“Every crime destroys more Edens than our own.”--Nathaniel Hawthorne.  The theme for this class is crime in American literature, starting at colonization and continuing to 1905.  Part 1, fall semester, will include works by Poe, Hawthorne, Alcott, and Twain, among others.  Students will lead discussions, write analytical essays, and complete a final semester project.

American Crime and Punishment 2 picks up where the fall semester class left off.  This semester will focus on the theme of crime in 20th century American literature and film, both canonical and popular.  The class may include American authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, James Cain, Dashiell Hammet, Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Delores Hitchens, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes. David Goodis, Chester Himes, Flannery O’Connor.  Students will lead discussions, write analytical book reviews, and submit a final project of their choice.

This course will read and discuss the great writings of the mystery genre from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868,) widely considered the first mystery novel, through classic works by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and on to more contemporary fiction.  We will also screen film and television adaptations of these works and listen to examples from the age of radio mysteries, considering what resonates in different periods, including a study of the real life 1860 murder of 3 year-old Saville Kent (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher) that set the model for the archetypal character of “the detective” and sparked a Victorian interest in murder that would develop into the mystery genre we know today.

Venture into the world of creative writers who choose nonfiction as their realm, or as Creative Nonfiction Magazine describes the genre, “true stories well told.”  From memoir to personal essay, from lyric essay to literary journalism—creative nonfiction has it all.  In this class we shall sample creative nonfiction by the best—John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Bill Bryson, Susan Orlean, to name a handful–and write some nonfiction of our own.