Possible American Pieces for MLA Research Paper
Colonial Period- Nonfiction
John Smith- The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles
William Bradford- Of Plymouth Plantation
Thomas Morton- The New English Canaan
William Byrd- Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia: and North Carolina
Ben Franklin- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Paine- The Crisis (all 16), The Rights of Man , The Age of Reason
Cotton Mather- Magnalia Christi Americana
J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur- Letters From an American Farmer
Mary Rowlandson The History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson
Olaudah Equiano- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African
Romantic Period-Fiction
Washington Irving- Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York from the Beginning of
the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, The Sketch Book ( a
collection of short stories, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow”)
James Fenimore Cooper- Any novel from the Leatherstocking Tales ( Last of the
Mohicans, The Deerslayer, etc.)
Edgar Allan Poe- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, any of his short stories or poems
Harriet Beecher Stowe- Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Louisa May Alcott- Little Women or Little Men
Herman Melville- Moby-Dick , Billy Budd ( I would suggest the Penguin Classic edition of Billy Budd with
an introduction by Fredrick Busch), Red Jacket , Typee, Omoo , The Confidence-Man,
Mardi, Pierre
Hugh Henry Brackenridge- Modern Chivalry Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and
Teague O'Reagan, His Servant
William Hill Brown- The Power of Sympathy (considered the first American novel by many)
Charles Brockden Brown- Wieland; or The Transformation or Edgar Huntly or Arthur
Mervyn
William Wells Brown- Clotel ; or the President’s Daughter
Richard Henry Dana- Two Years Before the Mast
Nathaniel Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Bithedale
Romance, The Marble Faun
Romantic Period-Nonfiction
The Federalist Papers
Thomas Paine- The Rights of Man or The Age of Reason
Alexis (Charles Henri Maurice Clerel) de Tocqueville- Democracy in America
Ralph Waldo Emerson- His essays- include these: “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,
“The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,”
“The Over-Soul,” and “The Transcendentalist” (I would
recommend Penguin Classics Nature and Selected Essays by
Ralph Waldo Emerson with an introduction by Larzer Ziff)
Henry David Thoreau- Walden; or Life in the Woods
Margaret Fuller- Woman in the Nineteenth Century
James Russell Lowell- The Writings of James Russell Lowell

Fredrick Douglass- Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass
Sojourner Truth- The Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Oliver Wendell Holmes- The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
Realism/Naturalism/Regionalism Period-Fiction
George Washington Cable- The Grandissimes, Old Creole Days: A Story of Creole Life (a collection of
short stories)
Bret Harte- a short story from any collection of his short stories, most famous being "The Outcasts of Poker Flats"
and "The Luck of Roaring Camp"
William Dean Howells- The Rise of Silas Lapham
Theodore Dreiser- An American Tragedy
Henry JamesThe American , Daisy Miller, The Europeans, Washington Square , The
Portrait of a Lady , The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw , The Wings
of the Dove , The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl
Stephen Crane- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets , The Red Badge of Courage, or any single story from a collection of
his short stories. The most well-known are "The Blue Hotel," "The Open Boat," and "The Bride
Comes to Yellow Sky"
Sarah Orne Jewett- The Country of the Pointed Firs (actually a collection of connected short stories)
Mark Twain- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, The Gilded Age, The Tragedy of
Pudd'nhead Wilson
Jack London- The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, White Fang, Martin Eden, The Iron Heel
Frank Norris- McTeague , The Octopus, The Pit
Charlotte Perkins Gilman- Herland
Kate Chopin- At Fault, The Awakening
Hamlin Garland- Main-Traveled Roads (a collection of short stories)
Edith Wharton- The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth
Ambrose Bierce- any short story from a collection of short stories by Bierce. Most famous is "An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge"
Sherwood Anderson- Winesburg, Ohio (actually a collection of inter-connected short stories)
Upton Sinclair- The Jungle
Willa Cather- My Antonia or O Pioneers!
Realism/Naturalism/Regionalism Period-Nonfiction
Mark Twain- Life on the Mississippi , The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad
Black Elk- Black Elk Speaks
W.E.B. Du Bois- The Souls of Black Folk
Ida Tarbell- The History of the Standard Oil Company
Booker T. Washington- Up From Slavery, An Autobiography
Marcus Garvey- any work by Garvey
Charlotte Perkins Gilman- Women and Economics
Modernism Period-Fiction
Ernest Hemingway- The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to
Arms, Across the River and into the Trees, In Our Time
F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby , Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise
William Faulkner- Light in August, Intruder in the Dust , As I Lay Dying, The Unvanquished, Sanctuary,
The Wild Palms, The Sound and The Fury, The Reivers, Flags in the Dust, The Mansion,
Soldier’s Pay, Mosquitoes; Absalom, Absalom; Go Down, Moses, any short story
Eudora Welty- The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist’s
Daughter, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories,The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty
John Steinbeck- Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, Cannery Row, The Moon is Down,

East of Eden, The Pearl, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, In Dubious Battle, Tortilla Flat,
The Winter of Our Discontent
Zora Neal Hurston- Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Dos Passos- Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer
Sinclair Lewis- Main Street, It Can’t Happen Here, Arrowsmith, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth
Sherwood Anderson- Winesburg, Ohio (A Collection of short stories but with a common thread running
through it)
Pearl S. Buck- The Good Earth, Dragon Seed, Peony
Willa Cather- My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!
Edgar Rice Burroughs- Tarzan of the Apes, Pellucidar, A Princess of Mars, The Land That Time Forgot
William Saroyan- The Human Comedy
Nathanael West- Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust
Thomas Wolfe- Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River, You Can’t Go Home Again
Richard Wright- Native Son, The Outsider
H. P. Lovecraft- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness
Ring Lardner- You Know Me, Al
James T. Farrell- Studs Lonigan (a series, and perhaps too long; I would read Young
Lonigan if nothing else)
Ellen Glasgow- The Romantic Comedian, They Stooped to Folly, The Sheltered Life, The Deliverance,
Virginia, Life and Gabriella, Barren Ground
Erskine Caldwell- Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre
Katherine Ann Porter- Noon Wine, Old Mortality; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Ship of Fools, The Collected
Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Robert Penn Warren- All the King’s Men
Anzia Yezierska- Bread Givers
Oliver LaFarge- Laughing Boy
MacKinlay Kantor- Andersonville
Post-Modernism Period-Fiction
James Agee- A Death in the Family
Sherman Alexie- Reservation Blues, Indian Killer
James Baldwin- Go Tell It on the Mountain
John Barth- The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy
Donald Barthelme- Snow White, The Dead Father, The King, City Life
Saul Bellow- Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Humboldt’s Gift,
Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet
Paul Bowles- The Sheltering Sky
Ray Bradbury- Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way
Comes
Richard Brautigan- Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur
Raymond Carver- Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Chandler- The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely
John Cheever- The Wapshot Chronicles, Falconer
Sandra Cisneros- The House on Mango Street, Caramelo
Don Delillo- White Noise, Libra, End Zone
James Dickey- Alnilam, To the White Sea
Joan Didion- Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer
E. L. Doctorow- Ragtime, Loon Lake, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate
Ralph Ellison- Invisible Man
Louise Erdrich- Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, The Beet Queen, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club,
The Plague of Doves
Joseph Heller- Catch 22, God Knows
John Hersey- A Bell for Adano
Gish Jen- Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife

Jack Kerouac- On the Road
Ken Kesey-
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion
Barbara Kingsolver- The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, Pigs in Heaven
Maxine Hong Kingston- Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
Harper Lee- To Kill a Mockingbird
Ursula K. Le Guin- any of her novels
Norman Mailer- The Naked and the Dead, Harlot’s Ghost
Bernard Malamud- The Natural, The Assistant, The Fixer, The Magic Barrel
Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses, The Road, No Country for Old Men, Child of God,
The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, Blood Meridian, Suttree, The Outer Dark
Carson McCullers- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café
and Other Stories
N. Scott Momaday- House Made of Dawn
Toni Morrison- The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Beloved, Song of Solomon
Tim O’Brien- Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Wood, The Things They Carried (actually a
collection)
Flannery O’Connor- Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Complete
Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor
John Gardner- Grendel, Mickelsson’s Ghost, Nickel Mountains
John O’Hara- Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8
Cynthia Ozick- The Puttermesser Papers
Ann Petry- The Street, The Narrows
Thomas Pynchon- Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland
Ayn Rand- Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We, the Living
J. D. Salinger- The Catcher in the Rye
Leslie Marmon Silko- Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead
Wallace Stegner- Angel of Repose, The Spectator Bird
William Styron- The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, The Long March
Amy Tan- The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, Saving Fish from Drowning
Walker Percy- The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming
John Kennedy Toole- A Confederacy of Dunces
John Updike- any of his novels
Gore Vidal- Burr
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.- Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, Deadeye Dick, Mother Night,
Jailbird, Slapstick, Welcome to the Monkey House
Alice Walker- The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar
Margaret Walker- Jubilee
Tom Wolfe- Bonfire of the Vanities
David Foster Wallace- Infinite Jest
Richard Yates- Revolutionary Road
James Jones- From Here to Eternity
Isaac Bashevis Singer- Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
Tillie Olsen- Tell Me A Riddle
Jean Stafford- Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Richard Ford- The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Rock Springs (a collection of short stories)
Modernism/Post-Modernism Period-Nonfiction
Ernest Hemingway- A Moveable Feast
Black Elk- Black Elk Speaks
Studs Terkel- Working
Gertrude Stein- The Autobiography of Alices B. Toklas
John Steinbeck- Travels With Charley in Search of America
Richard Wright- Black Boy
Maya Angelou- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

John Agee- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Truman Capote- In Cold Blood
John Hersey- Hiroshima
Jack Kerouac- The Dharma Bums
N. Scott Momaday- The Way to Rainy Mountain
John Gardner- On Moral Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist
Richard Rodriguez- Hunger of Memory
Rachel Carson- Silent Spring
Mike Rose - Lives on the Boundary, Possible Lives, Why School
Tom Wolfe- Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Right Stuff, The Pumphouse Gang
Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)- The Autobiography of Malcolm X
H. L. MenckenThe American Language
William Carlos Williams- In the American Grain
Joseph Campbell- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Annie Dillard- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Michael Herr- Dispatches
M. F. K. Fisher- The Art of Eating
Vine Deloria, Jr.- Custer Died for Your Sins bell hooks- Aint’ I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Joan Didion- Slouching Toward Bethelem
Maxine Hong Kingston- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Li-Young Lee- The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
Gore Vidal- The United States: Essays 1952-1992
Truman Capote In Cold Blood
American Poets from the Various Literary Periods
Anne Bradstreet- The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America or any of her
poems
Phillis Wheatley- Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral or any of her poems
Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass (might want to single out a specific section)
John Greenleaf Whittier
Emily Dickinson
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sidney Lanier
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Hart Crane-
Edgar Allan Poe- any poem
William Cullen Bryant
Langston Hughes Amy Lowell Robert Frost Carl Sandburg
Sylvia Plath
Countee Cullen
Robert Frost
T. S. Eliot
Wallace Stevens
Ezra Pound H.D.
William Carlos Williams
Robinson Jeffers
Marianne Moore Elizabeth Bishop
Edna St. Vincent Millay Louise Bogan
Jean Toomer
Hart Crane
Allen Tate John Berryman Randall Jarrell Gwendolyn Brooks
Robert Lowell James Dickey Richard Wilbur Denise Levertov A. R. Ammons
Allen Ginsberg W. S. Merwin James Wright Anne Sexton Adrienne Rich
Amiri Baraka Wendy Rose Joy Harjo Rita Dove Cathy Song Billy Collins
Ishmael Reed Simon Ortiz Maya Angelou e.e. cummings Gary Snyder
Galway Kinnell Robert Bly Archibald MacLeish Dana Gioia Alan Dugan
Stephen Vincent Benet Nikki Giovanni Charles Bukowski Robert Creeley
William Stafford Theodore Roethke Lawrence Ferlinghetti Naomi Shihab Nye

****These are representative of their day and times. There are many others, and you should investigate them. It would be neat to see you pick some lesser-known authors or some up-and-coming new writer; the only problem remains that perhaps there are not enough academic/scholarly sources to write a successful paper on that lesserknown or fairly recent work. Come to me and we'll work through it.
Mr. Kirby