I've just purchased a couple of big honkin' reference-type books that this crew might be interested in (especially if the local library has them) -
A New Literary History of America, Harvard Univ. Press
From an Amazon blurb -
"This magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture...Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too...This book is not so much a history of our literature as it is a literary version of our history, told through the culture we've created to recount our past and conjure our future..." Laura Miller, Salon
and
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein
Certainly more readable and more lift-able. Both are good for browsing & dipping into.
