We will look at several writers from the 19^th through the 21^st centuries who considered the impact of modern technologies on American society.

Suggested Reading:

• Henry David Thoreau, from Walden
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad”
• Herman Melville, “The Tartarus of Maids”; “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight”
• Walt Whitman, “To a Locomotive in Winter”
• Edward Bellamy, from Looking Backward
• Mark Twain, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
• Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin”
• John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio”
• Kurt Vonnegut, from Welcome to the Monkey House
• Don Delillo, Cosmopolis
• George Saunders, “Semplica Girl Diaries”; “Escape from Spiderhead"

Daniel Schenker is a graduate of Brandeis University and has advanced degrees in English and American Literature from Johns Hopkins University.  For thirty years he taught a wide range of literature courses at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, from which he also holds a degree in Spanish. He has written scholarly essays, short stories, and an historical novel, Confessions of a Marrano Rocketeer (Black Rose Writing). He keeps a vegetable garden and enjoys hiking in the Berkshires and in his native upstate New York.

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