Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama [Paperback]

Ann Charters (Author), Samuel Charters (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312445741 | ISBN-13: 978-0312445744 | Publication Date: August 7, 2006 | Edition: 4th

Literature is a conversation -- between writers and other writers, and writers and readers. In their introduction to literature anthology, Ann Charters, editor of the bestselling The Story and Its Writer, and Samuel Charters, a much-published poet and novelist, bring students into this conversation through a distinctive set of features, including an abundance of writer commentaries that model how to read and write about literature (and a minimum of intrusive editorial apparatus that may constrain how to think about it). In the fourth edition of Literature and Its Writers, Ann and Samuel Charters open the conversation even further, by expanding the range of writers they include and presenting innovative new kinds of conversations about literature for students to enter.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ann Charters (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and has taught courses in the short story for over 30 years. A preeminent authority on the Beat writers, Charters has written a critically acclaimed biography of Jack Kerouac; compiled Beats & Company, a collection of her own photographs of Beat writers; and edited the best-selling Portable Beat Reader. Her most recent books are The Kerouac Reader; Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, 1957-1969; Beat Down to Your Soul; and The Story and Its Writer, Seventh Edition, available in full and compact versions.

Samuel Charters has taught creative writing and published widely in a variety of genres, including 11 books of poetry, 4 novels, a book of criticism on contemporary American poetry, a biography (coauthored with Ann Charters) of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and translations of the poetry of Tomas Transtromer and Edith Sodergran. An ethnomusicologist, he produces blues and jazz recordings and has published many books about music, among them a history of New Orleans jazz and a study of bluesman Robert Johnson.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1776 pages
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's; 4th edition (August 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312445741
• ISBN-13: 978-0312445744
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #219,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent choice for introductory literature classes!, November 11, 2010

By 

David Fortnight "Poet Reader" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Paperback)

I am a part-time ("adjunct") professor at a California community college, and I switched from using another LARGE literature anthology to this one for English 1-B for the following reasons:
1) Very good selection of readings, including a smattering of very contemporary authors like Edwidge Danticat and Sherman Alexie, a section on "small press" poetry and poets, and so on.
2) I found on opening the book the first time that for Faulkner's story, "A Rose for Emily," there is an excerpt of an interview with Faulkner where he recalls what image (in his mind) inspired him to write this story--very informative, good supplement to the story, and a more personal artistic element that I haven't found in other anthologies.
3) The price is high--but not as high as some other anthologies, at least for the paperback edition. I try to give my students SOME break in the governmental and corporate campaign to bankrupt them (seemingly) by the time they are educated!

8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Affordable Compilation of Literature!, March 12, 2008

By 

Sylviastel - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Paperback)

This book has an excellent compilation of authors, writers, poets, and essayists. Here are some of them below;

Sherman Alexie; Sherwood Anderson; Margaret Atwood; Rolfe Aggestam; W.H. Auden; Anna Akhmatova; Matthew Arnold; John Ashbery; Thomas Bailey Aldrich; Aristotle;

Wayne Booth; James Baldwin; Toni Cade Bambara; Russell Banks; Robert Brinkmeyer; Cleanth Brooks; Elizabeth Bishop; Lord George Gordon Byron; Emily Bronte; Sterling A. Brown; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Robert Bly; Basho; Buson; Amiri Baraka; Buson; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Gwendolyn Brooks; Joseph Brodsky; GEoffrey BUllough;

Raymond Carver; Ann Charters; Anton Chekhov; Kate Chopin; Amy Clampitt; Lewis Carroll; Hart Crane; Countee Cullen; Billy Collins; Wendy Cope; A. Cinna; Adelaide Crapsey; Stephen Crane; Lucille Clifton; Marilyn Chin; Samuel Charters; e.e. cummings; Samuel Taylor Coleridge;

Edwidge Danticat; Joan Dayan; Emily Dickinson; Robert Duncan; Hilda Doolittle; John Donne; Rita Dove; Paul Laurence Dunbar; James Dickey; Jill Dolan;

Ralph Ellison; Louise Erdrich; T.S. ELiot;

William Faulkner; Richard Ford; Sally Fitzgerald; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Carolyn Forche; Robert Frost; Rose C. Feld; Jessie Fauset; Francis Ferguson; Sigmund Freud;

Sandra Gilbert; Susan Gubar; Gabriel Garcia Marque; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Susan Glaspell; Nadine Gordimer; James Gargano; Louise Gluck; Thomas Gray; Richard LEighton Green; Allen Ginsberg; Linda Gregg; Philip Gerber; Sir John Gielgud;

Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; Zora Neale Hurston; Toby Hiller; A.E. Housman; Robert Herrick; George Herbert; Robert Hass; T.E. Hulme; Thomas Hardy; Jim Harrison; Robert Hayden; Seamus Heaney; Langston Hughes; Anthony Hecht; Thomas Wentworth Higginson; Lorraine Hansberry;

Issa; Henrik Ibsen;

Shirley Jackson; James Joyce; Tom Jenks; Ben Jonson; Erica Jong; Randall Jarrell; Thomas H. Johnson;

Franz Kafka; Jamaica Kincaid; J. Gerald Kennedy; John Keats; Galway Kinnell; Jack Kerouac; Yusef Komunyakaa; Etheridge Knight; Hugh Kingsmill; H.D.F. KItto;

Jhumpa Lahiri; D.H. Lawrence; Audre Lorde; Mina Loy; Denise Levertov; Primo Levi; Robert Lowell; John Lahr;

J. Hillis Miller; Katherine Mansfield; Guy De Maupassant; Herman Melville; Rick Moody; Bobbie Ann Mason; Dorothy Tuck McFarland; Archibald MacLeish; Marianne Moore; Edwin Morgan; Andrew MArvell; ANdrew Motion; W.S. Merwin; Leonard Mustazza; Arthur Miller;

Jim Naughton; Lorine Niedecker; Ogden Nash; Helge Normann Nilsen; Benjamin Nelson;

Flannery O'Connor; Joyce Carol Oates; Tim O'Brien; Tillie Olsen; Frank O'Hara; Wilfred Owen; Alicia Suskin Ostriker; Sharon Olds;

Grace Paley; Edgar Allan Poe; Annie Proulx; Dorothy Parker; Alexander Pope; Francesco Petrarca; Ezra Pound; Marge Piercy; Allen Polite; Linda Pastan; Sylvia Plath;

David Reynolds; Christina Rossetti; Lou Reed; Edwin ARlington Robinson; Theodore Roethke; Norman Rosten; Dudley Randall; Ishmael Reed; Adrienne Rich; ARnold Rampersad; Willy Russell;

Leslie Marmon Silko; John Steinbeck; Kathleen Westfall Shute; A.O. Scott;
Stevie Smith; Carl Sandburg; Percy Bysshe Shelley; William Shakespeare; Shiki; Wallace Stevens; Ann Stevenson; Wislawa Szymborska; Gary Snyder; Anne Sexton; Gary Soto; Sophocles; Sir Tom Stoppard; Sir GEorge Bernard Shaw;

Amy Tan; Cheryl B. Tornsey; Lord Alfred Tennyson; Dylan Thomas; Joan Templeton;

John Updike;

Helena Maria Viramontes; Paula Vogel;

Eudora Welty; Alice Walker; William Carlos Williams; Robert Penn Warren; Sir Thomas Wyatt; Big Joe Williams; Richard Wilbur; William Wordsworth; J. Walker; Richard Wright; Miller Williams; Phyllis Wheatley; Walt Whitman; James Wright; Virginia Woolfe; Tennessee Williams;

Susan Yuzna; William Butler Yeats;

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Looked new, September 25, 2010

By 

The student - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Paperback)

I believe I bought this item used. However it looked like it had never been touched. Great price too. It was close to a hundred in the book store and this was I believe in the twenties or thirties.

Great service, great price!