Writing New England

An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present

Edited by Andrew Delbanco

    Preface

    Introduction

    Chronology

    The Founding Idea

    John Winthrop * From A Model of Christian Charity

    Samuel Danforth * From A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness

    God Speaks to the Rain

    Edward Taylor * Preface to God's Determinations Touching His Elect

    Cotton Mather * From The Christian Philosopher

    Jonathan Edwards * The Spider Letter

    William Cullen Bryant * "Forest Hymn"

    Ralph Waldo Emerson * From Nature

    Margaret Fuller * "Dialogue"

    Richard Henry Dana * From Two Years before the Mast

    Nathaniel Hawthorne * From American Notebooks

    Peter Oliver * From The History of the Puritan Commonwealth

    Emily Dickinson * "Four Trees upon a Solitary Acre"

    Henry David Thoreau * From The Maine Woods

    Mark Twain * "The Oldest Inhabitant-The Weather of New England"

    William James * "What Pragmatism Means"

    Robert Frost * "Out, Out-"

    Wallace Stevens * "The Snow Man"

    Henry Beston * From The Outermost House

    Robert Lowell * "Mr. Edwards and the Spider"

    Galway Kinnell * "Another Night in the Ruins"

    Richard Wilbur * "Mayflies"

    The Examined Self

    John Cotton * From Christ the Fountain of Life

    Anne Bradstreet * "Before the Birth of One of Her Children"

    Jonathan Edwards * Personal Narrative

    Emily Dickinson * "I Should Have Been Too Glad, I See"

    Henry Adams * From The Education of Henry Adams

    W. E. B. Du Bois * From Darkwater

    Robert Frost * "To Earthward"

    Elizabeth Bishop * "In the Waiting Room"

    Dorothy West * From The Richer, the Poorer

    A Gallery of Portraits

    Harriet Beecher Stowe * From Uncle Tom's Cabin

    Elizabeth Stoddard * From The Morgesons

    Henry James * From The Bostonians

    Edwin Arlington Robinson * "Miniver Cheevy"

    William Dean Howells * From Literary Friends and Acquaintance

    E. E. Cummings * "The Cambridge Ladies"

    John P. Marquand * From The Late George Apley

    Edwin O'Connor * From The Last Hurrah

    John Cheever * "Reunion"

    John Updike * "Plumbing"

    Timothy Lewontin * From Parsons' Mill

    Education

    Harvard College * From New England's First Fruits

    Benjamin Franklin * Dogood Papers, No. 4

    Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and A. Bronson Alcott * From Conversations with Children

    Horace Bushnell * From Christian Nurture

    Charles Sumner * "Equality before the Law"

    Charles W. Eliot * Inaugural Address

    John Jay Chapman * "The Function of a University"

    Dorothy Canfield Fisher * "Sex Education"

    Louis Auchincloss, John McPhee, and Geoffrey Wolff * Schoolmasters

    Dissident Dreamers

    John Winthrop * Letter to His Wife

    James Otis * From The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved

    Abigail Adams and John Adams * Letters

    George Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne * Letters concerning Brook Farm

    John Quincy Adams * Argument before the Supreme Court in the Amistad Case

    Nathaniel Parker Willis * "The Lady in the White Dress, Whom I Helped into the Omnibus"

    Daniel Webster * Speech in the United States Senate

    Theodore Parker * From Three Sermons

    Julia Ward Howe * "Battle-Hymn of the Republic"

    Louisa May Alcott * Transcendental Wild Oats

    William Graham Sumner * From What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. * "Natural Law"

    John F. Kennedy * Broadcast Address

    A. Bartlett Giamatti * "The Green Fields of the Mind"

    Strangers in the Promised Land

    The Salem Court * Examination of Susanna Martin

    William Apess * From Eulogy on King Philip

    Frederick Douglass * From My Bondage and My Freedom

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow * "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport"

    Mary Antin * From The Promised Land

    Felix Frankfurter * From "The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti"

    F. O. Matthiessen * Journal Letters

    Jean Stafford * From Boston Adventure

    Shirley Jackson * "The Lottery"

    Robert Lowell * "For the Union Dead"

    Malcolm X and Alex Haley * From The Autobiography of Malcolm X

    Anne Sexton * "Her Kind"

    Jonathan Kozol * From Death at an Early Age

    J. Anthony Lukas * From Common Ground

    The Abiding Sense of Place

    Ralph Waldo Emerson * "Hamatreya"

    Sarah Orne Jewett * "A White Heron"

    Henry James * From The American Scene

    E. B. White * "Maine Speech"

    Fred Allen * Letter to The Cape Codder

    Donald Hall * "Scenic View"

    Acknowledgments

    Index

  • Cover: Writing New England

Andrew Delbanco is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Among his many publications are The Puritan Ordeal and The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (both from Harvard).