Literature: An Introduction to Reading And Writing - Couverture rigide

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.

How important is writing in your course?

When Edgar Roberts taught literature and composition, a large part of his courses involved essay-writing assignments.  He dedicated a substantial amount of his class time to explaining how students should prepare their writing assignments. He discovered that the more he described to his students what he wanted, and the more time he spent explaining things, the better the final essays turned out to be. There was a direct correlation between the way he made his assignments and the quality of student work he received. 

Professor Roberts started to hand out directions to his students, saving him valuable classroom and preparation time. Over the years, he tested each assignment in his own classes.  To meet the needs of the literature and composition course, Professor Roberts seamlessly integrated writing-about-literature instruction with a comprehensive literature anthology.  The result is the book you hold in your hands. 

Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing is founded on the principles of writing about literature.  It is not an afterthought and it is not treated as a separate chapter or appendix; but rather, it is the carefully integrated philosophy of Professor Roberts’ approach to teaching literature and composition. 

Also available in a briefer paperback version.

Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, Compact Third Edition

(c) 2006 1648 pp.

ISBN 0-13-153435-1