The Erie Canal Readerpoems, essays, travelogues, and fiction by major American and British writerscaptures the colorful landscape and life along the Erie Canal from its birth in the New York frontier, through its heyday as a passage of culture and commerce, to its present decline into disuse.

Part celebration of the men and women who worked its waters and part social observation, these writings by such figures as Basil Hall, Frances Trollope, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and others provide first-hand observations of the canal country and its role in the...