A survey of nineteenth-century American fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose ranging from the American Renaissance to the Realist and Naturalist period. Authors may include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and others.