Thirty years after the first volume of the Scribner Writers Series , this second Retrospective Supplement follows the path of the first by re-examining some of the most important and influential writers in the American canon-men and women who continue to be studied in high schools and universities as often today as when the American Writers Series first began. Each essay, written by an expert in the field with years of teaching experience, explores the life and work of individual authors. The bio-critical essays on such writers as Ralph Waldo Ellison, Edgar Allan Poe, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sylvia Plath, and James Baldwin reflect the most recent scholarship on these and other writers of enduring importance.