Paul Lauter-Heath Anthology Papers

Paul Lauter (1932-), a professor of English at Trinity College, set the work for the Heath Anthology of American Literature in motion in 1968 when he attended a Modern Language Association conference and spearheaded a protest of the lack of diversity and the underrepresentation of American authors and regular people, including Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian Americans, and women. Then, in the late 1970s, Lauter initiated and directed the Reconstructing American Literature (RAL) project at the Feminist Press in New York, which he had helped found. Funded in part by the federal Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), RAL constituted a collection of revisionist syllabi and bibliographies for teaching English literature. It was published in hardback in 1984 as Reconstructing American Literature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues (Feminist Press). By the mid-1980s, D.C. Heath and Company had taken on an adjacent project of publishing an anthology of marginalized authors, giving it its eventual name when published in 1989 as the Heath Anthology. Lauter launched work on the anthology by enlisting the contributions of over 300 academics and post-secondary institutions involved in the study of underrepresented groups in American Literature.

The Heath Anthology was the earliest initiative among academics to create a revised, more inclusive anthology that sought to incorporate the underrepresented voices of women, people of color, immigrants, and other groups marginalized from American Literature To this day, the anthology is still hailed as a major achievement in the promotion of multiculturalism in American Literature.