Studies in Classic American Literature

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature from the previous six years, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Dana, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19, but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved.