Art and a Better America

The current rewriting of American literary history is most readily examined in new anthologies and fresh editions of familiar ones, not, it seems, in compilations like the Columbia Literary History of the United States. I have recently seen fresh versions from Macmillan, Norton, and McGraw-Hill, as well as a new entry from Harper, but no one has sought to generate for them the prepublication anticipation and succeeding excitement of D. C. Heath's new venture. The launching of this new anthology has been orchestrated with truly impressive skill. In the spring of 1988 I received the first number of The Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter, with an engaging chronological account by General Editor Paul Lauter of "the project that we have immodestly called 'Reconstructing American Literature."' With help from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, innovative syllabi collected from across the country, and 50 participants in a meeting at Yale in June 1982, Professor Lauter worked toward a twovolume anthology "to teach a reconstructed American literature" that will help in "reshaping how we understand our history, our culture, and our literature." My Newsletter contained as well an attack by its editor, Dr. Judith Stanford, on E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and Albert Shanker, president of the AFT, for "refueling of anti-new-canon fires." In the spring of 1989, the second number of the Newsletter appeared in my mailbox with course syllabi submitted by readers experimenting with fresh materials in their classrooms and a sample from the table of contents of the anthology. In a remarkably candid message, Paul A. Smith of Heath urged me to get behind this worthwhile work-he twice uses the word The Heath Anthology of American Literature Edited by Paul Lauter et al. D. C. Heath, 1990