1. AN OUTLINE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

2. COLONIAL LITERATURE pamphlets about the benefits of the colonies
journals
religious poetry
political writings (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine: Common Sense )

3. 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.“

4. POST-INDEPENDENCE first American novel William Hill Brown:
The Power of Sympathy
(1791)

5. 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)

6. TRANSCENDENTALISM
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau – philosophical essays
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman - poetry

7. REALISM Mark Twain: O. Henry – short stories Jack London:
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)

8. NATURALISM Stephen Crane: Theodore Dreiser:
The Red Badge of Courage (1895) – novel from the Civil War
Theodore Dreiser:
An American Tragedy (1925)

9. LOST GENERATION Earnest Hemingway: Francis Scott Fitzgerald:
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)

10. DEPRESSION ERA – 1930s John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men (1937)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
East of Eden (1952)

11. WAR / ANTI-WAR NOVEL Norman Mailer: Joseph Heller: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.:
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Joseph Heller:
Catch-22 (1961)
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.:
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

12. BEAT GENERATION Allan Ginsberg: Jack Kerouac: William S. Burroughs:
Howl (1955)
Jack Kerouac:
On the Road (1957)
William S. Burroughs:
The Naked Lunch (1959)

13. POSTMODERNISM John Irving: Truman Capote: William Styron: Don DeLillo:
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)

14. SOUTHERN LITERATURE William Faulkner: Flannery O´Connor:
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

15. 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

16. JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
Bernard Malamud:
The Magic Barrel (1958) – a collection of short stories
Philip Roth:
Goodbye, Columbus (1959) - a novella and short stories

17. SCIENCE-FICTION Isaac Asimov: Ray Bradbury:
I, Robot (1950) – a collection of short stories
Ray Bradbury:
The Martian Chronicles (1950)
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

18. AMERICAN DRAMA Eugene O´Neil: Arthur Miller: Tennessee Williams:
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)

19. CONTEMPORARY WRITERS Stephen King: Dan Brown: Cormac McCarthy:
The Green Mile (1996)
Dan Brown:
The Da Vinci Code (2003)
Cormac McCarthy:
No Country for Old Men (2005)
The Road (2006)