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Modern American Literature, 5th ed. Ed. by Joann Cerrito and Laurie DeMauro. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 1999. 3 vols. $450/set (ISBN 1-55862-3795/set). Web site: www.gale.com.
This new edition of Modern American Literature contains critiques of 431 authors. Dorothy Nyren Curley, Maurice Kramer, and Elaine Fialka Kramer compiled and edited the earlier edition of MAL (Ungar, fourth enlarged edition, 1969-85, volumes I-III plus supplement volumes IV-V). The 1999 edition's preface is so sketchy that it was necessary to consult the foreword [p. v-vi] to the previous edition, which states that MAL "indicates critical attitudes-sometimes remarkably stable, sometimes mercurial-toward now close to three hundred American authors of the twentieth century. The new authors added here vary from a Few overlooked elders to some of the younger writers who have . . . established themselves in the Sixties . [Keeping a record is certainly a major function of this book. . . . The Fifties and Sixties saw an increase in published criticism, especially of a scholarly nature. We tried to include...