When I was in high school in the mid-1970s, first in Rockville outside Washington, DC, then in north San Diego County, a year of classic American literature was a standard thing. These weren’t private schools—I never attended one of those—just ordinary public schools with the usual good and bad students. Still, everyone assumed English class included Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain in the nineteenth century and Frost, Millay, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner in the twentieth century. Choices after that varied, but always were serious. My teachers picked Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, and John Barth’s The Floating Opera.
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