Composition and Literature: Exploring Human Experience

The book might be more beneficial to high school students. It is a typical introductory college literature book for community and university college students. The authors introduce the book to exploring human experience in the introduction section of the book. Part One The next section is beginnings for writing about speaking, prose, poetry including Walt Whitman selections. It's followed by Mark Twain's The Boys' Ambition, Dylan Thomas' Reminiscences of a Childhood. The next section was Mothers and Fathers with an essay from psychologist Erich Fromm. The next section is brothers, sisters, and grandparents including X.J. Kennedy and Frank O'Connor's First Confessions. They also include kinships, thinking activities with each section in the book to expand the student's knowledge. The third section is titled Awakenings with venturing into the world of adulthood. It begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story of My Kinsman, My Major Molineux. The section followed by Joseph Conrad's Short story Youth. Shirley Jackson's Dorothy and My Grandchildren, and Sailors, and Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey's His Children. Questioning Appearances section includes Hawthorne's classic, Young Goodman Brown, and D.M. McKeithan's interpretation. The fourth section is making connctions featuring Walt Whitman's classic poem, A Noiseless Patient Spider to help understand metaphor and similes. Then followed by disconnections and reconnections with Jo Brans' A Divorce Made in Heaven and Bill Porterfields' Rye Observations followed by writing, reading, thinking activities. Faulty connections section features a five act play by French playwright, Moliere, "The Misanthrope" with thinking activities, reading, and writing suggestions. The family connections is concluded by Leo Buscaglia's Family History Can Provide a Sense of Survival and Alex Haley's My Furthest Back Person--"The African." The fifth section is titled Coming to Terms with Life. It includes Gerard Manley Hopkins. Alfred Tennyson, Robert Frost, Matthew Arnold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Arlington Robinson. The next section is Coming to Terms with Death includes Joyce Maynard's Four Generations, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, Edward Arlington Robinson's The Man Against the Sky, Leslie M. Thompson's Cultural and Institutional Restrictions on Dying, Katherine Anne Porter's The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Robert Frost's Home Burial, Edgar Lee Master's poems-The Hill, Pauline Barrett, William and Emily, and Lucinda Matlock from the Spoon Rivers Anthology. Alice Walker's To Hell with Dying is also included in this section. The last section of Part One is The Literate Mind at Work featuring John Updike's A & P with activities. Part Two The first section of Part Two is entitled On Literacy, Literature, and Life featuring works by Arthur Hugh Clough, E.E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Padriac Pease, Alexander Pope, William Shakespeare's Macbeth sections Act V, Scene V lines 19-28, Percy B