The following is not intended to be a definitive listing of all American authors of significance &emdash; only the ones I choose to teach. The categories I use here are also quite subjective and open to much debate. I present them here to give the student some handle on the rich body of work our nation's writers have produced. (Note: some authors appear in more than one category, as most great writers avoid easy categorization.)
Native American Authors (SI Page)
I. Age of Reason
deCrevecoeur
Thomas Paine
Thomas Jefferson
Jonathan Edwards
IIa. Gothic & Detective
Edgar Allen Poe (essay ideas)
Edgar Allen Poe: "The Tell Tale Heart" & "The Fall of the House of Usher"
II b. Transcendentalists
Emerson: "Self-Reliance" & "American Scholar"
Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience" & Walden
Thoreau: SI page
Whitman: "Song of Myself" (also modernism)
II c. Anti-Transcendentalists
Hawthorne: Scarlet Letter worksheet
Hawthorne Scarlet Letter (Essay ideas)
Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown & My Kinsman Major Molineux
Hawthorne: The Minister's Black Veil
Hawthorne: SI Links
Melville "Bartleby the Scrivener" & Billy Budd
III Realism
III a. Local Color
Sarah Orne Jewett: "A White Heron"
Bret Harte
Mark Twain: SI page
Willa Cather: "Neighbor Rosicky"
III b. Psychological Realism
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller
Kate Chopin: The Awakening
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: "The Yellow Wallpaper"
III c. Naturalism
Stephen Crane: "The Blue Hotel" "Open Boat"
Robert Frost
Eugene O'Neill: Desire Under the Elms
John Steinbeck: "Flight"
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1)
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (2)
IV. Modernism
Walt Whitman: Song of Myself
Emily Dickinson
Hilda Doolittle
Sherwood Anderson: "A Death in the Woods"
Ezra Pound
e.e. cummings
Wallace Stevens: "Sunday Morning"
Wallace Stevens: "Peter Quince at the Clavier"
William Carlos Williams
Marianne Moore
Thomas Wolfe "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn"
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzerald: SI Links
Ernest Hemingway "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Killers"
Hemingway: The Old Man & The Sea
Hemingway's Code Hero definition
Heminway: SI Links
William Faulkner: "That Evening Sun" "A Rose for Emily"
Eudora Welty: "Death of a Traveling Salesman"
Theodore Roethke: The Lost Son
Theodore Roethke: The Big Wind
V. Harlem Renaissance & beyond (The Black Experience)
Countee Cullen
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Langston Hughes
Jean Toomer "Blood Burning Moon"
Zora Neal Hurston "Gilded Six Bits"
Richard Wright: Native Son & "The Man Who Was Almost a Man"
Richard Wright: SI Page
James Baldwin: "Sonny's Blues"
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gloria Naylor: "The Women of Brewster Place"
VI. Post Modernism
VI. a. Magic Realism
Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie
Bernard Malamud: "The Magic Barrel"
E.L. Doctorow: Ragtime
VI. b. The Beats
Allen Ginsberg: Howl
Gary Snyder
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
VI. c. Other Post-Modernists
Tillie Olsen: "I Stand Here Ironing"
Ann Beattie: "The Lawn Party"
Donald Barthelme: "The School"
Arthur Miller: The Crucible
Flannery O'Connor "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
VI. d. Feminist Poets
Sylvia Plath
Denise Levertov
Ann Sexton
Adrienne Rich
VI e. Immigrant Experience
RuThanne Lum McCunn: One Thousand Pieces of Gold
David Guterson: Snow Falling on Cedars
E.L. Doctorow: Ragtime