Lightning Lit — American Lit: Early-Mid 19th Century Student Guide

Third Edition

Lessons cover persuasive writing, tone, conflict, character, and rhyme and meter in poetry. The Student’s Guide includes information about the authors, comprehension questions, writing exercises, discussion questions and project suggestions, reading lists appropriate to the period or subject, semester and full-year schedules, and a bibliography. The answers to comprehension questions are in the Teacher’s Guide. Book-length works are sold separately and in a pack with the guides.

Recommendations:

This book is especially recommended for freshmen students new to Lightning Literature in any high school grade, students taking American History, or students interested in American literature. These should not be viewed as restrictions as this course can profitably be used by high school students of any grade regardless of which previous Lightning Literature courses they have completed.

Students read in the following order:

• Benjamin Franklin (nonfiction: Autobiography)
• Washington Irving (essay, text in this Guide: “The Angler”)
• William Cullen Bryant (selected poems, text in this Guide)
• Frederick Douglass (nonfiction: Narrative)
• Edgar Allan Poe (short story, text in this Guide: “The Tell-Tale Heart”)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (novel: The Scarlet Letter)
• Herman Melville (novel: Moby-Dick)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (selected poems, text in this Guide)