1. Periods and Writers in American Literature
16th -20th Centuries

2. Colonial Period: 1600s (17th Century)
Captain John Smith: History of Virginia
William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation
Anne Bradstreet: 1st Am. poet

3. Revolutionary Period/Colonial: late 1700s (18th Century)
Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence
Thomas Paine: Age of Reason; “Common Sense”; “Crisis Papers”
Ben Franklin: The Autobiography
Patrick Henry: “Speech at Virginia Convention”

4. Romantic Period (American Renaissance): mid 1800s/1840-1855 or mid 19th Century
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature; Self-Reliance: “The American Scholar”
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter; “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven”
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

5. Beginnings of Realism (The Gilded Age/late 1800s-post Civil War)
Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage

6. Modern Period (1917-1945) Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
Ernest Hemingway: Old Man and the Sea
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men
William Faulkner: Sound and the Fury
T. S. Eliot: “The Wasteland”
e. e. cummings: “Pity This Busy Monster
Manunkind”

7. Harlem Renaissance (part of Modern Period)
a flourish of African-American writing, music, and art in the borough of Harlem (1920s) in New York City

8. Harlem Renaissance Writers:
Langston Hughes: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Richard Wright: Black Boy; Native Son
Countee Cullen: “Any Human to Another”
Claude McKay: “The Tropics in New York”
Jean Toomer: Cane
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

9. Postmodern Period (Contemporary)
J. D. Salinger: Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Sandra Cisneros: House on Mango Street (1984)
Arthur Miller: The Crucible (1950)
Judith Guest: Ordinary People (1976)
Chaim Potok: The Chosen (1967)