General Reference Works

The instant delivery of information made possible by the Internet, its search engines, and its almost universal access to data would seem logically to doom reference books. But I count more than 30 print titles of some relevance to American literature this year, a hopeful sign that both publishers and the readers and students of literature and culture continue to appreciate the value of thoughtfully selected, carefully organized information. To type the phrase "early American nature writers" into a Google search box and receive in response—in 0.19 seconds—the first section of a list of 47,200,000 results is impressive but dauntingly unhelpful. So the reader of this essay should be aware that though I may be critical of particular works because of choices made in the selection of materials or lack of clarity in their organizing perspectives, I nonetheless appreciate the underlying effort to provide intelligent guidance.

Two encyclopedia projects are substantial expansions of their earlier forms. A new group of editors has "revised and augmented" the three-volume Encyclopedia of American Literature (2002) into a four-volume set with the same title, under the supervision of Richard Layman and the late Matthew J. Bruccoli as editorial directors and Elizabeth Leverton as series editor. The individual entries with their brief accompanying lists of primary works and sources have been updated, and illustrations and epigraphs have been added. Also added to each volume to assist students are study-guide essays and lists of literary topics associated with the historical period and the major authors covered therein. Each volume provides its own chronology and its own index, as well as an alphabetical list of all its entries. Even more dramatically expanded is the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, whose single, dense, and comprehensive 1989 volume is now swelling into the 24 volumes of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (No. Car.), each one addressing a separate topic area. Literature, ed. M. Thomas Inge, is number 9 in the overall sequence. It features 31 thematic essays on genres, themes, groups, movements, and issues (e.g., "Civil War in Literature," "Humor," "Nature Writing and Writers," "Postsouthern Literature," "Southern Gothic") and more than 220 brief (generally one to three pages) author entries, their focus inconsistently situated somewhere between encyclopedia, appreciation, and gossip and their historical range extending from William Byrd II to Rick Bragg (born 1959). The material is supported by an overview contents list and an author-title index. The special nature of "Southern," a topic of intense conversation in other contexts, is only occasionally invoked here, though Inge attempts a reflective overview in his introduction (pp. 1–16): "Whether in the form of fiction, poetry, or play; memoir, history, or journalism; docu-drama, screenplay, or criticism, in all likelihood, the last distinctively southern writer, like the last southern gentleman, has not been heard from yet."

The reach of the entirely new Encyclopedia of American Journalism, ed. Stephen L. Vaughn (Routledge), is impressive, with more than 400 alphabetically arranged, signed entries, each accompanied by suggestions for further reading. The introductory "Thematic List of Entries" identifies survey essays on such topics as literary journalism, muckraking, and women's magazines, and a separate inventory, "Individuals," cites figures as various as Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Upton Sinclair, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe. On the other hand, not in the list are Edgar Allan Poe, S. S. McClure, or Edgar Watson Howe, the Kansas newspaper editor and realistic novelist. A particular strength of this encyclopedia is that the author entries focus effectively on an author's journalistic activity rather than on more comprehensive biography. Addressing a subfield of American journalism is Edd Applegate's Muckrakers: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors (Scarecrow), its contents 59 entries arranged alphabetically and accompanied by list of primary and second materials. Entries are brief, mostly factual rather than interpretive, and add nothing to their sources. The volume is aimed at high-school and beginning undergraduate students, its chief value the gathering together in one place of all these names associated with a vital and continuing dimension of freedom of the press. Also organized around an historical...