What is "the environment"? We will explore how American writers answered that question in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, focusing on the first half of the 20th century, largely before the environmentalist movement as we know it. Some environments may include wilderness (Jack London, John Muir, Robinson Jeffers), the open sea (Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway), the rural South (Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright),  New England farms (Robert Frost), midwest towns (Edgar Lee Masters), and cities (many possible examples such as Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, as well as Toomer and Wright).  How do humans shape our environments? How are we shaped by them? Discovery and exploration, not ideology, will be the method of this course. In addition to weekly readings, coursework will include in-class writing and discussion, some experimental writing outside of class, and tests (thanks, chat GPT, for bringing back the literature exam!)