1The literature in English of the British colonies of North America and, after 1776, of the United States.

The earliest colonial literature consisted mainly of religious

and political tracts. The first notable poets were Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) and Edward Taylor (1642-1729), both of Massachusetts. The intellectual dominance of
New England was continued into the early 18th century by the theologian and metaphysician Jonathan Edwards (1703-58).

The period of the American Revolution was dominated by political writers, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Influential writers of the early 19th century
included Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe and American literature came to its full maturity in the works of the New England
writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, the poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and the humorist Mark Twain.

The influence of English literature on the early development of American literature was now reciprocated, notably in the works of the novelist Henry James and the
poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, all of whom went to live in Europe. They were followed in the 1920s by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Other writers who
achieved a transatlantic reputation include the dramatists Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller and the poets Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, and John
Berryman. The vitality of 20th-century American literature is most evident in the novel, practitioners of which include William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Vladimir
Nabokov, Thomas Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon.

American literature does not easily lend itself to classification by time period. Given the size of the United States and its varied population, there are often several
literary movements happening at the same time. However, this hasn't stopped literary scholars from making an attempt. Here are some of the most commonly agreed
upon periods of American literature from the colonial period to the present.

The Colonial Period (1607–1775)

This period encompasses the founding of Jamestown up to a decade before the Revolutionary War. The majority of writings were historical, practical, or religious in
nature. Some writers not to miss from this period include Phillis Wheatley, Cotton Mather, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, and John Winthrop. The first account
of an enslaved African person, "A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man," was published during this
period, in 1760 Boston.

The Revolutionary Age (1765–1790)

Beginning a decade before the Revolutionary War and ending about 25 years later, this period includes the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James
Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. This is arguably the richest period of political writing since classical antiquity. Important works include the “Declaration of
Independence,” "The Federalist Papers," and the poetry of Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau.

The Early National Period (1775–1828)

This era in American literature is responsible for notable first works, such as the first American comedy written for the stage—"The Contrast" by Royall Tyler, written
in 1787—and the first American Novel—"The Power of Sympathy" by William Hill, written in 1789. Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Charles
Brockden Brown are credited with creating distinctly American fiction, while Edgar Allan Poe and William Cullen Bryant began writing poetry that was markedly
different from that of the English tradition.

The American Renaissance (1828–1865)

Also known as the Romantic Period in America and the Age of Transcendentalism, this period is commonly accepted to be the greatest of American literature. Major
writers include Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Emerson, Thoreau, and
Margaret Fuller are credited with shaping the literature and ideals of many later writers. Other major contributions include the poetry of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow and the short stories of Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Additionally, this era is the inauguration point of American literary criticism,
lead by Poe, James Russell Lowell, and William Gilmore Simms. The years 1853 and 1859 brought the first novels written by African American authors, both male
and female: "Clotel," by William Wells Brown and "Our Nig," by Harriet E. Wilson.

The Realistic Period (1865–1900)

As a result of the American Civil War, Reconstruction and the age of industrialism, American ideals and self-awareness changed in profound ways, and American
literature responded. Certain romantic notions of the American Renaissance were replaced by realistic descriptions of American life, such as those represented in
Freeman the works of William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain. This period also gave rise to regional writing, such as the works of Sarah Orne Jewett,
Kate Chopin, Bret Harte, Mary Wilkins, and George W. Cable. In addition to Walt Whitman, another master poet, Emily Dickinson, appeared at this time.

The Naturalist Period (1900–1914)

This relatively short period is defined by its insistence on recreating life as life really is, even more so than the realists had been doing in the decades before. American
Naturalist writers such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created some of the most powerfully raw novels in American literary history. Their
characters are victims who fall prey to their own base instincts and to economic and sociological

factors. Edith Wharton wrote some of her most beloved classics, such as "The Custom of the Country" (1913), "Ethan Frome" (1911), and "The House of Mirth"
(1905) during this time period.

The Modern Period (1914–1939)

After the American Renaissance, the Modern Period is the second most influential and artistically rich age of American writing. Its major writers include such
powerhouse poets as E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Novelists and other prose writers of the time include Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John
Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, and Sherwood Anderson. The Modern Period contains within it
certain major movements including the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Lost Generation. Many of these writers were influenced by World War I and the
disillusionment that followed, especially the expatriates of the Lost Generation. Furthermore, the Great Depression and the New Deal resulted in some of America’s
greatest social issue writing, such as the novels of Faulkner and Steinbeck, and the drama of Eugene O’Neill.
2 The Beat Generation (1944–1962)

Beat writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, were devoted to anti-traditional literature, in poetry and prose, and anti-establishment politics. This time
period saw a rise in confessional poetry and sexuality in literature, which resulted in legal challenges and debates over censorship in America. William S. Burroughs
and Henry Miller are two writers whose works faced censorship challenges. These two greats, along with other writers of the time, also inspired the counterculture
movements of the next two decades.

The Contemporary Period (1939–Present)

After World War II, American literature has become broad and varied in terms of theme, mode, and purpose. Currently, there is little consensus as to how to go about
classifying the last 80 years into periods or movements—more time must pass, perhaps, before scholars can make these determinations. That being said, there are a
number of important writers since 1939 whose works may already be considered “classic” and who are likely to become canonized. Some of these very established
names are: Kurt Vonnegut, Amy Tan, John Updike, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas
Pynchon, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams, Philip Roth, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Wright, Tony Kushner, Adrienne Rich, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Joyce
Carol Oates, Thornton Wilder, Alice Walker, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer, John Barth, Maya Angelou, and Robert Penn Warren.

Native American Literature

Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, native people had their own rich culture. The Native American literary tradition comprises oral tradition,
folktales, creation stories and other myths that survive in the traditions and stories told by modern-day Native Americans.

One common element in these stories is repetition of incidents in a culturally significant number, usually four (the cardinal directions) or seven (the cardinal directions
plus skyward, earthward and center). These stories were told and retold by generations of storytellers across the many tribes, and the stories vary in the telling not
just from storyteller to storyteller and tribe to tribe, but even across multiple tellings by the same narrator.

In the 1700s, the Reverend Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan nation, was among the first Native Americans to publish writings in English. At the beginning of
the 20th century, Zitkála-Šá, a Yankton Dakota writer, musician and activist, collected and published legends drawn from Native cultures for a widespread white,
English-speaking readership — along with personal stories that explored her struggles with cultural identity and the tension between traditional and assimilation.
Another iconic writer of the early 20th century was Charles Eastman, considered the first to write American history from the Native American point of view.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Native American Renaissance saw a surge of Native American literature, including authors like James Welch and Paula Gunn Allen.
Contemporary Native writers such as Eden Robinson and Sherman Alexie continue to be vital voices in the American literary tradition.

Colonial Literature 1600s-1700s

As the English colonies were established in the 17th century, the topics of literature among the colonists reflected their historical context. The earliest English works
from the colonies ranged from practical accounts of colonial history and life written by leaders such as John Smith, to Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung
Up in America, likely the first collection of poetry written in and about America.

Since many of the colonies were founded due to religious divisions back in Great Britain, it should be no surprise that religious themes were common. Such works
ranged from the Puritan writings of ministers such as Increase Mather, to Roger Williams’ arguments for separation of church and state, and even the anti-
religious New English Canaan by Thomas Morton — a harsh critique of the Puritans’ customs and power structures.

Enlightenment and Revolution

Mid- to Late 1700s

In the years surrounding the American Revolution, literature likewise shifted to encompass the patriotic spirit that drove the nation toward independence. The
iconic Federalist Papers in the realm of politics were matched by works by other authors in the realm of science and philosophy, such as Thomas Paine’s The Age of
Reason.

1789 saw the publication of The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown. Widely recognized as the first American novel, Brown’s work was a cautionary tale about
the dangers of seduction, advocating for rational thinking and moral education of women. Given its historical context, critics have viewed The Power of Sympathy as
an exploration of virtues most needed by the new nation.

American Gothic
Early 1800s-present

Not to be confused with the famous painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic literature draws on dark themes from the nation’s historical and contemporary
challenges. The early Gothic writers drew on frontier anxiety and fear of the unknown; Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) is perhaps the most
famous example.

As the nation grew and matured, the Gothic tradition matured with it, through the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and others. Southern Gothic
writers used the decaying plantations of the post-Civil War South in place of the castles of European Gothic literature, as in the works of William Faulkner. The
contemporary works of authors like Stephen King, who draws on his own experiences in rural Maine in his stories, continue the long American Gothic tradition.

Romanticism and Transcendentalism

1820s-1850s
3 The romantic era began in Europe in the eighteenth century, but it arrived in America later, around 1820. American romantic writers explored themes of
individualism, intuitive perception and the inherent goodness of the natural world. Among the best known American romantic novels are Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), a dramatic story of a woman cast out of a Puritan community for committing adultery; and Herman Melville’s Moby
Dick (1851), one of history’s most famous stories of man against the elements.

Emerging from romanticism later in the 1800s was perhaps the first notable American intellectual movement, transcendentalism, built on the belief in the inherent
goodness of people, and the idea that self-reliance, transcending the corrupting influence of society, unlocks that goodness. We see these ideas in the works of Henry
David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and others. Perhaps the best-known transcendentalist book was Thoreau’s Walden, a reflection on his
experience living independently near Walden Pond.

Since transcendental literature was in many respects the opposite of American Gothic, it should come as no surprise that prominent Gothic writers also penned
critiques of transcendentalism, such as Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.

Literary Realism, Naturalism and Modernism

1860s-1940s

Following the Civil War, American literature was marked by a deep skepticism, understandable given the historical context. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American
literary realism, in the works of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and others, was marked by attempts to present realistic things as they are, without supernatural or
speculative elements. Twain’s vigorous, colloquial style in works such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a shot across the bow at tired conventions. American
naturalism, heavily influenced by the works of Frank Norris, stood in the middle ground between romanticism and realism; for instance, Stephen Crane’s short
story The Open Boat, a naturalistic depiction of a group of shipwreck survivors, explores themes of the indifference of the universe.

From the same current as realism, literature progressed to American modernism in the interwar period, with some of the most famous works penned by the “Lost
Generation” of expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Modernist works drew from the pain and loss of direction that
this generation experienced in the wake of World War One, but it also contained themes of hope as individuals could change their surroundings.

Contemporary & Postmodern Literature

1950s-present

The postwar period saw the rise of a whole spectrum of innovative and subversive themes in literature, from the overtly counter-cultural works of the 1950s “Beat
Generation” to John Updike’s reflective explorations of faith, personal turmoil and sensuality. Sexually frank content entered the mainstream in this period, as
restrictions on obscenity were loosened and writers were empowered to speak freely about previously taboo topics.

Over the last several decades, American literature has seen an explosion of postmodernist themes such as unreliable narrators, internal monologue and temporal
distortion. Contemporary writers have used literature to critique American culture, find connections across time and place and explore themes such as pluralism,
relativism and self-consciousness.

There is a great and proud tradition of American writers, including some of the world’s most famous authors. Novels, plays, and poems pour out of the United States,
with increasing numbers of women, African American, Native American and Hispanic writers making a strong contribution. There have been twelve literature Nobel
Prize laureates, beginning with Sinclair Lewis in 1930 to Bob Dylan, in 2016. Other American writers who were laureates include such household names as T.S. Eliot,
Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. American writers’ contribution to English literature is incalculable

The American literary tradition began when some of the early English colonists recounted their adventures in the New World for the benefit of readers in their mother
country (see our list of the best English authors). Some of those early writings were quite accomplished, such as the account of his adventures by Captain John Smith
in Virginia and the journalistic histories of John Winthrop and William Bradford in New England.

It was in the Puritan colonies that published American literature was born, with writers like Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams producing works to promote their
visions of the religious state. Perhaps the first book to be published by in America was the Bay Psalm Book in 1640, produced by thirty ministers, led by Richard
Mather and John Cotton. It was followed by passionate histories like Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (1654) and Cotton and Mather’s
epic Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

The American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the United States was a time of intellectual activity together with social and economic change. The
founding fathers of the new state included the writers, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Philip Freneau, the first American lyric poet of distinction, the
pamphleteer Thomas Paine, later an attacker of conventional religion, and the polemicist Francis Hopkinson, who was also the first American composer. The 19th-
century saw the spreading and recognition of American writing in Europe with the folk stories of Washington Irving, the frontier adventures of Fenimore Cooper and
the moralising verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Then came the giants, who took even the old world by storm and are still regarded as being among the greats of
Western literature: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and the poet, Walt Whitman.

That romantic trend was interrupted by two of America’s great writers, Henry James, and Mark Twain, who threw the doors open to a new realism and changed
American literature, setting it up for the rich literature that followed and which has not diminished. James emigrated to Europe and embraced psychological realism in
novels such as Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Twain used national dialects in classics like Huckleberry Finn (1885).

The twentieth century witnessed the flowering of American literature. Confronted by the violence of the 20th century, a sense of despair was reflected in the
literature, and the particular conditions of American society with all its diversity found its way into American writing. In the 1950s, major dramatists, notably Arthur
Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard, developed the American theatre. African-American writers, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, dealt
with racial inequality and violence in contemporary US society while Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison focused on the 20th-century history of African-American
women. In the 1960s, novelists such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Joseph Heller examined the Jewish experience in American society.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. It was a controversial decision. However, it points to a new development in the progress of American
literature when a songwriter’s work is regarded as literature. There have been several great American songwriters in the past century and one can find many of the
concerns of modern America in the national songbook but this is the first time that American songs have been regarded as “literature.” Over seven decades Dylan has
4addressed the changes that America has experienced, ranging over war, race, climate change, and many other phenomena, producing a comprehensive commentary
on the times in which we live. Some of the lyrics of his songs are regarded as being among the finest poetry of the period.

Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne’s works have been labelled ‘dark romanticism,’ dominated as they are by cautionary tales that
suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humankind. His novels and stories, set in a past New England, are versions of historical fiction
used as a vehicle to express themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution

Edgar Allan Poe 1809 –1849

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. He is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and suspense. He
is generally considered the inventor of detective ficiton. Poe’s work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. In
addition to his detective stories he is one of the originators of horror and science fiction. He is often credited as the architect of the modern short story.

Herman Melville was an American writer of novels, short stories and poems. He is best known for the novel Moby-Dick and a romantic account of his experiences in
Polynesian life, Typee. His whaling novel, Moby-Dick is often spoken of as ‘the great American novel’ ’vying with Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for that title

Walt Whitman was a poet, essayist, and journalist who transformed poetry around the world with his disregard for traditional rhyme and meter and his celebration of
democracy and sensual pleasure. His masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems, is widely studied by poets, students and academics, set to music, translated
into numerous languages, and is widely quoted. His influence can be found everywhere – in contemporary best seller lists to feature films and musical works, both
“serious” and popular…

Unknown as a poet during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now regarded by many as one of the most powerful voices of American culture. Her poetry has inspired
many other writers, including the Brontes. In 1994 the critic, Harold Bloom, listed her among the twenty-six central writers of Western civilisation. After she died her
sister found the almost two thousand poems the poet had writtenMark Twain 1835 – 1910

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , far better known as Mark Twain, was an American writer, businessman, publisher and lecturer. He progressed from his day job as pilot
of a Mississippi riverboat to legend of American literature. His work shows a deep seriousness and at the same time, it is hilariously satirical, as seen in his many
quotes on all aspects of life. His masterpiece is the novel, Huckleberry Finn, which is regularly referred to as ‘the great American novel.’…

Henry James 1843 – 1916

Henry James is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He is noted for writing from a character’s point of view’ which allowed him to
explore consciousness and perception. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators brought a new depth to narrative fiction, all
of which were influential on the writing of the novelists who followed him. He was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature three times

Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-born, British, poet, essayist, playwright, critic, now regarded as one of the twentieth century’s major poets. He received more
rewards than almost any other writer of the past two centuries, including the Nobel prize, the Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe prize, the US Medal of Freedom and the
British Order of Merit

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist, widely regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American writers of the 20th century. He is best known
for his novel, The Great Gatsby, which vies for the title ‘Great American Novel’ with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Fitzgerald’s
place on this list is justified by the fact that his great novel is actually about AmericaWilliam Faulkner 1897 –1962

William Cuthbert Faulkner was a Nobel Prize laureate, awarded the literature prize in 1949. He wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and screenplays. He is known
mainly for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha Country, Mississippi. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated American writers, regarded,
generally as the great writer of the American South…

Tennessee Williams 1911-1983

Thomas Lanier Williams III, known as Tennessee Williams is one of America’s most popular playwrights and now regarded as one of the most significant writers of the
twentieth century. He wrote more than thirty plays, some of which have become classis of Western drama. He also wrote novels and short stories but is known almost
exclusively for his plays. His genius was in the honesty with which he represented society and the art of presenting that in the form of absorbing drama

Arthur Miller 1915 – 2005

Arthur Miller was a playwright and ‘great man’ of American theatre, which he championed throughout his long life. His many dramas were among the most popular
by American authors and several are considered to be among the best American plays, among them the classics, The Crucible, All My Sons, A View from the
Bridge and, above all, the iconic American drama, Death of a Salesman. He also wrote film scripts, notably the classic, The Misfits…

Joseph Heller 1923 – 1999

Joseph Heller was an American writer of satirical novels, short stories and plays. Although he wrote several acclaimed novels, his reputation rests firmly on his
masterpiece, the great American anti-war satire, Catch 22. Because of the quality of the novel and the impact it has made on American culture it has catapulted
Heller into the ranks of the great American writers

Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961

5 Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works, and won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. More works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously.

Raymond Chandler 1888 – 1959

Raymond Chandler was a British-American novelist who wrote several screenplays and short stories. He published seven novels during his lifetime. The first, The Big
Sleep, was published in 1939. An eighth, Poodle Springs, unfinished at his death, was completed by another great crime writer, Robert B Parker. Six of Chandler’s
novels have been made into films, some more than onceToni Morrison 1931 – 2019

Toni Morrison’s novels are known for their vivid dialogue, their detailed characters and epic themes. Her most famous novel is the 1987 novel, Beloved. She was
awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993…

Vladimir Nabokov 1899 – 1977

Vladi mir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-American novelist, and also a famous entomologist, specialising in butterflies, a topic on which he wrote several
academic books. He wrote nine novels in Russian, but it was when he began writing in English that he achieved international recognition…

Flannery O’Connor 1925 – 1964

Mary Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, and also several reviews and commentaries. Her reputation is based mainly on her short
stories. She was a Southern writer and relied heavily on regional settings and typically southern characters. She was strongly Roman Catholic, which informed her
exploration of ethics and morality

John Steinbeck 1902 – 1968

John Ernst Steinbeck was the author of 16 novels and various other works, including five short story collections. He is widely known for the novels, East of Eden, Of
Mice and Men, and particularly, the Puliter Prize winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, his masterpiece, which is one of the great American novels: it has sold more
than 15 million copies so far…

John Updike 1923 – 2009

John Updike was a novelist, short story writer and poet. He was also a literary and art critic. He published more than twenty novels, numerous short-story collections,
eight volumes of poetry and many children’s books. He is most famous for his ‘Rabbit‘ series – novels that chronicle the life of his protagonist, Harry Angstrom – in
which Updike presented his progress over the course of several decades

Kurt Vonnegut 1922 – 2007

Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer who published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction. He is most famous for
his novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ (1969) which has become an American classic. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel based on his experience as a prisoner of war who
survived the allies’ bombing of Dresden.

American literature is often divided into six major periods:

 Pre-colonization

 The Colonial and Early National period (17th century to 1830)

 The Romantic period (1830 to 1870)

 Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)

 The Modernist period (1910 to 1945)

 The Contemporary period (1945 to present)

American literature is often divided into six major periods:

 Pre-colonization: Native American literature

 Colonial and Early National: 17th century to 1830

 Romantic: 1830 to 1870

 Realism and Naturalism: 1870 to 1910

 Modernist: 1910 to 1945

 Contemporary: 1945 to present

Here are some other notable periods and writers in American literature:

 6 Revolutionary Age: 1775-1783, dominated by political writers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine

 American Gothic: Early 1800s-1870s

  Transcendentalist: 1820s-1860s

 Mark Twain: Considered the "father of American literature" for making it acceptable to write "like an American"

 Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald: Part of the "Lost Generation" of expatriate writers who wrote modernist works

 Thomas Pynchon: An American practitioner of the absurdist fable, whose work influenced writers like Don DeLillo and Paul Auster

Pre-colonization Literature has been created in what is today the United States for thousands of years. This history began with the many oral traditions of the
Indigenous peoples of North America. Among the Native peoples of the Plains, the Southwest, and parts of present-day California, Coyote was the central figure of the
age before humans were created. Hundreds of tales told by these peoples describe his exploits as a trickster and as a benefactor to humankind. Raven was Coyote’s
counterpart for the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, the Pacific coast stretching from what is today Alaska to northwestern California. The Raven cycle is a
collection of tales that describe the chaos that Raven creates and the order that eventually emerges, often at Raven’s expense. The oral traditions of the Pueblo, in the
Southwest, include stories about kachinas, the ancestral spirit-beings that exist among humans and actively shape their environment. Among the Native peoples of
the Plains, a wide range of creation myths explain how the world came into existence. The stories of the Comanche, for example, center on the Great Spirit, which
created different groups of humans, while the Sioux describe how the winds came into being and, together with the Sun and the Moon, control the universe.

The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century–1830) The first colonists of North America wrote, often in English, about their experiences starting in the 1600s.
This literature was practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and focused on the future.

John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and as president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608
and 1624, include his controversial accounts of the Powhatan girl Pocahontas.

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.

Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was
published in England.

A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction
were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain. The

The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the political direction of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, tells a quintessentially American life story.

Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, was the first Black poet of note in the United States. Her first book was Poems on Various Subjects, Religious
and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau is another notable poet of the era.

The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in 1789.

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), is among the earliest slave narratives and stands as a forceful argument for abolition.

By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and
novels published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It includes “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his
experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

The Romantic Period (1830–70)

Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also
values the wildness of nature over human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and American writers
embraced it in the early 19th century.

Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—
during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849.

Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness
is intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme. The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) are gripping tales of
horror. In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of
American society.

James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday life in the Northeast.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the upper-class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through
European models and sensibilities.

The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry
David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.
Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became
some of the most-enduring works of American literature.

As a young man, Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with
the Transcendentalists before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of
Melville’s early life of traveling and writing.

Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass
(1855), and his frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in
American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.

During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and about enslaved and free Black people were written.

William Wells Brown published what is often considered the first Black American novel, Clotel, in 1853. He also wrote the first African American play to be published,
The Escape (1858).

In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first Black women to publish fiction in the United States.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published serially in 1851–52, is credited with raising opposition in the North to slavery.

Harriet Jacobs published a searing account of her life as an enslaved woman in 1861, the same year that the Civil War began. It became one of the era’s most
influential slave narratives.

Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her
death in 1886; and she was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a Romantic vision as clearly as Whitman’s or
Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and emotionally intense. Here are five of her notable poems: “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” “Because I could not stop for Death –” “My
Life had stood – a Loaded Gun” “A Bird, came down the Walk –” “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

Realism and Naturalism (1870–1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2,300,000 soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in
1861–65. Walt Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following decades was a literature that
presented a detailed and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the
grim realities of a devastating war, these styles became writers’ primary mode of expression.

Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name
while reporting on politics in the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which
catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain deployed this
combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. The following are some of Twain’s notable works: Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883) Short stories: “Jim Baker’s
Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)

Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the 19th century who
sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them, particularly among the middle and working
classes living in cities.

Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism. His Sister Carrie (1900) is the most important
American naturalist novel.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane, and McTeague (1899), The
Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris, are novels that vividly depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in Black dialect—“Possum” and “When de Co’n Pone’s
Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and gave them what they believed was reality for Black Americans. Dunbar also
wrote poems not in dialect—“We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of racism in America
during Reconstruction and afterward.

Sophia Alice Callahan, who was of Muskogee Creek descent, published in 1891 what is often considered the first novel by a Native
woman: Wynema: A Child of the Forest. Zitkala-Sa, whose mother was Yankton Sioux, published a collection of Dakota stories, Old
Indian Legends, in 1901. She used this collection and other early writings to document her experience of forced assimilation, and
she spent the rest of her life advocating for Native peoples.

Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present reality, but his writing style
and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic experience, not simply document truth. He was preoccupied
with the clash in values between the United States and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism
and naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable novels include:

The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), What Maisie Knew (1897),The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Golden Bowl
(1904)
The Modernist Period (1910–45)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the 20th century and brought about a
sense of unprecedented progress. The devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering
in Europe and the United States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling within modernism, a movement in the arts
defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of
faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period
proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American literature.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered on specific individuals,
or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it
may express hope at the prospect of change. F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).

Richard Wright Richard Wright, 1943.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USW3-030278-D)

Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).

Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of
the Lost Generation.

Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My
Ántonia (1918).

William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The
Sound and the Fury (1929).

John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His fragmentary, multivoiced The
Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but his was not the dominant voice among American
modernist poets.

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they
lived.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice
Dunbar Nelson.

Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United
States but for the English-speaking world.

During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and
experimentation in their poetry.

Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century. Playwrights drew
inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and enduringly American.

Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey into Night (written 1939–41,
performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20 years of creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded
with The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946).

During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that exposed injustice in America.Thornton
Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America in Our Town, first produced in 1938.

The Contemporary Period (1945–present)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union
shaped global politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of the influences
shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by
the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. By the turn of the 21st century, American literature was recognized as being a complex, inclusive story
that is grounded on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and is open to the experiences of more and
more Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was
published in 1945. He left the United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he faced as a Black man in America; other
Black writers working from the 1950s through the ’70s also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed Black man adrift in, and ignored by, America.

James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most
accomplished and influential.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first performed in 1959.

Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of Black nationalism and sought to generate a uniquely Black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm
X (1965), by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, is among its most-lasting literary expressions.

Toni MorrisonAmerican author Toni Morrison, 2009.

© Olga Besnard/Dreamstime.com

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the lives of Black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.

In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her involvement in the civil rights movement.

The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist, metafictional, postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long,
fragmentary, feminist, stream of consciousness—these and dozens more labels can be applied to the vast output of American novelists. Little holds them together
beyond their chronological proximity and engagement with contemporary American society. These are representative novels:

Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)

Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)

Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

N. Scott Momaday: House Made of Dawn (1968)

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)

Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)

Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1983)

Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1984)

Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)

Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)

Ha Jin: Waiting (1999)

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)

Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting influence on American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen
Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate American poetry. Raucous, profane, and deeply
moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for poetry during the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Among the important poets of this period are the
following:

Anne Sexton,Sylvia Plath,John Berryman,Donald Hall,Elizabeth Bishop,James Merrill,Nikki Giovanni,Robert Pinsky,Adrienne Rich,Rita Dove,Yusef Komunyakaa,W.S.
Merwin,Tracy K. Smith

In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three men: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death
of a Salesman (1949) questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main character, while Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered what might have been a benign
domestic situation into something vicious and cruel. By the 1970s the face of American drama had begun to change, and it continued to diversify into the 21st century.
Notable dramatists include:

David Mamet,Amiri Baraka,Sam Shepard,August Wilson,Ntozake Shange,Wendy Wasserstein,Tony Kushner,David Henry Hwang,Richard Greenberg

Suzan-Lori Parks,Young Jean Lee,Jeremy O. Harris.

12 Novels Considered the “Greatest Book Ever Written”

Literary critics, historians, avid readers, and even casual readers will all have different opinions on which novel is truly the
“greatest book ever written.” Is it a novel with beautiful, captivating figurative language? Or one with gritty realism? A novel that
has had an immense social impact? Or one that has more subtly affected the world? Here is a list of 12 novels that, for various
reasons, have been considered some of the greatest works of literature ever written.

Anna Karenina Any fan of stories that involve juicy subjects like adultery, gambling, marriage plots, and, well, Russian feudalism,
would instantly place Anna Karenina at the peak of their “greatest novels” list. And that’s exactly the ranking that publications
like Time magazine have given the novel since it was published in its entirety in 1878. Written by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, the
eight-part towering work of fiction tells the story of two major characters: a tragic, disenchanted housewife, the titular Anna, who
runs off with her young lover, and a lovestruck landowner named Konstantin Levin, who struggles in faith and philosophy. Tolstoy
molds together thoughtful discussions on love, pain, and family in Russian society with a sizable cast of characters regarded for
their realistic humanity. The novel was especially revolutionary in its treatment of women, depicting prejudices and social hardships
of the time with vivid emotion.

To Kill a Mockingbird-Harper Lee, believed to be one of the most influential authors to have ever existed, famously
published only a single novel (up until its controversial sequel was published in 2015 just before her death). Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird was published in 1960 and became an immediate classic of literature. The novel examines racism in the American
South through the innocent wide eyes of a clever young girl named Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch. Its iconic characters, most notably
the sympathetic and just lawyer and father Atticus Finch, served as role models and changed perspectives in the United States at a
time when tensions regarding race were high. To Kill a Mockingbird earned the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and was made into
an Academy Award-winning film in 1962, giving the story and its characters further life and influence over the American social
sphere.

The Great Gatsby(F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby)is distinguished as one of the greatest texts for introducing
students to the art of reading literature critically (which means you may have read it in school). The novel is told from the
perspective of a young man named Nick Carraway who hasrecently moved to New York City and is befriended by his eccentric
nouveau riche neighbor with mysterious origins, Jay Gatsby. The Great Gatsby provides an insider’s look into the Jazz Age of the
1920s in United States history while at the same time critiquing the idea of the “American Dream.” Perhaps the most famous aspect
of the novel is its cover art—a piercing face projected onto a dark blue night sky and lights from a cityscape—an image that is also
found, in a slightly different configuration, within the text itself as a key symbol.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García MárquezGabriel García Márquez, 1982.© Lutfi OzkokThe late Colombian author Gabriel García
Márquez published his most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in 1967. The novel tells the story of seven generations of
the Buendía family and follows the establishment of their town Macondo until its destruction along with the last of the family’s
descendents. In fantastical form, the novel explores the genre of magic realism by emphasizing the extraordinary nature of
commonplace things while mystical things are shown to be common. Márquez highlights the prevalence and power of myth and
folktale in relating history and Latin American culture. The novel won many awards for Márquez, leading the way to his eventual
honor of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his entire body of work, of which One Hundred Years of Solitude is often lauded
as his most triumphant.
A Passage to IndiaA Passage to IndiaA scene from the film A Passage to India (1984), which was
based on E.M. Forster's novel.E.M. Forster wrote his novel A Passage to India after multiple trips to the country throughout
his early life. The book was published in 1924 and follows a Muslim Indian doctor named Aziz and his relationships with an English
professor, Cyril Fielding, and a visiting English schoolteacher named Adela Quested. When Adela believes that Aziz has assaulted
her while on a trip to the Marabar caves near the fictional city of Chandrapore, where the story is set, tensions between the Indian
community and the colonial British community rise. The possibility of friendship and connection between English and Indian people,
despite their cultural differences and imperial tensions, is explored in the conflict. The novel’s colorful descriptions of nature, the
landscape of India, and the figurative power that they are given within the text solidifies it as a great work of fiction.

Invisible Man Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison, 1952.Often confused with H.G. Wells’s science-fiction novella of nearly
the same name (just subtract a “The”), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a groundbreaking novel in the expression of identity for the
African American male. The narrator of the novel, a man who is never named but believes he is “invisible” to others socially, tells
the story of his move from the South to college and then to New York City. In each location he faces extreme adversity and
discrimination, falling into and out of work, relationships, and questionable social movements in a wayward and ethereal mindset.
The novel is renowned for its surreal and experimental style of writing that explores the symbolism surrounding African American
identity and culture. Invisible Man won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953.

Don QuixoteDon QuixoteDon Quixote (right) and his servant Sancho Panza are pictured in an illustration from the book Don
Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The illustration appeared in an edition of the book that was published in the 1800s.Miguel de
Cervantes’s Don Quixote, perhaps the most influential and well-known work of Spanish literature, was first published in full in 1615.
The novel, which is very regularly regarded as one of the best literary works of all time, tells the story of a man who takes the name
“Don Quixote de la Mancha” and sets off in a fit of obsession over romantic novels about chivalry to revive the custom and become a
hero himself. The character of Don Quixote has become an idol and somewhat of an archetypal character, influencing many major
works of art, music, and literature since the novel’s publication. The text has been so influential that a word, quixotic, based on the
Don Quixote character, was created to describe someone who is, “foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; especially:
marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action.”

BelovedToni MorrisonToni Morrison, c. 1980–87.Toni Morrison’s 1987 spiritual and haunting novel Beloved tells the story of an
escaped slave named Sethe who has fled to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the year 1873. The novel investigates the trauma of slavery even
after freedom has been gained, depicting Sethe’s guilt and emotional pain after having killed her own child, whom she named
Beloved, to keep her from living life as a slave. A spectral figure appears in the lives of the characters and goes by the same name
as the child, embodying the family’s anguish and hardship and making their feelings and past unavoidable. The novel was lauded for
addressing the psychological effects of slavery and the importance of family and community in healing. Beloved was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

Mrs. DallowayVirginia WoolfEnglish novelist Virginia Woolf, 1928.Possibly the most idiosyncratic novel of this list, Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway describes exactly one day in the life of a British socialite named Clarissa Dalloway. Using a combination of a
third-person narration and the thoughts of various characters, the novel uses a stream-of-consciousness style all the way through.
The result of this style is a deeply personal and revealing look into the characters’ minds, with the novel relying heavily on
character rather than plot to tell its story. The thoughts of the characters include constant regrets and thoughts of the past, their
struggles with mental illness and post-traumatic stress from World War I, and the effect of social pressures. The novel’s unique
style, subject, and time setting make it one of the most respected and regarded works of all time.

Things Fall ApartChinua AchebeThe Western canon of “great literature” often focuses on writers who come from North
America or Europe and often ignores accomplished writers and amazing works of literature from other parts of the world. Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, is one such work of Nigerian literature that had to overcome the bias of some
literary circles and one that has been able to gain recognition worldwide despite it. The novel follows an Igbo man named Okonkwo,
describing his family, the village in Nigeria where he lives, and the effects of British colonialism on his native country. The novel is
an example of African postcolonial literature, a genre that has grown in size and recognition since the mid-1900s as African people
have been able to share their often unheard stories of imperialism from the perspective of the colonized. The novel is frequently
assigned for reading in courses on world literature and African studies.

Jane EyreCharlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, another novel often assigned for reading in school, was initially published in 1847
under the pseudonym Currer Bell to disguise the fact that the writer was a woman. Fortunately, a lot has changed with regard to
women in literature since 1847, and Brontë now receives the credit she deserves for one of the most groundbreaking novels about
women in history. At a time when the author felt compelled to hide her true identity, Jane Eyre provided a story of individualism for
women. The novel’s eponymous character rises from being orphaned and poor into a successful and independent woman. The work
combines themes from both Gothic and Victorian literature, revolutionizing the art of the novel by focusing on the growth in Jane’s
sensibility with internalized action and writing.

The Color PurpleAlice WalkerAlice Walker, 2005.Though the epistolary novel (a novel in the form of letters written by one
or more characters) was most popular before the 19th century, Alice Walker became a champion of the style with her 1982
novel The Color Purple, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Set in the post-Civil War American South, the novel
follows a young African American girl named Celie into adulthood in letters she writes to God and to her sister Nettie. Celie
faces sexual abuse by her father and eventually her husband, chronicling her own suffering and growth as well as that of her friends
and family. The novel explores themes of sexism, racism, gender, sexual orientation, and disability through its grouping of
disadvantaged and damaged characters who, over time, grow to shape their own lives. The story was adapted into an Academy
Award-nominated film in 1985 that, despite widespread critical acclaim, was notoriously snubbed of all 11 awards it was nominated
for.