In high school, my beloved 11th grade teacher called me a “grammar prodigy.” I loved grammar so much all those years ago, and although I enjoyed reading and liked writing, literature was my least favorite topic to teach. I now understand that I had a strict, sheltered childhood and a lot of my analysis skills were stunted, even as a teacher at the same high school from which I graduated in my 20’s.
These days I’m working on pulling my old literature units and creating some new ones for publication on this site. In the meantime, I intend to post resources here–at the very least free PDF files or clean printable web sites for public domain works as well as free audio recordings and good biographies on YouTube.
I’m reminding you that my focus is American literature, although I do expand my horizons from time to time. I’m also acknowledging that sometimes links break for various reasons and previously clean web sites change. Please let me know in the comments if you see such an issue.
- W.E.B. DuBois
- A letter to his daughter Yolande about Niagara Falls
- Audio recording
- PDF file (NOTE: Page 1 is blank.)
- A letter to his daughter Yolande
- Image file (NOTE: This is the cleanest version I can find online, and it is an image embedded on a page that includes a typed version as well as some images of other W.E.B. Dubois correspondence. Here is a link.)
- Open letters to Woodrow Wilson from The Crisis
- Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson, March 1913
- Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson, September 1913
- A letter to his daughter Yolande about Niagara Falls
- Shirley Jackson
- “The Lottery”
- Carl Sandburg
- “I Am the People, the Mob”
I’ll be adding John Steinbeck, John Updike, Alice Walker, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, J. California Cooper, Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner in coming weeks. My goal is to add one unit per week. I’m focusing on short prose, short poetry, and letters for now.
Never stop learning,
Erin
