To the Editors:

When I heard from a friend that The Heath Anthology of American Literature was the subject of an editorial in The New Criterion (Notes & Comments, October 1990), I looked forward to being engaged by a challenging, perhaps provoking, conservative view. Alas, what I found instead was shrill and trite rant about “affirmative-action thinking.”

I challenge any reader of the anthology to show me one single work chosen on the basis of whatever your editorialist means by “affirmative-action thinking.” I would not claim that all the hundreds of texts in the anthology are masterpieces. No museum—and anthologies are, among other things, literary museums—hangs nothing but masterpieces. On the contrary, works are included in any collection because they are historically interesting, because they represent significant artistic trends, because they have done well commercially —and for less edifying motives. It was our intention to represent the range of the cultures of the United States at many stages of development, and I think we have done reasonably well at it. We have even included far more of the traditional “masterpieces” than could be taught in any two-term American literature sequence. In fact, had your editorialist done his or her homework, what would have been clear is that The Heath Anthology contains as much or more work by the authors you list as important than most other American-literature anthologies.

Furthermore, the notion of what constitutes a “masterpiece” changes significantly over time. Let’s remember that in 1920 Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”