AN OUTLINE
OF
AMERICAN
LITERATURE
COLONIAL LITERATURE
• pamphlets about the benefits of the
colonies
• journals
• religious poetry
• political writings (Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Paine: Common Sense )
Thomas Jefferson:
United States Declaration of
Independence
„We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all
men are created equal,
that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.“
POST-INDEPENDENCE
• first American novel
William Hill Brown:
The Power of Sympathy
(1791)
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
• Washington Irving – short stories (Rip Van
Winkle)
• James Fenimore Cooper – novels (The Last of
the Mohicans)
• Edgar Allan Poe – poetry, horror stories,
detective fiction (The Raven, The Black Cat,
The Murders in the Rue Morgue)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne – novels (The Scarlet
Letter)
• Herman Melville – novels (Moby-Dick)
TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau – philosophical essays
• Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman - poetry
REALISM
• Mark Twain:
– Life on the Mississippi (1883) - memoirs
– Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
– Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
• O. Henry – short stories
• Jack London:
– The Call of the Wild (1903)
NATURALISM
• Stephen Crane:
– The Red Badge of Courage (1895) – novel
from the Civil War
• Theodore Dreiser:
– An American Tragedy (1925)
LOST GENERATION
• Earnest Hemingway:
– The Sun Also Rises (1926)
– A Farewell to Arms (1929)
– For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
– The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
• Francis Scott Fitzgerald:
– The Great Gatsby (1925)
DEPRESSION ERA – 1930s
• John Steinbeck:
– Of Mice and Men (1937)
– The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
– East of Eden (1952)
WAR / ANTI-WAR NOVEL
• Norman Mailer:
– The Naked and the Dead (1948)
• Joseph Heller:
– Catch-22 (1961)
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.:
– Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
BEAT GENERATION
• Allan Ginsberg:
– Howl (1955)
• Jack Kerouac:
– On the Road (1957)
• William S. Burroughs:
– The Naked Lunch (1959)
POSTMODERNISM
• John Irving:
– The World According to Garp (1978)
• Truman Capote:
– In Cold Blood (1966) – a non-fiction novel
• William Styron:
– Sophie´s Choice (1979) – a historical novel
• Don DeLillo:
– White Noise (1985)
SOUTHERN LITERATURE
• William Faulkner:
– The Sound and the Fury (1929) – Southern Gothic
– As I Lay Dying (1930) – modernism, stream of
consciousness method
• Flannery O´Connor:
– A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) - Southern
Gothic; short stories
• Tennessee Williams:
– Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) - drama
AFRO - AMERICAN LITERATURE
• Langston Hughes – jazz poetry of 1920s,
Harlem Renaissance
• Tony Morrison:
– The Bluest Eyes (1970)
– Beloved (1987)
• Maya Angelou:
– I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) – an
autobiography
JEWISH AMERICAN
LITERATURE
• Bernard Malamud:
– The Magic Barrel (1958)
– a collection of short stories
• Philip Roth:
– Goodbye, Columbus (1959) - a novella and
short stories
SCIENCE-FICTION
• Isaac Asimov:
– I, Robot (1950) – a collection of short stories
• Ray Bradbury:
– The Martian Chronicles (1950)
– Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
AMERICAN DRAMA
• Eugene O´Neil:
– Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)
• Arthur Miller:
– Death of a Salesman (1949)
• Tennessee Williams:
– A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
• Edward Albee:
– Who´s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962)
CONTEMPORARY WRITERS
• Stephen King:
– The Green Mile (1996)
• Dan Brown:
– The Da Vinci Code (2003)
• Cormac McCarthy:
– No Country for Old Men (2005)
– The Road (2006)