Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature from the previous six years, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Dana, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19, but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved.

This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form; it contains the complete surviving 1918-19 text of the essays of the English Review period, including two previously unpublished essay versions; it offers five previously unpublished essays from 1919, as well as a host of other materials (for example, four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman are included).