George and Barbara Perkins

THE HARPERCOLLINS READER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 2nd edition, 2002, is the most comprehensive single-volume encyclopedia of American Literature. Its six thousand entries, eleven thousand pages, and over a million words make it far more more comprehensive than other reference books in the field. Emphasizing the literature of the United States, it also gives significant representation to the books and writers of Canada and Latin America. Supplementing the fundamental writing and editing of George Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger, the volume includes signed essays on specific topics contributed by 130 scholars.

Among the entries are:

NOVELISTS AND SHORT-STORY WRITERS

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, H. P. Lovecraft, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Stephen King, Amy Tan

POETS

Anne Bradstreet, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Czeslaw Milosz, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Octavio Paz, Sylvia Plath

PLAYWRIGHTS

Royall Tyler, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, August Wilson, Sam Shepard

ESSAYISTS, CRITICS, HISTORIANS, STATESMEN, GENERALS

W. E. B. Du Bois, Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Parkman, Henry Adams, E. B. White, Jimmy Carter

CLASSIC WORKS

The Scarlet Letter, The Song of Hiawatha, Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Waste Land, Death of a Salesman, Martin Fierro, On the Road, Gravity's Rainbow, The Song of Solomon

LITERARY GROUPS AND MOVEMENTS

The Hartford Wits, Transcendentalism, Imagism, the Lost and Beat Generations, Black Mountain Poets, the New York School of Poetry, San Francisco Renaissance,

TOPICS OF SPECIAL INTEREST

Literary Criticism, motion pictures, feminism, children's literature, comics, science fiction, slave narratives, folklore in American literature, humor in the United States, Jewish American literature, globalization of American literature, Indian captivity narratives, Afro-American literature, Native American Prose and Poetry, Hispanic American Literature, Asian-American Literature

PERIODS AND GENRES

Histories of American, Latin American, and Canadian Literature, the novel, poetry, drams

GLOBALIZATION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

The late twentieth-century infusion of works written by authors born abroad into the mainstream of American literature, a phenomenon magnified by the simultaneous increase in writing by second-generation immigrants. First defined and given wide currency in George and Barbara Perkins's textbook anthology The American Tradition in Literature (9th edition, 1998), globalization is represented there by selections from Isabel Allende, Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Jamaica Kincaid, Denise Levertov, Czeslaw Milosz, Bharati Mukherjee, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Rapidly gaining force as the century approached its close, by the year 2000 the globalization of American literature was playing a large part in shaping the ways that residents of the United States view their lives and their literature, and, in turn, the ways the lives and literature of Americans are viewed abroad.

At the level of highest achievement, the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature bears stark witness to the change. From 1930 to 1962 the list of American winners was short and unequivocal: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl Buck, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck were all native born. Except for Toni Morrison, however, the list from 1962 through 2000 contains no native-born Americans. Instead, there are a number who by naturalization, long residence, or significant achievement within the United States can in some sense be designated "American": Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott. Another indicator of trends comes from the Library of Congress, where two of the six Poets Laureate of the United States appointed in the 1990s, Mark Strand and Joseph Brodsky, were born abroad.

For the nearly two centuries between the Declaration of Independence and the Second World War, the central figures of American literature were native born. From Washington Irving through Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Poe, Hawthorne, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and on to Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, and James, and into the twentieth century with Dreiser, Cather, Frost, Wharton, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck the roll call of major authors contains none born abroad. Immigrants made valuable contributions before and during the American Revolution, but afterwards patriotic fervor and enthusiastic encouragement favored the native writer. After the Revolution, the names of immigrant writers appear in histories only in specialized lists of the foreign born, or in very lengthy general listings of American writers that run into the hundreds rather than the dozens of those who have been most read and admired. Only recently has the trickle of non-native writing turned into a stream of accomplishment that is changing the character of the nation's literature.

In the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Lafcadio Hearn, Abraham Cahan, Ole Rolvaag, Mary Antin and other immigrants won attention beside the hordes of the native born, standing as literary exemplars of America's longstanding commitment to immigration and multiculturalism, apart from, rather than central to, the American literary tradition. In recent years, however, the few have turned into the many. "The tired," the "poor" and the "huddled masses yearning to be free" of the lines from Emma Lazarus inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty have continued to flock to the United States, typically needing a generation or two to become settled, earn livelihoods, educate their children and grandchildren, and produce writers of merit, who then, of course, are native born. Since World War II, however, the ranks of American immigrants have been swelled not only by the tired, poor, and huddled, but also by the energetic, economically stable, and fiercely independent.

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 proved crucial in opening the doors to new waves of immigrants, especially from Asia (see Asian American Literature). As a result of more welcoming immigration policies since then, the demographic face of America has changed: in the year 2000 nearly one in ten of the 281 million inhabitants of the United States was born abroad, a number and a percentage unmatched earlier in the nation's history. A surprising number of these new Americans are writers. Many have become writers after their arrival, and many others arrived with literary reputations already established. They have come for a variety of reasons, including exile and estrangement from their homes, desire for political or economic freedom, and recognition that with the spread of English as a world language and the United States remaining as the last global power, the United States stands highest among places on the globe where literary reputations are made, maintained, and solidified.

Many of these new immigrants assert their Americanness directly. Writing in English in Switzerland, long after his abandonment of his native Russia and Russian language, Vladimir Nabokov defined himself as "an American writer who has once been a Russian one." Joseph Brodsky claimed to be "an American long before I arrived on these shores." Bharati Mukherjee posed in a cornfield wrapped in an American flag, asserting the power of the immigrant's claim on the new country: "I am a voluntary immigrant. I became a citizen by choice, not by the simple accident of birth." Like some other immigrants, Mukherjee and Isabel Allende have attempted to reshape the history of their new country in images drawn from their personal heritages, Mukherjee in THE HOLDER OF THE WORLD (1993), ranging from Puritan New England to Mughal India, and Allende in DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE (1999), bringing together Argentina, China, and the California Gold Rush. Others write of the pervasive influence of American culture. In his stories "A Windmill in the West" and "American Dreams," Peter Carey demonstrated his fascination with the United States over two decades before he left Australia for New York. Charles Simic, born in Yugoslavia, raised in Chicago, has noted "Jazz made me an American and a poet."

In addition to those named above, foreign-born authors who have contributed to the literature of the United States in the twentieth century, mostly since World War II, include Andre Aciman, Vincenzo Ancoma, Reinaldo Arenas, W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, Bei Dao, Carlos Bulosan, Eileen Chang, Louis Chu, James Clavell, Andrei Codrescu, Mary and Padriac Colum, Alistair Cooke, Bernard Cornwell, Quentin Crisp, Edwidge Danticat, Nicholas Delbanco, Anita Desai, Junot Diaz, Thom Gunn, Shirley Hazzard, James Hilton, Robert Hughes, Ruth Prawa Jhabvala, Ha Jin, Younghill Kang, Thomas Keneally, Richard Kim, Hans Koning, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Li-Young Lee, Jaime Manrique, Ved Mehta, Orlando Patterson, Manuel Puig, Jonathan Raban, Edward Said, Bienvenido Santos, Natalie Anderson Scott, Elizabeth Sewell, Wilfred Sheed, Manil Suri, Niccolo Tucci, Luisa Valenzuela, Paul West, Elie Wiesel, P. G. Wodehouse, Anzia Yezierska, and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Children of immigrants have continued to write of the confrontations and acculturation that accompany the immigrant experience, just as in years past, but their works have recently taken on additional meaning within the context of literary globalization. Among the most visible in the twentieth century have been: Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Pietro diDonato, Herbert Gold, David Hwang, Garrett Hongo, Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jerre Mangione, John Okada, William Saroyan, Amy Tan, Gail Tsukiyama, Yoshiko Uchida, and John Yau.