Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present.
The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today
Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction
Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers
Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years
Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society
Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers
 
Review
"Richard Gray's real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers." (Literary Review)
 
Review
"This book is the first comprehensive, single volume history of American literature since The Columbia Literary History of the United States edited by Elliott Emory and published sixteen years ago. It is a puzzle, given the extraordinary interest in American literature at home and abroad, that so few full histories of American literature have been published. Consider the fact that the Columbia history arrived nearly four decades after R. E. Spiller's Literary History of the United States. What makes Gray's book so extraordinary is that it supercedes the Spiller and Emory texts in nearly every respect, and even challenges the supremacy of the titanic (this pun is intentional), multi-volume, still-evolving Cambridge History of American Literature. How Gray managed to so captivatingly capture the depth and breadth of so complex a literature in under a thousand pages is worth considering. [...] Richard Gray possesses the most balanced scholarship of the entire range of American literature I ever read. [...] This is the first history of American literature fully worthy of the multi-dimensionality of its subject."
—Norman Weinstein, Boise State University