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)