Reading List
Junior English Base Readings
The following listing represents the readings that will form the basis for Junior English at D’Evelyn. In addition to these selections, teachers may assign other reading to add to the course.
All textual selections are from Adventures in American Literature. For each author names a biographical selection is assigned.
SEMESTER ONE:
Twain, The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, discussion of summer reading
Introduction: The Beginnings of the American Tradition
William Bradford from “Of Plymouth Plantation”
Anne Bradstreet, “Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666”
Edward Taylor, “Huswifery”
William Byrd, from The History of the Dividing Line, and handout passage evaluating
colonization
Jonathan Edwards, from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Introduction: The Revolutionary Period
Benjamin Franklin, from The Autobiography, from Poor Richard’s Almanac,
“Rules By Which a Great Nation may Be Reduced to a Small One” on handout
Patrick Henry, “Speech in the Virginia Convention”
Thomas Paine, from “The Crisis, Number 1”
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur, from Letters from an American Farmer
Introduction: The First Harvest
Washington Irving, “The Devil and Tom Walker”
James Fenimore Cooper, from The Deerslayer
William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl”
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven” and “The Masque of the Red Death”
Introduction: The Flowering of New England
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Nature”, from “The Divinity School Address”, from “Self-
Reliance”, from “Fate”
Henry David Thoreau, from Walden
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” on handout
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life”, “Nature”, “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Old Ironsides”, “The Chambered Nautilus”
SEMESTER TWO:
Emily Dickinson, “This is My Letter to the World”, “Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church”,
Success is Counted Sweetest”, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society”, “Apparently With
No Surprise”, “My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close”, “The Bustle in a House”,
“Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”
The Belle of Amherst (video)
Introduction: A House Divided and Restored
Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”, “I Hear America Singing”, “When I Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer”, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”, “Beat! Beat! Drums!”, “A March in the
Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown”, “Reconciliation”
Spirituals “Go Down, Moses”, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
Frederick Douglass from “What the Black Man Wants” and 1845 Narrative selections about
learning to read, the fight with Covey, and Douglass’ escape, all on handout
Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address” and The Second Inaugural Address
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Voices of Native Americans: “Song of the Sky Loom”, “The Blackfeet Genesis”
Black Hawk, “Black Hawk’s Farewell”
Chief Joseph, “The surrender Speech of Chief Joseph”, from “An Indian Views of Indian
Affairs”
Mark Twain, “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calavaras County”
Bret Harte, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”
Introduction: Realism and Naturalism
The American Novel
Edwin Arlington Robinson, and all poems in book
Edgar Lee Masters, and all poems in book
Sherwood Anderson, “Sophistication”
Katherina Anne Porter, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”
James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech”, “The Tall Men” on handout
Flannery O’Connor, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”
Bernard Malamud, “The First Seven Years
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening”, “After Apple-Picking”, “Mending Wall”
Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”, “Prayers of Steel”, “Grass”
Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”
T.S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”
E. E. Cummings, “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”, “Pity this busy Monster, Manunkind”
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, “As I Grew Older”
Countee Cullen, “Any Human to Another” and “From the Dark Tower”
Thornton Wilder, Our Town as filmed performance