The Literature of the United States (by Literary Period)

• Original People
  • Oral narratives: Myths; legends; songs; creation stories from groups such as the Zuni, Aztec, Navajo, Lakota, Seneca, Tlingit, Cherokee, Blackfoot, Cree, Inuit, and many more.
• Exploration
  • Prose: Christopher Columbus, Alvar Nuez Cabeza de Vaca, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Thomas Harriot, and Samuel de Champlain.
  • Oral narratives: Seneca legend "How America was Discovered."
• Colonal America
  • Poetry: Michael Wigglesworth, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor.
  • Prose: Thomas Jefferson's Autobiography, "Declaration by the Represent-atives of the United States of America," Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison's Federalist Papers.
  • Drama: Royall Tyler's The Contrast.
  • Verse and Ballads: "Yankee Doodle," "The Liberty Song."
• Early National
  • Poetry: Phillip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Phillis Wheatley.
  • Prose: Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child
  • Narratives: Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Lfe of Olaudah Equiano.
  • Novels: Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette.
• Romantic
  • Poetry: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Sigourney, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson.
  • Prose: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Lloyd Garrison.
  • Narratives: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
  • Novels: James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Susan Warner, Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, William Wells Brown, Harriet E. Wilson. Drama: George Aiken's play, Uncle Tom's Cabin, based on Stowe's novel.
• Transcendentalism
  • Poetry: Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson's poems published posthumously.
  • Prose: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Zitkala-Sa, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin.
  • Novels: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Henry James, Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy.
• Realism
  • Poetry: Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson's poems published posthumously.
  • Prose: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Zitkala-Sa, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin
  • Novels: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Henry James, Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy.
• Naturalism
  • Prose: Frank Norris, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland.
  • Novels: Frank Norris' McTeague, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, Stephen Crane's Maggie: a Girl of the Streets.
• Modern
  • Poetry: Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, H.D.
  • Novels: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway.
  • Drama: Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Susan Glaspell's, Trifles, Clifford Odets
• Harlem Renaissance 20s and 30s
  • Poetry: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay.
  • Prose: W.E.B DuBois, Jean Toomer.
  • Novels: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay.
  • Drama: Randolph Edmonds, Langston Hughes.
• Lost Generation
  • Poetry: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot.
  • Prose: Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot.
  • Novels: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
• Beat Writers
  • Poetry: Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
  • Prose: Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot.
  • Novels: William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
• Contempory
  • Poetry: Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Philip Larkin.
  • Prose: Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Alice Walker.
  • Novels: Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Richard Wright, Thomas Pynchon, E.L Doctorow, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison.
  • Drama: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, David Mamet.