This print textbook is available for students to rent for their classes. The Pearson print rental program provides students with affordable access to learning materials, so they come to class ready to succeed.
For introductory courses in Literature.
Cultivates a love of literature and an understanding of effective writing
Kennedy/Gioia’s Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, 6th Edition is a brief version of the discipline's most popular literature anthology.
Backpack Literature introduces students to the appreciation and experience of literature in its major forms – and develops their abilities to think critically and communicate effectively through, and about, writing. Authors X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia aim to help readers develop sensitivity to language, culture, and identity, see beyond the boundaries of their own selves, and view the world through the eyes of others.
Each of the first three sections is devoted to one of the major literary forms of fiction, poetry, and drama; the fourth is a comprehensive introduction to critical writing. The 6th Edition of this trusted resource has been revised throughout for clarity and accessibility, and all chapters have been updated with a more visual appeal for current students. Packed with a variety of popular and provocative stories, poems, plays, and critical prose, it includes exciting and often-surprising contemporary selections. Every chapter has been reviewed and updated with relevant cultural references.
0134756797 / 9780134756790 BACKPACK LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO FICTION, POETRY, DRAMA, AND WRITING [RENTAL EDITION], 6/e
About our authors
X. J. Kennedy, after graduation from Seton Hall and Columbia, became a journalist second class in the Navy (“Actually, I was pretty eighth class”). His poems, some published in The New Yorker, were first collected in Nude Descending a Staircase (1961). Since then, he has published 7 more collections, including a volume of new and selected poems in 2007, several widely adopted literature and writing textbooks and 17 books for children, including 2 novels. He has taught at Michigan, North Carolina (Greensboro), California (Irvine), Wellesley, Tufts and Leeds. Cited in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and reprinted in some 200 anthologies, his verse has brought him a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lamont Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Aiken-Taylor prize and the Award for Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English. He now lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Dorothy have collaborated on 5 books and 5 children.
Dana Gioia is a poet, critic and teacher. Born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican ancestry, he attended Stanford and Harvard before taking a detour into business. (“Not many poets have a Stanford MBA, thank goodness!”) After years of writing and reading late in the evenings after work, he quit a vice presidency to write and teach. He has published 4 collections of poetry, Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, Pity the Beautiful (2012) and 3 critical volumes, including Can Poetry Matter? (1992), an influential study of poetry's place in contemporary America. Gioia has taught at Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan (Connecticut), Mercer and Colorado College. From 2003 to 2009 he served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. At the NEA he created the largest literary programs in federal history, including Shakespeare in American Communities and Poetry Out Loud, the national high school poetry recitation contest. He also led the campaign to restore active literary reading by creating The Big Read, which helped reverse a quarter century of decline in US reading. He is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. (The surname Gioia is pronounced JOY-A. As some of you may have already guessed, gioia is the Italian word for “joy.”)
Dan Stone worked for many years as a program manager and documentary producer at the National Endowment for the Arts, during which time he wrote, recorded and produced nearly 30 radio documentaries on classic American novels for the Big Read, interviewing more than 200 prominent writers, actors, artists, musicians and public figures. While at the NEA, Stone helped create Poetry Out Loud, the popular national high school recitation contest, and he produced educational and audio programming for the initiatives Shakespeare in American Communities and NEA Jazz Masters. He studied poetry at Colorado College and received an MFA in fiction from Boston University, and he has taught middle school, high school and college. With Dana Gioia, Stone edited Penguin's 100 Great Poets of the English Language. His most recent book, How Money Became Dangerous, is about the modern evolution of Wall Street and the financial services industry. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Radio Silence, a magazine of literature and rock 'n' roll. For City Arts & Lectures and NPR, he has conducted lengthy stage conversations with Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, George Saunders and Elvis Costello. Stone owns an establishment near his home in Oakland, California, called North Light, which serves as a bookstore, record store, restaurant and café.
