This book Essays on American Literature has several chapters devoted to the chronological happenings in American literature. The first chapter is about the colonial days and then the subsequent chapters treat such seminal topics as American dream, Transcendentalism, Civil War writings, frontier literature, realism, Harlem renaissance, American criticism, American English, African American literature as much as Jewish/Asian American literatures, and finally two chapters dealing with such important writers-in-isolation as Faulkner, Hemingway and Frost. Dr Mallikarjun Patil is a Professor and Chairman, Dept. of English, Karnatak University, Dharwad for long. The range of his academic publications is too immense: he has books on Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence, Conrad, Kipling, Frost, Poe, Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. This is not all. Mallikarjun Patil is a creative writer. He is a novelist and travel-book writer. His novel Under the Mango Tree (2008) is made into the film Negiluyogi in 2012. His numerous Kannada plays are staged in Karnataka.