A Century of American Literature: Benjamin Franklin to James Russell Lowell; Selections from a Hundred Authors (Classic Reprint) by Huntington Smith (Paperback / softback, 2015)
Excerpt from A Century of American Literature: Benjamin Franklin to James Russell Lowell; Selections From a Hundred Authors In view of that scholarly and elaborate enterprise, the Stedman-Hutchinson Library of American Literature, and of Mr. Morris's entertaining Half Hours with American Authors, to say thing of an indefinite series of anthologies of one sort and ather, it might seem at first glance as if the present collection were on the whole superfluous; I hope, however, that such will t be the verdict of the great mass of readers for whose use it has been prepared. Whether we have or have t, in the strictly critical sense, an American literature, it is certain that histories of that subject have been written and that they demand a fair amount of illustration in the form of extracts which could t, by reason of limitations of space, be introduced to any considerable extent with the current of biographical narrative and aesthetic comment. Such a collection of extracts must t be too volumius, it must be representative in range, and it must give a definite conception of each writer's method and style. This want the present work undertakes to supply. It is offered, primarily, as a companion to all existing histories of American literature, and as such I trust it may find a welcome. But I have t, in making and arranging these selections, kept entirely to this primary object. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.