Erik Fredner and J.D. Porter’s article “Counting on the Norton Anthology of American Literature” emerged from a project begun in the Literary Lab, and made possible by its resources and the contributions of its members to the database.
You can read the article here. [LINK TO HOSTED ARTICLE.]
And you can review the calculations for figures cited in the article here.
Analyzing the every editorial decision made in the NAAL‘s tables of contents over its first 10 editions (1979-2022), Fredner and Porter identify, among other things, 103 authors that have been selected and re-selected for every edition of the NAAL. This finding anchors their argument that the editorial history of the NAAL reveals an editorial preference for a strategy of growth rather than one of redistribution.
Those interested in further discussing the data should email the authors.
The Norton 103
Below you will find the members of the Norton 103 organized by the year of their birth. Author identities are represented as they are in Norton’s tables of contents. Following Norton’s editors, we treat the authors of the Federalist Papers as a single author.
| Author | Birth Year |
| John Winthrop | 1588 |
| William Bradford | 1590 |
| Anne Bradstreet | 1612 |
| Mary Rowlandson | 1636 |
| Edward Taylor | 1642 |
| Cotton Mather | 1663 |
| Sarah Kemble Knight | 1666 |
| William Byrd | 1674 |
| Jonathan Edwards | 1703 |
| Benjamin Franklin | 1706 |
| John Woolman | 1720 |
| J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur | 1735 |
| Thomas Paine | 1737 |
| Thomas Jefferson | 1743 |
| Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison | 1745* |
| Philip Freneau | 1752 |
| Phillis Wheatley | 1753 |
| Washington Irving | 1783 |
| James Fenimore Cooper | 1789 |
| William Cullen Bryant | 1794 |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | 1803 |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | 1804 |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | 1807 |
| John Greenleaf Whittier | 1807 |
| Edgar Allan Poe | 1809 |
| Abraham Lincoln | 1809 |
| Margaret Fuller | 1810 |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | 1811 |
| Henry David Thoreau | 1817 |
| Frederick Douglass | 1818 |
| Walt Whitman | 1819 |
| Herman Melville | 1819 |
| Emily Dickinson | 1830 |
| Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) | 1835 |
| Bret Harte | 1836 |
| Henry Adams | 1838 |
| Ambrose Bierce | 1842 |
| Henry James | 1843 |
| Joel Chandler Harris | 1848 |
| Sarah Orne Jewett | 1849 |
| Kate Chopin | 1850 |
| Mary E. Wilkins Freeman | 1852 |
| Booker T. Washington | 1856 |
| Charles W. Chesnutt | 1858 |
| Hamlin Garland | 1860 |
| Edith Wharton | 1862 |
| W.E.B. Du Bois | 1868 |
| Edwin Arlington Robinson | 1869 |
| Theodore Dreiser | 1871 |
| Stephen Crane | 1871 |
| Willa Cather | 1873 |
| Gertrude Stein | 1874 |
| Robert Frost | 1874 |
| Sherwood Anderson | 1876 |
| Jack London | 1876 |
| Carl Sandburg | 1878 |
| Wallace Stevens | 1879 |
| William Carlos Williams | 1883 |
| Ezra Pound | 1885 |
| H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) | 1886 |
| Marianne Moore | 1887 |
| T. S. Eliot | 1888 |
| Katherine Anne Porter | 1890 |
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | 1892 |
| E.E. Cummings | 1894 |
| Jean Toomer | 1894 |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1896 |
| John Dos Passos | 1896 |
| William Faulkner | 1897 |
| Hart Crane | 1899 |
| Ernest Hemingway | 1899 |
| John Steinbeck | 1902 |
| Langston Hughes | 1902 |
| Countee Cullen | 1903 |
| Theodore Roethke | 1908 |
| Richard Wright | 1908 |
| Eudora Welty | 1909 |
| Charles Olson | 1910 |
| Elizabeth Bishop | 1911 |
| Ralph Ellison | 1913 |
| John Berryman | 1914 |
| Randall Jarrell | 1914 |
| Saul Bellow | 1915 |
| Gwendolyn Brooks | 1917 |
| Robert Lowell | 1917 |
| Richard Wilbur | 1921 |
| Denise Levertov | 1923 |
| James Baldwin | 1924 |
| Flannery O’Connor | 1925 |
| A.R. Ammons | 1926 |
| James Merrill | 1926 |
| Frank O’Hara | 1926 |
| Allen Ginsberg | 1926 |
| W.S. Merwin | 1927 |
| James Wright | 1927 |
| John Ashbery | 1927 |
| Anne Sexton | 1928 |
| Adrienne Rich | 1929 |
| Gary Snyder | 1930 |
| Sylvia Plath | 1932 |
| John Updike | 1932 |
| Philip Roth | 1933 |
| Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) | 1934 |
*Jay’s birth date, the earliest of the three authors of The Federalist Papers.