About the Author

James D. Hart was Professor of American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of its Bancroft Library. He is the author of The Popular Book and A Companion to California. He died in 1990.
Phillip Leininger, after a twenty-year career as acquiring editor for Holt and Harper, and as consulting editor for Oxford University Press, has taught literature, fiction, and poetry at Marist College, Empire State College, and at SUNY-Albany. He is co-editor of Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature with George and Barbara Perkins and was in-house editor for The American Tradition in Literature and the Harper American Literature.

Reviews

"In a word, grand: as indispensable to a serious reader, academic or otherwise, as a compass to an explorer.... Each entry is written with eminent fairness."--San Jose Mercury News
"This compilation has been a reference mainstay since its inception in 1941.... The Oxford Companion to American Literature continues to be a significant reference source, and it now has the advantage of greater currency."--Booklist
"`More' apparently does not always have to mean 'less' in this era of canon expansion; here more is just that, insuring this companion's continued preeminence in its field well into the century."--Nineteenth-Century Literature