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reviewed Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes by James Baldwin (Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes)

Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Adams, Rita Dove, Anna Quindlen, Sojourner Truth, Anonymous, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jack London, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, Tom Wolfe, Simon J. Ortiz, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joni Mitchell, Patrick Henry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Abraham Lincoln, N. Scott Momaday, William Carlos Williams, Richard Lederer, Robert E. Lee, Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, Alex Haley, John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, Willa Cather, Julia Alvarez, Henry David Thoreau, John Wesley Powell, Joy Harjo, Bailey White, Adrienne Rich, Tim O'Brien, Sherwood Anderson, Alice Walker, Katherine Anne Porter, Bret Harte, Ezra Pound, Frederick Douglass, Grace Paley, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Stephen Crane, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Maxine Hong Kingston, Herman Melville, Joel, Billy., Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Robert Penn Warren, Annie Dillard, Arthur Miller, E.B. White, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kate Chopin, Marianne Moore, Larry McMurtry, Amy K. Duer, John F. Kennedy, Christopher Columbus, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, Darryl Babe Wilson, John Smith, Edward Taylor, Steve Wulf, Phillis Wheatley, Michel-guillaume Jean De Crevecoeur, Emily Saliers, Angela De Hoyos, William Faulkner, Robert Hayden, Stephen Foster, George Cooper, Robert E. Lee, Goss, Warren Lee, McKim, Randolph H., Stonewall Jackson, William Bradford, Rev. Henry M. Turner, Molly Moore, Miriam Davis Colt, Anne Bradstreet, James Cloyd Bowman, Phillis Wheatley, Ricardo Sanchez, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, William Cullen Bryant, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Margaret Fuller, Chief Joseph, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edwin Arlington Robinson, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Frost, Countee Cullen, Flannery Oconnor, Diana Chang, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Arna Wendell Bontemps, Claude McKay, Garret Hongo, E. L. Doctorow, Colleen McElroy, Ian Frazier, Joyce Carol Oates, Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, Randall Jarrell, Anne Tyler, Edith Wharton, Jean Toomer, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Martin Espada, Sylvia Plath, Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, Jonathan Edwards, Amy Tan, Carson McCullers, Meriwether Lewis, Robert Lowell, James Thurber, Thomas Paine, Carl Sandburg, W. H. Auden, Edgar Lee Masters, Gwendolyn Brooks: Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (Hardcover, 1999, Prentice Hall) 4 stars

Review of 'Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Another story in which a man is tormented by his doppelgänger. Poe's take on this trope is quite similar to that of Dostoevsky's, both the original William Wilson and the original Golyadkin are being agonised by someone who walks, talks, and looks like them and both stories lead up to a climactic end. Despite their similarities, these stories each leave you a rather different feeling of discomfort than the other but are both worth reading.

5/5
The only downside to this story is its short length, other than that it's a fantastic read.


SPOILERS AHEAD:

I would like to add that between Dostoevsky's Double and Poe's William Wilson, I'm far fonder of the latter's ending:

"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."