Top American Authors in 19-21st Century Literary Anthologies

This project explores author prominence across centuries by analyzing page count and number of occurrences in American Literary Anthologies.

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What we learned

From tables of contents of American literary anthologies, we were able to understand who are considered ‘major’ American authors, using page counts and relative percentage of total pages. Furthermore, we compared the actual number of anthologies authors were featured in to see prominence. We learned that poets like Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman were featured the most overall, with high page counts and number of occurrences. Interestingly, while we found that Native American Literature was moderately to frequently included in Literary Anthologies, the amount of pages it received was very small compared to other authors occurring just as frequently. This shows what authors of these anthologies consider "major" and "prominent" in the history of American Literature.

What's next for our project: Top American Authors in 19th - 21st Century Anthologies

We feel that with time, many more stories are able to be told from this data. We look forward to next identifying what themes are considered "major" in American Literature and how this changes over time, as well as further exploring author representation with regard to gender and race.

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