Popular Writing in America: The Interaction of Style and Audience

by Robert Atwan (Editor), Donald McQuade (Editor)

Used for nearly two decades in schools nation-wide, this unique anthology offers provocative examples of successful, influential American writing drawn from advertising, the press, popular magazines, bestsellers, classics, film and television, suiting a variety of classroom purposes--topics
for lively class discussions, practical models for student composition, and imaginative texts for literary study. The fifth edition places a new emphasis on multicultural perspectives on the media, and offers an infusion of new selections by a diversity of authors, both within and outside the
established literary canon.

As always, every selection is connected either stylistically or thematically with one or more of the other selections, and an expanded "Table of Linked Selections" follows the "Rhetorical Table of Contents". This feature encourages readers to discover the different ways the same subject can be
treated by different writers or by different media--for example, how staff writers for Time and Newsweek each handled the space shuttle disaster in January 1986, how a major author like Stephen Crane used his personal experience of a disaster at sea to write both a newspaper report and a classic
American short story, or how Ernest Hemingway's famous short story, "Soldier's Home," was transformed into a film script.
Current and comprehensive, Popular Writing in America offers a unique method of teaching composition, one that appeals to students and teachers alike.

784 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Robert Atwan has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.