Steve King

Mark Twain, ETC

A History of American Literature

By

Blackwell 912pp £65hbk £19.99pbk order from our bookshop

Writing this book cannot have been easy. Just piclung it up is not easy. It is a whopping great tome. Yet Richard Gray’s real achievement is somehow to have compressed more than 400 years of thrillingly rich literary history between two covers. The multi-authored Cambrid’g, e History of American Literature runs to eight fat volumes. At less than 920 pages, Gray’s history is, by comparison, a triumph of brevity.

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