Texts from The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 7th Ed.:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, selections from “Nature,” and “Experience”
- Henry David Thoreau, selections from “Walden”, “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
- Edgar Allen Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Purloined Letter”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Black Cat”
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
- Emily Dickinson, poems no. 67, 280, 613, 657,712, 754, 1072
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “The Birth-Mark”
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd
- Mark Twain, Short stories tbd
- Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Figure in the Carpet”
- Hopkins, Pauline. Contending Forces. Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (1991)
- Twain, Mark (Berkove, Lawrence, ed.) The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain. Modern Library; (2004)