American Literature

Literature Resource Center Database

Find up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world. The optional MLA International Bibliography module adds citations for hundreds of thousands of books, articles and dissertations from 1926 to the present, linked to full text where available.

Writing Center

Busy students find the assistance they need at the SC4 Writing Center, located in 313 Main Building.

Submit your paper to the writing center: Writing Center tutors will respond to your paper by providing general feedback about your paper’s strengths and areas of concern and suggestions for improvement in the areas you selected above.  Tutors may also refer you to helpful resources for grammar and citation format. Writing Center tutors, however, will NOT correct, edit, or make changes to ideas in your paper.

Literary Reference Center Database

A full-text database providing information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and time frames. It gives students, professors and researchers a foundation of literary reference works to meet their research needs.

Writing Essays about Literature: A Guide and Style Sheet

Widely used in introductory literature courses as a style guide or as a supplement to anthologies, this text provides students with valuable guidelines for interpreting literature and writing essays. The text includes full-length selections as well as student essays.

The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon

Harold Bloom is our greatest living student of literature, "a colossus among critics" (The New York Times) and a "master entertainer" (Newsweek). Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than half a century, in such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare- The Invention of the Human, he transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Now, in the first collection devoted to his illuminating writings specifically on American literature, Bloom reflects on the surprising ways American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries.