
Paula Rabinowitz
1934, September Robert Penn Warren
Howell Raines 1935 The Popular Front
Angela Miller
1935 The skyscraper
Sarah Whiting 1935, June 10 Alcoholics Anonymous
Michael Tolkin
1935, October 10 Porgy and Bess
John Rockwell 1936, Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom! 1936, July 5 Two days in Harlem
Adam Bradley
1936, November 23 Life begins
Michael Lesy 1938 Superman
Douglas Wolk
1938, May Jelly Roll Morton speaks
Marybeth Hamilton 1939 Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit"
Robert O'Meally
1939; 1981 Up from invisibility
Josef Jarab 1940 "No way like the American way"
Erika Doss
1940--1944 Preston Sturges
Douglas McGrath 1941 An insolent style
Carrie Tirado Bramen
1941 Citizen Kane
Joseph McBride 1941 The word "multicultural"
Werner Sollors
1943 Hemingway's paradise, Hemingway's prose
Keith Taylor 1944 The second Bill of Rights
Cass R. Sunstein
1945, February Bebop
Ingrid Monson 1945, April 11 Thomas Pynchon and modern war
Glenda Carpio
1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m. The atom bomb
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi 1946, December 5 Integrating the military
Gerald Early December 3 1947, Tennessee Williams 1948 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
David A. Mindell
1948 Saul Bellow
Ruth Wise 1949--1950 "Birth of the Cool"
Ted Gioia
1950, November 28 "Damned busy painting"
T. J. Clark 1951 A poet among painters
Mark Ford 1951, The Catcher in the Rye 1951 James Jones, From Here to Eternity
Lindsay Waters
1951 A soft voice
M. Lynn Weis 1952, April 12 Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood
Michael Ventura
1952, June 10 C. L. R. James
Donald E. Pease 1953, January 1 The song in country music
Dave Hickey
1954 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
Helen Vendler 1955, August 11 "The self-respect of my people"
Monica Miller
1955, September 21 A. J. Liebling and the Marciano-Moore fight
Carlo Rotella 1955, October 7 A generation in miniature
Richard Candida Smith
1955, December Nabokov's Lolita
Stephen Schif 1956, April 16 "Roll Over Beethoven"
James Miller
1957 Dr. Seuss
Philip Nel 1959 "Nobody's perfect"
William J. Mann
1960 Psycho
William Beard 1960, January More than a game
Michael MacCambridge
1961, January 20 JFK's inaugural address and Catch-22
Charles Taylor 1961, July 2 The author as advertisement
David Thomson
1962 Bob Dylan writes "Song to Woody"
Joshua Clover 1962 "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art"
Howard Hampton
1963, April "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
George Hutchinson 1964 Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead"
Peter Sacks October 27 1964, The last stand on Earth 1965, September 11 The Council on Interracial Books for Children
Dianne Johnson
1965, October The Autobiography of Malcolm X
David Bradley 1968 Norman Mailer
Mary Gaitskill
1968, March The illusory babels of language
Hal Foster 1968, August 28 The plight of conservative literature
Michael Kimage
1969 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems
Laura Quinney 1969, January 11 The first Asian Americans
Hua Hsu
1969, November 12 The eye of Vietnam
Thi Phuong-Lan Bui 1970 Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker
Cheryl A. Wall 1970, 1972, Linda Lovelace" 1972 Loisaida literature
Frances R. Aparicio
1973 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Maureen N. McLane 1975 Gayl Jones
Robert O'Meally
1981, March 31 Toni Morrison
Farah Jasmine Grifin 1982 Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
1982 Wild Style
Hua Hsu 1982 Maya Lin's wall
Anne Wagner
1982, November 8 Harriet Wilson
Saidiya V. Hartman 1985, April 24 Henry Roth
Mario Materassi
1987 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
Seo-Young Chu 1995 Philip Roth
Hana Wirth-Nesher
2001 Twenty-first-century free verse
Stephen Burt 2003 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing
Greil Marcus 2005, August 29, Hurricane Katrina 2008, November 4 Barack Obama
Kara Walker

About the Author

Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books. Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Reviews

In snapshots of a few thousand words each, the entries in A New Literary History put on display the exploring, tinkering, and risk-taking that have contributed to the invention of America… A New Literary History of America gives us what amounts to a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear. What you see isn’t the past so much as the present.
*Wall Street Journal*

A New Literary History of America is not your typical Harvard University Press anthology...[It] roams far beyond any standard definition of literature. Aside from compositions that contain the written word, its subjects include war memorials, jazz, museums, comic strips, film, radio, musicals, skyscrapers, cybernetics and photography.
*New York Times*

This magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture...Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too...This book is not so much a history of our literature as it is a literary version of our history, told through the culture we've created to recount our past and conjure our future...In the age of Wikipedia, a reference book like this needs more than just the facts; it needs to tell us what the facts mean, and A New Literary History does just that.
*Salon*

Ambitious, thought-provoking, and comprehensive, A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, features more than 200 essays on poems, letters, novels, memoirs, speeches, movies, and theater, by writers ranging from Bharati Mukherjee to John Edgar Wideman, reinterpreting the American experience form the 1500s forward.
*Elle*

The huge, welcoming, exciting, just-published volume A New Literary History of America is a book with which to spend entire days and the rest of your life...Where else are you going to read Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer, and Walter Mosley on the hardboiled detective novel? Don't you want to do that right now?...Talk about an all-American value: You could read this 1,000-plus-page book forever and never use up its revelations and its pleasures.
*Entertainment Weekly online*

[This] represents a rethinking of the awkward genre of literary history, which can fall disappointingly between the cracks of straight criticism and narrative history, devolving into a dull recitation of author bios and conventional literary wisdom. With the help of an editorial board, Marcus and Sollors settled on 216 artworks (film and painting as well as texts), authors, movements, and cultural artifacts that help answer the question, "What is America?" Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, and Faulkner are in there, to be sure, but so are the Winchester rifle, "Steamboat Willie," Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven," Alcoholics Anonymous, and Linda Lovelace (the star of the pornographic film "Deep Throat," who later said she'd been raped during its filming)...It will be a welcome change if a "literary history," for once, stirs up a little dust.
*Boston Globe Brainiac blog*

[An] essential, eclectic doorstop anthology.
*New York Magazine*

The full national-literary character of the United States is on display in this mighty history and reference work for our time. Written by a distinguished team, under the sure-handed editorship of musicologist and historian Marcus and Sollors...this volume begins with America's first appearance on a map and concludes with the election of President Obama. Among the more than 200 contributors are Bharati Mukherjee (on The Scarlet Letter), Camille Paglia (on Tennessee Williams) and Ishmael Reed (on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)...This is an astounding achievement in multiculturalism and American studies, which in the age of Google and the Internet lights the way toward serious interpretive reference publishing. (Starred Review)
*Publishers Weekly*

Of course it's hefty; it's a "broadly cultural history" of America with a literary bent, an avid and provocative collaboration that tracks the American story not only through works of American literature, classic and forgotten, but also via music, art, pop culture, speeches, letters, religious tracts, photographs, and Supreme Court decisions. Versatile social critic and historian Marcus, Harvard University professor of English and African American studies Sollors, and their illustrious board of editors assembled more than 200 commissioned essays, which meander chronologically from 1507 and the first appearance on a map of the name "America" to Barack Obama's election. In between is a dazzling array of inquiries into Gone with the Wind and Invisible Man, The Wizard of Oz and the blues, hard-boiled detective stories and Mickey Mouse, "Howl" and Miles Davis, nature writing and Zora Neale Hurston. With such contributors as Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Gaitskill, Bharati Mukherjee, Richard Powers, Ishmael Reed, David Thomson, David Treuer, and John Edgar Wideman, this is an adventurous, jazzily choral, and kaleidoscopic book of interpretations, illuminations, and revitalized history.
*Booklist*

Marcus and Sollors trace through literature the dynamism of American society and culture spanning 500 years, from the first time the name America appears on a map (1507) to the election of Barack Obama as president...No single volume can fully capture the range of a nation's literary history, but this book succeeds in highlighting new ideas and providing a starting point for further investigation. Above all, it is a pleasure to read.
*Library Journal*

Reading this gorgeous compendium on the written word in America should be required for gaining or maintaining U.S. citizenship. And even at more than 1,000 pages, it's a fun way to learn what we're all about...The list of contributors is a rich, varied array of our best contemporary writers and cultural mavens...The editors were aiming for "a reexamination of the American experience as seen through a literary glass." Marcus and Sollors have succeeded: This book is a literary history in every sense of the phrase.
*Cleveland Plain Dealer*

Hundreds of essayists write short, but think expansively on just about everything that makes us who we are--from Elvis to Obama.
*Entertainment Weekly*

It's natural to have high expectations of a book with the lofty title A New Literary History of America. What isn't natural is for the book to not just live up to, but far exceed those expectations...Edgar Allen Poe's invention of the detective story hobnobs with the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Hank Williams' country music is only a few pages from Zora Neale Hurston. It's as glorious a melting pot as America itself...If you've found yourself envying Britain her Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen, this book will bring you back to America and make you fall in love with her confidence, her innovation, her sheer pluck, all over again... A treasure for American history AND literature lovers.
*Boston Examiner*

You could get a hernia lifting A New Literary History of America, a 1,095-page tome edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. But you could also get a thorough, original, and occasionally startling education. Some 200 essays on our literary past by writers as disparate as critic/provocateur Camille Paglia (on the sexually electric Broadway opening of A Streetcar Named Desire) and sportswriter Michael MacCambridge (on football fiction) make for a book as richly varied as the nation itself.
*Fortune*

The book is not your usual bookish chronicle made up of fearless men churning out classics for the edification of the nation...[It's an] eclectic, opinionated vision of the story of American letters.
*Arts Fuse*

A wildly informative, hugely entertaining and sometimes even revelatory book.
*Buffalo News*

Tailor-made for fruitful and fun browsing...This is a reference book for anyone with a curiosity about the sweep and scope of not just American literature but the culture itself in art, film, sermon and song.
*San Diego Union-Tribune*

The feel of the whole is epic...By the time I had made my way through about a third of this book I began to feel an emotion that comes but rarely to a reviewer: pride. Not pride in America's politics or policies necessarily, but pride in our speech...In my opinion perhaps the single most impressive achievement in the book is the editors' and writers' ability to pinpoint linkages between one kind of fact and another...All the major writers, whether in poetry or prose, draw thoughtful essays.
*New York Review of Books*

The editors of this rich exercise in cultural history have taken up Pound's challenge [to "make it new"], producing an eloquent patchwork volume that gathers up more than 200 essays, chronologically arranged by subject, into a beguiling symphony that expresses the bewildering, often intimidating varieties of what we presume to call the American experience...This splendiferous tribute to the best that so many of us have thought and said and made embraces classic and watershed literary works and their authors, political acts and events and issues, statements of purpose and conscience, achievements in both the fine arts (music, painting, sculpture, et al) and the raucous venues of popular culture (yes, Virginia, we do get a crash course in the autobiographical writings of 1970s porn queen Linda Lovelace), and major figures ranging from the makers of the Constitution of the United States to contemporary film and television personalities and the giants and giantesses of pop, jazz and rock music...Defiantly unconventional...Surely one of the best books published in this country in a very long time.
*Washington Times*

The mammoth New Literary History of America [is] an extraordinary anthology of literary culture brought to you by a seat-of-the-pants polyglot of a country.
*Dallas Morning News*

This new-breed reference book--featuring freshly penned and eccentrically focused essays by a heterogeneous who's who of academics, journalists and authors--ventures to remap the expanse of American history through five centuries of literary and cultural landmarks...Although it shares with its history-book forebears unimpeachable intellect and seriousness of intent, this is not the Oxford Companion to American Literature. For one thing, it's a lot more fun.
*npr.org*

This hefty yet invigorating anthology of 225 new essays about American culture and history is perfect for the hard-to-please smarty-pants.
*Time Out New York*

A New Literary History of America is about what's Made in America, and America, made. It's about what the writers who are its subjects have made of America, and, equally, what the contributors, writing about these writers, make of America, too. There's a certain amount of trading on literary celebrity, to be sure. But the claims on our attention, and it is a serious claim, lies within the republic of these writers' imaginations.
*Times Literary Supplement*

In the monumental, absorbing A New Literary History of America, editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have assembled a fascinating collection of writings on a range of subject matters: everything from maps, diaries and Supreme Court decisions to religious tracts, public debates, comic strips and rock and roll...In 1,000-odd pages, Marcus and Sollors have compiled a remarkable history of America. Their expanded definition of literary encompasses "not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form." Most of all, A New Literary History of America is a reminder of just how vibrant and diverse United States history--and culture--really is.
*BookPage*

This brick of a book is a browser's delight. Ranging over many high points and exploring interesting crannies of the American experience from 1507 to 2008, A New Literary History offers those interested in culture, history, and politics much to savor and more than a little with which to match wits. Among those entries bringing fresh insight to seemingly exhausted subjects are Ted Widmer on Roger Williams and Abraham Lincoln, Greil Marcus on Moby-Dick, Anita Patterson on T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, and Charles Taylor juxtaposing with great verve JFK's inaugural with Catch-22. There are virtuoso explanations: Anthony Grafton on Edmund Wilson's The American Earthquake, Dave Hickey on Hank Williams's transformation of the American song in country music, and Monica Miller on the transcendental meaning of Zora Neale Thurston's denunciation of Brown v. The Board of Education. Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer is a stylistic tour de force...This ambitious anthology succeeds beyond reasonable expectations in satisfying what Lionel Trilling...said was "the moral obligation to be intelligent."
*Boston Phoenix*

[The editors] tell an equally fascinating and moving history of the country, as we have never heard it before--and a story like which, say the editors, would not be possible in any other country...Instead of blending into the background of different shades of gray of a historical order, each of the events here radiates with seemingly contemporary luminosity.
*Süddeutsche Zeitung*

A DIY college course unto itself.
*East Bay Express*

An impressive achievement.
*San Antonio Express-News*

[An] original new history of literature...A New Literary History of America recounts the history of the mind of a continent, and each single subject is approached with stylistic verve and thus knighted as literature by its authors, many of whom are themselves writers...Even though an idiosyncratic sprint across half a millennium of cultural history cannot avoid certain abbreviations, this amusing-to-read anthology teaches us that what appears to get more and more lost in this age of Wikipedia: well-researched, reflective, subjective and stylistically brilliant approaches that transform facts and figures into knowledge that can be passed on.
*Neue Zürcher Zeitung*

This may be called a literary history but it is more broadly a cultural history, a history of language in its many forms--novels, essays, plays, public speeches and private letters, sermons and on and on...The choices made by the editors are smart, and the writers of the essays engage ideas with great passion.
*Chicago Tribune*

[This] may be the most unique attempt yet to tell the story of the United States...It's a feast for anyone who cares about history and national identity, not to mention a showcase for virtuoso writing.
*avclub.com*

Brings together a series of disconnected, personal (and often very opinionated) essays that not only offer new angles on the big names of U.S. literature but also consider Alcoholics Anonymous, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Citizen Kane, Dr. Seuss, skyscrapers, and Superman.
*Times Higher Education*

It's hard to imagine anyone right up to full professor failing to get excitement from this charged grid of event and interpretation...Hats off, though, to the editors above all, for constructing a volume where each element reinforces every other, often by contradicting it, so that the whole vast book is more exciting than even its most impressive part.
*The Observer*

Who would want to go into this particular new year, with all its uncertainties, without a copy of A New Literary History of America? Many hands delight and inform, and "literary history" is time stuffed full of "cultural creations" like this perfect bedside book. The selections are short, written with both precision and passion, and not infrequently deliver insights.
*Providence Journal*

One way to reinvigorate our opinions about the nation's literary life is to encounter new ways to think about it. A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors does just that with a wide-ranging collection of essays.
*Pittsburgh Post-Gazette*

It's weirdly inclusive (Is the Winchester Rifle really part of literary history?), but the big book has so many lively entries, on everything from hard-boiled fiction to New Journalism, that you can overlook its faults and enjoy its sweep.
*San Diego Union-Tribune*

Never fails to engross and edify.
*Christian Century*

A New Literary History of America...avoids the temptation to rein in its subject too neatly or ease the strangeness out of American history. Not only does it stretch, appropriately, to America's earliest pre-history--the first essay, by Toby Lester, examines the first appearance of "America" on a map--this enormous anthology stretches the definition of literary...A New Literary History of America challenges not only its own structure, but also our traditional view of history's structure in order to emphasize the transmission, conscious or collectively unconscious, of ideas...But the pleasure of the volume, of course, is the massive collection of voices it brings together, subjects and authors both.
*popmatters.com*

A collection of great minds writing on other great minds, art and literature, social movements, feats of scholarship and everything in between.
*San Francisco Chronicle*

This book came out only last year and has already proved itself indispensable. If I'm writing about anything that has to do with American literature, I look it up here first. The format is a little unwieldy--the book is organized chronologically around idiosyncratically chosen dates--but its capsule essays build into a surprising, inventive narrative of American culture: Ishamel Reed on "Mark Twain's hairball", Luc Sante on the blues, David Thomson on Chaplin, Ruth Wisse on Saul Bellow, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer....I could quibble with the omissions, or I could just shut up and be grateful that this book exists in any form.
*National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors blog*

In the monumental, absorbing A New Literary History of America, editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have assembled a fascinating collection of writings on a range of subject matters: everything from maps, diaries and Supreme Court decisions to religious tracts, public debates, comic strips and rock and roll...In 1,000-odd pages, Marcus and Sollors have compiled a remarkable history of America...Most of all, A New Literary History of America is a reminder of just how vibrant and diverse United States history--and culture--really is.
*Book Page*