This book Essays on American Literature has several chapters devoted to the chronological happenings in American literature. The first chapter is about the colonial days and then the subsequent chapters treat such seminal topics as American dream, Transcendentalism, Civil War writings, frontier literature, realism, Harlem renaissance, American criticism, American English, African American literature as much as Jewish/Asian American literatures and finally two chapters dealing with such important writers-in-isolation as Faulkner, Hemingway and Frost.