Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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Preface.

This book is based upon a course of lectures delivered during January of 1903 before the Lowell Institute in Boston. Their essential plan was that of concentrating attention on leading figures, instead of burdening the memory with a great many minor names and data. Various hearers, including some teachers of literature, took pains to express their approval of this plan, and to suggest that the material might profitably be cast into book form. This necessarily meant a good deal of revision of a kind which the lecturer did not care to undertake; and he was able to secure the cooperation of a younger associate, to whom has fallen the task of modifying and supplementing the original text, so far as either process was necessary in order to make a complete and consecutive, though still brief, narrative of the course of American