Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing

For Introduction to Literature courses and Freshman Composition courses that emphasize writing about literature.

Roberts delivers the best coverage of writing about literature. Complete coverage of writing about fiction, poetry, and drama and a total of 32 student essays with accompanying commentary ensure student comprehension of writing about literature, which helps students produce better papers.

Edgar Roberts was inspired to create his first book―Writing about Literature―as a direct result of his experiences in the college classroom. Professor Roberts noticed that there was a clear correlation between the level of detail he provided when explaining his class assignments and the quality of work he received from his students: the more class time he devoted to describing what he wanted, the better the final essays turned out to be. As a result of this observation, Roberts created his successful text Writing about Literature to fill this need in literature and composition classrooms everywhere. 

Soon afterwards, Roberts realized that literature classrooms needed both the instruction provided in Writing about Literature and an anthology to meet the needs of a course based around that text. This led him to create Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. This volume contains classroom-tested selections in the areas of fiction, poetry, and drama, with analysis of each. Additionally, Roberts provides explanatory material in all relevant subject areas drawn from his years of experience teaching literature.

Edgar V. Roberts (b. 1928)

      Edgar V. Roberts is a native of Minneapolis, and he attended the Minneapolis public schools. After a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he studied at the U of Minnesota, where  he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and also a study fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.During his teaching career he taught at Minnesota, the U of Maryland Overseas Division, Wayne State U, Hunter College,

and Lehman College. In the 1980s he served as Chair of the Lehman English Department, and is now a Professor Emeritus there. Along with a number of articles on the drama of Henry Fielding, he edited two eighteenth-century plays: John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1968) and Fielding's The Grub-Street Opera (1969).

      Professor Roberts's Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing-now going into its eighth edition-which he wrote and edited jointly with Henry E. Jacobs (dec'd) of the U of Alabama, was first published in 1986. In addition, Professor Roberts is the Prentice Hall author of Writing About Literature (1964), now in its eleventh edition, along with the brief eleventh edition. In the early 1990s, PBS created their "Introduction to Literature" television series, using as their accompanying text the third and later editions of Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.

      Professor Roberts lives in the Edgemont area of Greenburgh, New York. He loves music and singing, and he regularly attends New York's Metropolitan Opera. For years he has been a devoted and diligent jogger. One of his major educational principles is that the study of literature, music, and art should be directed toward the development of analytical thought, which is vital in every aspect of applied and theoretical knowledge.