tudents just weren't signing up for American Literature I anymore. Of the fourteen electives we offer to our juniors and seniors, the enrollment for this course mattered the most to us. We loved the books and felt that no elective program would be complete, would have merit, without a course in the foundation of American literature that Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville provided. But what happens when you offer a course and no one takes it? M In our lamentation we began naming all the books and literary movements that owe a debt to this body of work, when, suddenly, it occurred to us that our