The Junior High School offers exceptional opportunity for relating literature to life. In addition to the aesthetic and ethical purposes, long recognized in the study of literature, the World War emphasized the need for an extension of aims to include the teaching of certain fundamental American ideals. To marshal the available material, setting it to work in the service of social and civic ideals, is to give to literature the “central place in a new humanism.” When we organize reading in the schools with reference to the teaching of ideals—personal, social, national, and patriotic—we “put the stress on literature as one of the chief means through which the child enters on his intellectual and spiritual inheritance.” Outstanding among these ideals are: freedom, love of home and country, service, loyalty, courage, thrift, humane treatment of animals, a sense of humor, love of Nature, and an appreciation of the dignity of honest work. In a word, to provide a course in the history and development of civilization, particularly stressing America’s part in it, is the present-day demand on the school. The Junior High School Literature Series, of which the present volume is intended for use in the first year, provides such a course. The literature brought together in this book is organized with reference to the social ideal. Nature in its varied relations to human life, particularly child life, is presented in stories and poems of animals, birds, flowers, trees, and winter, all abounding in beauty and charm. Interest in Nature leads to interest in the deeds of men filled with the spirit of adventure. The heroism of brave men and women from the age of chivalry to the days of self-sacrifice on Flanders Fields is told in ballad and romance, thus stimulating qualities of courage, loyalty, and devotion. Akin to these are the deeds of men who won freedom for their fellows and gave meaning to the words, “our inheritance of freedom.” Their heroism is told in story and song, from the time of the Great Charter and Robert the Bruce to the Declaration of Independence and the recent treaty of Versailles. The whole culminates in the literature and life in the homeland, interpreting America’s part in these great enterprises of the human spirit. Through legend and history the spirit and thoughts of our developing nation are portrayed in a literature of compelling interest, distinctively American.