This course offers an introduction to six of the greatest works of American literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). Lectures invite you to immerse yourselves in the environments in which they were written and to explore the crucial literary, intellectual, social, religious, economic, and political contexts that shaped the production and reception of these distinctly American contributions to world literature. (Fiction, Poetry, 1830-1940)