First published in 1923, this anthology provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature. It includes landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. The volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and earlier (often very different) versions of many of the essays, and other materials (including four versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman).