Studies in Classic American Literature

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of D. H. Lawrence's writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918–19; but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and the complete surviving text of the essays of the English Review period, as well as a host of other materials, including four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman.

General editor's preface; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Cue-titles; Introduction; Studies in Classic American Literature: Final version (1923); First version (1918–19); Intermediate version (1919); Appendices: 1. Reading notes for The Scarlet Letter; 2. Foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature (1920); 3. Foreword (1922); 4. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1920–1); 5. XIII.Whitman (1921–2); 6. XII.Whitman (1922); Explanatory notes; Textual apparatus; Variorum apparatus; A note on pounds, shillings and pence; Index.

Ezra Greenspan is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He writes widely about modern American literature and is the co-editor of Book History.
Lindeth Vasey is Editorial Manager: Classics at Penguin UK Ltd. She has edited several books in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence including Mr Noon and (with John Worthen) The First 'Women in Love'.
John Worthen is Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham. He has written and edited many books relating to D. H. Lawrence and is author of The Early Years, the first volume in the three-volume biography of D. H. Lawrence (1991).