American Literature

Major American authors, works, and movements from the colonial era to today.

A study reference, not a substitute for primary sources. Updated 2026-09-08.

Colonial and Early National Literature

Anne Bradstreet — major poet of Puritan New England and an early published woman poet of colonial America; The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) printed in London without her consent; known for “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “Upon the Burning of Our House.”¹
Edward Taylor — Puritan minister; devotional “Preparatory Meditations” and “God’s Determinations” circulated in manuscript; discovered and published only in the 20th century.
Cotton Mather — prolific Puritan divine; Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), an ecclesiastical history of New England; prominent during the Salem witch trials.
Jonathan Edwards — Calvinist theologian; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), the canonical fire-and-brimstone sermon; also wrote the philosophical treatise Freedom of the Will (1754).
Benjamin Franklin — Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1758); The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (written 1771–1790, published posthumously); master of aphorism and self-fashioning.
Thomas Paine — Common Sense (1776), the pamphlet galvanizing independence; The American Crisis (1776–1783), opening line “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Thomas Jefferson — principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776); Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) his major literary-philosophical work.
Phillis Wheatley — first African American and one of the first American women to publish a book; Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

Early Republic and Romanticism

Philip Freneau — “The British Prison Ship” (1781); “The Wild Honey Suckle” (1786); “The Indian Burying Ground” (1788); considered the “Poet of the American Revolution”; championed American independence and later Jeffersonian democracy in his newspaper The National Gazette; bridging figure between neoclassicism and American Romanticism.
Royall Tyler — The Contrast (1787), widely considered the first professionally performed American comedy; contrasts virtuous American character with affected European manners; also wrote the novel The Algerine Captive (1797).
Susanna Rowson — Charlotte Temple (1791, American edition 1794), one of the first American bestsellers; a seduction novel that remained in print for more than a century; also an actress and educator.
Charles Brockden Brown — Wieland (1798); Edgar Huntly (1799); Ormond (1799); pioneered the American Gothic novel; first American to support himself by writing fiction; influenced Hawthorne and Poe.
Washington Irving — “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (featuring Ichabod Crane, the superstitious schoolteacher pursued by the Headless Horseman) and “Rip Van Winkle,” both in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820); first American writer to gain major international reputation.
James Fenimore Cooper — Leatherstocking Tales (five novels, 1823–1841) featuring frontier hero Natty Bumppo; The Last of the Mohicans (1826) the most read; credited with inventing the American Western genre.
William Cullen Bryant — Thanatopsis (written c. 1817, published 1821), meditation on death that established him as America’s first major nature poet; longtime editor of the New York Evening Post; also wrote “To a Waterfowl” and “The Death of the Flowers.”
Edgar Allan Poe — poet, short-story writer, critic; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840); stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841, featuring C. Auguste Dupin — the founding detective-fiction story), “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is Hawthorne’s (see below); poems “The Raven” (1845), “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume” (1847); pioneered the detective story with C. Auguste Dupin.

The American Renaissance and Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson — Nature (1836) founding text of Transcendentalism; essays “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “Compensation”; “The American Scholar” (1837) oration called America’s intellectual declaration of independence.
Henry David Thoreau — Walden (1854), account of deliberate living at Walden Pond; Resistance to Civil Government (“Civil Disobedience,” 1849), influence on Gandhi and King; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Scarlet Letter (1850); key characters include Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the guilt-ridden minister whose secret sin mirrors Hester Prynne’s public shame, and the physician Roger Chillingworth as antagonist; The House of the Seven Gables (1851); tales collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), including “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (a scientist’s daughter who is herself poisonous); themes of Puritan guilt and hidden sin.
Herman Melville — Moby-Dick (1851), featuring Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner who becomes Ishmael’s close companion and whose coffin eventually saves Ishmael; Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853); Billy Budd, Sailor (completed 1891, published 1924); early sea adventures Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847); initially popular, then largely forgotten until a 20th-century revival.
Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass (first edition 1855; expanded through nine editions until 1891–92); “Song of Myself,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (elegy for Lincoln), “O Captain! My Captain!”; free verse pioneer; served as a volunteer nurse in the Civil War.
Emily Dickinson — nearly 1,800 poems, fewer than a dozen published in her lifetime; posthumous editions began 1890; known for slant rhyme, dashes, compressed syntax; poems include “Because I could not stop for Death,” “I heard a Fly buzz,” “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”; lived in near-seclusion in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Harriet Beecher Stowe — Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), serialized in The National Era; credited by Lincoln (apocryphally) with starting the Civil War; first American novel to sell one million copies.
Frederick Douglass — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); abolitionist orator and journalist.
James Russell Lowell — The Biglow Papers (1848, 1867), satirical verse opposing the Mexican-American War and slavery; A Fable for Critics (1848), witty assessments of contemporaries; first editor of The Atlantic Monthly (1857); diplomat and Harvard professor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes — The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), essayistic dialogues first run in The Atlantic Monthly; poems “The Chambered Nautilus” and “Old Ironsides” (1830); also a pioneering physician and Harvard medical dean; father of Supreme Court Justice O.W. Holmes Jr.
John Greenleaf Whittier — Snow-Bound (1866), pastoral elegy of rural New England life; ardent abolitionist poet; Voices of Freedom (1846); associated with the Fireside Poets alongside Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell.
William Wells Brown — Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847); Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), widely considered the first novel published by an African American; also wrote plays and travel narratives.
Louisa May Alcott — Little Women (1868–69), the semi-autobiographical novel of the March family sisters Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, followed by Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886) to form an unofficial trilogy; An Old Fashioned Girl (1870); the Civil War nursing account Hospital Sketches (1863); “Transcendental Wild Oats,” a satire of her father’s utopian Fruitlands commune in which the characters Abel Lamb and Sister Hope stand for her parents; daughter of Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and a neighbor of Emerson and Thoreau in Concord; also published lurid pseudonymous thrillers, including A Long Fatal Love Chase (written 1866, unpublished until 1995), featuring Rosamond Vivian and Phillip Tempest.

Realism and Naturalism

William Dean Howells — The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), novel of a self-made paint manufacturer navigating Boston society; A Modern Instance (1882); A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890); dominant editor of The Atlantic Monthly and champion of literary realism; friend to both Twain and James.
Harold Frederic — The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896; published in England as Illumination), novel of a Methodist minister whose faith and morals disintegrate on contact with modernity; considered a bridge between realism and naturalism.
Paul Laurence Dunbar — first African American poet to gain wide national recognition; Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), with a preface by William Dean Howells; The Sport of the Gods (1902); known for poems in African American dialect as well as standard English verse; “We Wear the Mask.”
W.E.B. Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk (1903), essays coining the concept of “double consciousness”; The Philadelphia Negro (1899), pioneering sociological study; co-founder of the NAACP; Black Reconstruction in America (1935); edited The Crisis for 24 years.
Charles Chesnutt — The Conjure Woman (1899), short stories using a Black narrator to subvert the plantation tradition; The House Behind the Cedars (1900); The Marrow of Tradition (1901); first African American fiction writer to achieve mainstream publisher recognition.
George Washington Cable — Old Creole Days (1879); The Grandissimes (1880), novel of Creole New Orleans; advocate for civil rights of Black Southerners; his social criticism led him to leave Louisiana for New England.
Sarah Orne Jewett — Deephaven (1877); The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), sketches of coastal Maine life; key figure in the local-color / regionalist movement; mentor to Willa Cather.
Bret Harte — The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870); popularized the literary Western and California Gold Rush setting; “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”; early editor of the Overland Monthly.
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), often called the Great American Novel; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned; The Gilded Age (1873, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner) coined the era’s name; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889); Life on the Mississippi (1883).
Henry James — Daisy Miller (1878); The Portrait of a Lady (1881); The Bostonians (1886); The Wings of the Dove (1902); The Ambassadors (1903); The Golden Bowl (1904); the “international theme” of Americans in Europe; late style notable for elaborate syntax; also a major critic and theorist of the novel.
Edith Wharton — The House of Mirth (1905); Ethan Frome (1911); The Custom of the Country (1913); The Age of Innocence (1920, Pulitzer Prize); first woman to win the Pulitzer for Fiction; chronicled New York Gilded Age society.
Stephen Crane — Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893); The Red Badge of Courage (1895), impressionistic Civil War novel; short story “The Open Boat” (1897).
Theodore Dreiser — Sister Carrie (1900), initially suppressed by publisher; Jennie Gerhardt (1911); An American Tragedy (1925); naturalistic depiction of economic determinism.
Jack London — The Call of the Wild (1903); White Fang (1906); The Sea-Wolf (1904); socialist and adventurer; semi-autobiographical Martin Eden (1909).
Kate Chopin — The Awakening (1899), largely ignored then rediscovered by feminist criticism in the 1960s–70s; short stories in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman — “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), proto-feminist short story depicting a woman’s descent into madness under “rest cure”; utopian novel Herland (1915).
Frank Norris — McTeague (1899), naturalistic novel of greed and degradation in San Francisco; The Octopus (1901), first volume of an unfinished wheat trilogy depicting railroad monopoly; strong influence of Zola’s naturalism.
Ambrose Bierce — Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891, also titled In the Midst of Life), Civil War stories including “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”; The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), sardonic definitions; disappeared in Mexico around 1913–1914; known as “Bitter Bierce.”
Upton Sinclair — The Jungle (1906), exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry that spurred the Pure Food and Drug Act; Oil! (1927); The Brass Check (1919), critique of journalism; won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for Dragon’s Teeth.
O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) — master of the twist-ending short story; “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Ransom of Red Chief”; Cabbages and Kings (1904); wrote prolifically while serving a prison sentence; the O. Henry Award for short fiction is named for him.

Modernism

Fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald — This Side of Paradise (1920); The Great Gatsby (1925); Tender Is the Night (1934); The Beautiful and Damned (1922); unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941); chronicler of the Jazz Age and the American Dream’s underside.
Ernest Hemingway — The Sun Also Rises (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); The Old Man and the Sea (1952, Pulitzer); Nobel Prize 1954; iceberg theory of minimalist prose; expatriate life in Paris and Spain.
William Faulkner — The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1930); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936); Go Down, Moses (1942); Yoknapatawpha County fictional setting; Nobel Prize 1949.
John Steinbeck — Of Mice and Men (1937), featuring Lennie Small, the gentle giant with diminished intellect whose friendship with George Milton ends in tragedy; The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer); East of Eden (1952); Cannery Row (1945); Nobel Prize 1962; documented the Dust Bowl and Depression-era labor.
Sinclair Lewis — Main Street (1920); Babbitt (1922); Elmer Gantry (1927); Arrowsmith (1925, declined Pulitzer); first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1930).
Willa Cather — O Pioneers! (1913); My Ántonia (1918); Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927); The Professor’s House (1925); Great Plains and Southwest themes.
Sherwood Anderson — Winesburg, Ohio (1919), interconnected stories of small-town life; major influence on Hemingway and Faulkner.
John Dos Passos — U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1930; 1919, 1932; The Big Money, 1936); innovative “newsreel” and “Camera Eye” techniques.
Zora Neale Hurston — Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Dust Tracks on a Road (autobiography, 1942); Mules and Men (1935) folklore collection; anthropologist of African American folklore who studied under Franz Boas at Columbia; central to the Harlem Renaissance; rediscovered after Alice Walker’s 1975 essay.
Their Eyes Were Watching God — Hurston’s 1937 novel follows Janie Mae Crawford through marriages to Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Vergible Woods, called Tea Cake. Joe becomes mayor of Eatonville; Janie later works with Tea Cake in the Everglades. After his death, she returns to Eatonville and recounts her experiences to Pheoby Watson. This storytelling frame makes Janie’s own account of love, marriage, and the search for fulfillment central to the novel.²
Henry Roth — Call It Sleep (1934), a novel of Jewish immigrant life on the Lower East Side narrated by young David Schearl; largely overlooked on publication, rediscovered by a 1964 paperback reissue and now considered a 20th-century masterwork; did not publish a second novel for sixty years.
E.E. Cummings — Tulips and Chimneys (1923); known for radical typographic experimentation, lowercase letters, and unconventional punctuation; also wrote the autobiographical war novel The Enormous Room (1922) based on his imprisonment in France; Harvard-educated member of the Lost Generation.
H.P. Lovecraft — pioneering writer of cosmic horror; “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) introduced the dread Great Old One Cthulhu, who lies “dead but dreaming” in the sunken city of R’lyeh; built the interconnected Cthulhu Mythos, including the forbidden grimoire the Necronomicon by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, the fictional Miskatonic University in Arkham, and the entity Nyarlathotep; other stories include “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow out of Time,” and “The Horror at Red Hook”; a lifelong native of Providence, Rhode Island, who envisioned humanity as insignificant in an indifferent universe; influenced Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, and Stephen King.
Vladimir Nabokov — Lolita (1955); Pale Fire (1962); Ada, or Ardor (1969); Speak, Memory (autobiography, 1951); Russian-born, became American citizen 1945; joined Cornell faculty; chess problems and lepidopterology.
Richard Wright — Native Son (1940), novel of Bigger Thomas in Chicago; Black Boy (autobiography, 1945); Uncle Tom’s Children (1938); expatriated to Paris; major figure in protest literature.
James Baldwin — Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), semi-autobiographical Harlem Pentecostal novel; Giovanni’s Room (1956); Another Country (1962); The Fire Next Time (1963, essay); If Beale Street Could Talk (1974); novels and essays central to the civil rights era; expatriated to Paris and later France; openly gay Black writer at the intersection of race and sexuality.

Poetry

Edwin Arlington Robinson — The Man Against the Sky (1916); Collected Poems (1921, Pulitzer); also The Man Who Died Twice (1924, Pulitzer) and Tristram (1927, Pulitzer); three Pulitzers; poems “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy”; precursor to modernism in his psychological realism.
Edgar Lee Masters — Spoon River Anthology (1915), free-verse epitaphs voiced by inhabitants of a fictional Illinois town revealing lives of quiet desperation; influential on American poetry’s turn toward direct speech.
Carl Sandburg — Chicago Poems (1916); Cornhuskers (1918, Pulitzer); The People, Yes (1936); also wrote a six-volume biography of Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 1926; The War Years, 1939, Pulitzer); “Chicago,” “Fog.”
Vachel Lindsay — General William Booth Enters into Heaven (1913); The Congo (1914); known for performative, musical verse meant to be chanted aloud; championed a democratic poetry he called “the higher vaudeville.”
Robert Frost — A Boy’s Will (1913); North of Boston (1914); New Hampshire (1923, Pulitzer); “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall”; deceptively simple rural New England verse; four Pulitzer Prizes.
T.S. Eliot — born St. Louis; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915); The Waste Land (1922); Four Quartets (1943); became a British citizen 1927; Nobel Prize 1948; Tradition and the Individual Talent as critical manifesto.
Wallace Stevens — Harmonium (1923); The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937); Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942); insurance executive in Hartford; “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning”; poetry of imagination and reality.
William Carlos Williams — Spring and All (1923); Paterson (five books, 1946–1958); “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This Is Just to Say”; Imagism and American vernacular; physician in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Ezra Pound — Personae (1909); The Cantos (begun 1915, unfinished); championed and edited Eliot, Hemingway, and Joyce; Imagism manifesto; arrested for treason for wartime broadcasts in Italy.
Langston Hughes — The Weary Blues (1926); Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951); “A Dream Deferred” (“Harlem”), “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”; poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance; also wrote plays, novels, autobiography The Big Sea (1940), and the Simple stories featuring Jesse B. Semple, published in the Chicago Defender.
Countee Cullen — Color (1925); Copper Sun (1927); “Incident,” “Yet Do I Marvel”; key Harlem Renaissance poet who worked in traditional forms.
Edna St. Vincent Millay — Renascence and Other Poems (1917); The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923, Pulitzer), first woman to win the Pulitzer for Poetry; known for sonnets and feminist independence; “First Fig” (“My candle burns at both ends”).
Stephen Vincent Benét — John Brown’s Body (1928, Pulitzer), epic narrative poem of the Civil War; short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1937); also won a second Pulitzer posthumously for Western Star (1943).
Archibald MacLeish — “Ars Poetica” (1926), source of the dictum “A poem should not mean / But be”; Conquistador (1932, Pulitzer), an epic on the conquest of Mexico; “You, Andrew Marvell,” a meditation on the coming of night sweeping westward past Kermanshah, Palmyra, and Sicily; the verse drama J.B. (1958, Pulitzer), a modern retelling of the Book of Job; three-time Pulitzer winner; served as Librarian of Congress and assistant secretary of state; wrote the foreword to James Agee’s Permit Me Voyage; also adapted “The Devil and Daniel Webster” as the play Scratch.
Marianne Moore — Observations (1924); Collected Poems (1951, Pulitzer and National Book Award and Bollingen Prize); known for syllabic verse, precise observation of animals, and use of quotations; “Poetry” (“I, too, dislike it”); editor of The Dial (1925–1929).
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) — Sea Garden (1916); Trilogy (1944–1946), wartime long poem; Helen in Egypt (1961); co-founded Imagism with Pound and Richard Aldington; later embraced mythology and visionary mysticism.
Hart Crane — White Buildings (1926); The Bridge (1930), an epic poem using Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of American possibility and myth; died by suicide by jumping from a steamship at age 32.
Robinson Jeffers — Tamar and Other Poems (1924); Roan Stallion (1925); The Double Axe (1948); inhumanism philosophy (nature’s primacy over humanity); Big Sur, California setting; “Carmel Point.”
Gertrude Stein — Three Lives (1909); Tender Buttons (1914); The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); Four Saints in Three Acts (opera libretto, 1934); coined “the Lost Generation”; ran a celebrated Paris salon; major influence on Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson.

The Harlem Renaissance

Claude McKay — Harlem Shadows (1922); novel Home to Harlem (1928); sonnet “If We Must Die.”
Jean Toomer — Cane (1923), a formally experimental collage of prose, poetry, and drama set in the South and Washington D.C.; mixed-race identity theme.
Nella Larsen — Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), novels exploring racial identity and the color line.
Alain Locke — edited The New Negro (1925), the defining anthology of the movement; philosopher at Howard University.
Ralph Ellison — Invisible Man (1952, National Book Award); unnamed Black narrator’s journey through American society; only novel published in his lifetime; second novel Juneteenth assembled posthumously (1999).
James Agee — Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, with photographer Walker Evans), documentary prose on Alabama sharecroppers; screenplay for The African Queen (1951); A Death in the Family (1957, Pulitzer, posthumous); film critic for The Nation and Time.
Ernest J. Gaines — A Gathering of Old Men (1983); A Lesson Before Dying (1993, National Book Critics Circle Award), set in rural Louisiana on the eve of an execution; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), a fictional memoir spanning from the Civil War to the civil rights era; born on a Louisiana sugar plantation; voice of Louisiana’s Black community comparable to Faulkner’s treatment of Mississippi.

Drama

Eugene O’Neill — Beyond the Horizon (1920, Pulitzer); Anna Christie (1922, Pulitzer); Desire Under the Elms (1924); Strange Interlude (1928, Pulitzer); Mourning Becomes Electra (1931); The Iceman Cometh (1946); Long Day’s Journey into Night (written 1941–42, produced 1956, Pulitzer); Nobel Prize 1936; first major American dramatist.
Arthur Miller — All My Sons (1947); Death of a Salesman (1949, Pulitzer); The Crucible (1953); A View from the Bridge (1955); After the Fall (1964).
Tennessee Williams — The Glass Menagerie (1944); A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, Pulitzer); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer); Suddenly Last Summer (1958); The Night of the Iguana (1961).
Thornton Wilder — Our Town (1938, Pulitzer); The Skin of Our Teeth (1942, Pulitzer); also novelist (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927, Pulitzer).
Lorraine Hansberry — A Raisin in the Sun (1959), first play by a Black woman on Broadway; title from Hughes’s “Harlem.”
Lillian Hellman — The Children’s Hour (1934); The Little Foxes (1939); Watch on the Rhine (1941); refused to name names before HUAC in 1952; memoir Scoundrel Time (1976) recounts the McCarthy era; her testimony inspired the phrase “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
Edward Albee — Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962); A Delicate Balance (1966, Pulitzer); Seascape (1975, Pulitzer); absurdist and social critique.
August Wilson — Pittsburgh Cycle of ten plays, one per decade of the 20th century; Fences (1985, Pulitzer); The Piano Lesson (1987, Pulitzer); Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988); Two Trains Running (1990).
Sam Shepard — Buried Child (1978, Pulitzer); True West (1980); Curse of the Starving Class (1976); Fool for Love (1983); dysfunctional American West family dramas.
Clifford Odets — Waiting for Lefty (1935), one-act agitprop play about a taxi-driver strike; Awake and Sing! (1935); Golden Boy (1937); central voice of the Group Theatre and Depression-era protest drama.
David Mamet — American Buffalo (1975); Glengarry Glen Ross (1983, Pulitzer), a portrait of cutthroat real-estate salesmen; Speed-the-Plow (1988); Oleanna (1992); known for profanity-laced, staccato dialogue he called “Mamet speak”; also wrote the screenplay for The Verdict (1982).
Suzan-Lori Parks — Topdog/Underdog (2001, Pulitzer), first African American woman to win the Pulitzer for Drama; The America Play (1994); Venus (1996); known for repetition, “rep and rev” (revision) technique, and excavations of African American history.
Bruce Norris — Clybourne Park (2010, Pulitzer Prize), a two-act play examining the same Chicago house as Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: Act One set in 1959 as a white family sells to a Black family, Act Two in 2009 when a white couple plans to demolish it; Tony Award for Best Play; a direct companion piece to Hansberry.
Lanford Wilson — The Hot L Baltimore (1973); Talley’s Folly (1979, Pulitzer); co-founded Circle Repertory Company; regionalist and realist voice in American theater of the 1970s–80s.

Postwar and the Mid-Century

J.D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye (1951); short fiction collected in Nine Stories (1953); “Franny and Zooey” (1961); Glass family stories; withdrew from public life after the mid-1960s. Notable character: Holden Caulfield, the alienated 16-year-old narrator of Catcher in the Rye, whose voice and “phony”-detecting worldview made him one of the most iconic protagonists in American fiction.
Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead (1943); Atlas Shrugged (1957); philosophical novels promoting rational self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism, which she called Objectivism; born in Russia, emigrated to the United States in 1926.
James Thurber — The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939, in My World and Welcome to It), short story about a mild-mannered man whose daydreams cast him as a series of heroic figures; widely adapted for film and stage; the name “Walter Mitty” has entered the language as a byword for an escapist daydreamer; cartoonist and humorist long associated with The New Yorker.
Elie Wiesel — Night (La Nuit, 1958; English 1960), Holocaust memoir of his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager; part of a trilogy with Dawn and Day; Nobel Peace Prize 1986; born in Sighet, Romania; among the most widely read Holocaust memoirs in the world.
Nathanael West — Miss Lonelyhearts (1933); The Day of the Locust (1939), satirical novel of Hollywood’s dispossessed; dark satirist of American dream mythology; died in a car accident in 1940 at age 37.
Margaret Mitchell — Gone with the Wind (1936, Pulitzer and bestseller record-setting); only novel; the 1939 film adaptation remains one of the highest-grossing films of all time; Mitchell received the National Book Award for most distinguished novel 1936–1937.
James Hilton — Lost Horizon (1933), a British novel set largely among British characters but hugely influential in American popular culture; coins the word Shangri-La for an idyllic hidden Himalayan utopia where the inhabitants age very slowly; Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934); Shangri-La has entered English as a byword for any paradise or utopian retreat; the presidential retreat Camp David was originally named Shangri-La by FDR.
Flannery O’Connor — Wise Blood (1952); A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955); The Violent Bear It Away (1960); Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965, posthumous); Southern Gothic; grotesque and grace; died at 39.
Erskine Caldwell — Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933); naturalistic novels of poverty and social degradation in the rural Georgia South; both were bestsellers and became successful stage adaptations; associated with the Southern literary school alongside Faulkner though far more sensational in style.
Carson McCullers — The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940); The Member of the Wedding (1946, also adapted as a play); Ballad of the Sad Café (1951); Southern Gothic; themes of isolation and spiritual longing; published her first novel at age 23.
Eudora Welty — A Curtain of Green (1941); The Robber Bridegroom (1942); Delta Wedding (1946); The Optimist’s Daughter (1972, Pulitzer); One Writer’s Beginnings (memoir, 1984); lifelong Mississippian; major figure in Southern short fiction.
Truman Capote — Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948); The Grass Harp (1951); Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958); In Cold Blood (1966), pioneering “nonfiction novel” of the Clutter family murders; central figure in New York literary society.
Robert Penn Warren — All the King’s Men (1946, Pulitzer), novel based loosely on Huey Long; also won Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry (Promises, 1958; Now and Then, 1979); first official U.S. Poet Laureate (1986); co-wrote Understanding Poetry (1938) with Cleanth Brooks, foundational to New Criticism.
Harper Lee — To Kill a Mockingbird (1960, Pulitzer); the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama is the novel’s setting; Go Set a Watchman (2015, published from an early draft); the earlier novel sold more than 40 million copies and became a staple of American high school curricula.
Dashiell Hammett — Red Harvest (1929); The Maltese Falcon (1930); The Thin Man (1934); created Sam Spade and Nick Charles; foundational figure of hard-boiled detective fiction; also a screenwriter; blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
Raymond Chandler — The Big Sleep (1939); Farewell, My Lovely (1940); The Long Goodbye (1953); created private detective Philip Marlowe; alongside Hammett, the defining figure of the hard-boiled school; coined the maxim “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”
Maya Angelou — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), first volume of autobiographical series; poet and memoirist; recited “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration (1993); Gather Together in My Name (1974); And Still I Rise (1978).
Bernard Malamud — The Natural (1952); The Assistant (1957); The Fixer (1966, Pulitzer and National Book Award); The Magic Barrel (1958, National Book Award); moral fables set among Jewish-American characters; alongside Bellow and Roth as a major mid-century Jewish-American voice.
Shirley Jackson — “The Lottery” (1948), one of the most anthologized short stories in American literature; We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962); The Haunting of Hill House (1959); combined domesticity with dread and the uncanny.
Ken Kesey — One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), featuring Nurse Ratched (Mildred Ratched), the cold authoritarian head nurse of the ward whose conflict with Randle McMurphy drives the novel’s central tension; Sometimes a Great Notion (1964); counterculture figure who led the Merry Pranksters bus trip documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).
Robert Heinlein — Stranger in a Strange Land (1961, Hugo Award); Starship Troopers (1959, Hugo Award); The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966, Hugo Award); three Hugo Awards for Best Novel; considered one of the “Big Three” of Golden Age science fiction alongside Asimov and Clarke.
Saul Bellow — The Adventures of Augie March (1953, National Book Award); Herzog (1964); Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970); Humboldt’s Gift (1975, Pulitzer); Nobel Prize 1976.
John Updike — Rabbit tetralogy (Rabbit, Run, 1960; Rabbit Redux, 1971; Rabbit Is Rich, 1981, Pulitzer; Rabbit at Rest, 1990, Pulitzer); The Witches of Eastwick (1984); prolific reviewer and essayist.
Philip Roth — Goodbye, Columbus (1959, National Book Award); Portnoy’s Complaint (1969); American Pastoral (1997, Pulitzer); The Human Stain (2000); The Plot Against America (2004); Zuckerman and Kepesh alter egos.
Kurt Vonnegut — Player Piano (1952); Cat’s Cradle (1963); Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Dresden firebombing; Breakfast of Champions (1973); dark satire and science fiction.
Joseph Heller — Catch-22 (1961), absurdist World War II satire featuring Captain John Yossarian, the bombardier who fears everyone is trying to kill him and strives to be declared insane to escape flying missions; the phrase “catch-22” entered common language; Something Happened (1974); Good as Gold (1979).

Postmodernism and Late 20th Century

William Gaddis — The Recognitions (1955), a dense novel of art forgery, faith, and American materialism; JR (1975, National Book Award), narrated almost entirely through telephone dialogue, centering on an 11-year-old corporate raider; A Frolic of His Own (1994, National Book Award); three National Book Awards; notoriously difficult.
Thomas Pynchon — V. (1963); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Gravity’s Rainbow (1973, National Book Award; Pulitzer board overruled jury recommendation); Mason & Dixon (1997); Against the Day (2006); notoriously reclusive.
John Barth — The Floating Opera (1956); The Sot-Weed Factor (1960); Giles Goat-Boy (1966); Lost in the Funhouse (1968), metafictional short fiction; LETTERS (1979); key theorist of postmodernism; essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) and “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979).
Donald Barthelme — Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964); Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968); Snow White (1967), a postmodern retelling; The Dead Father (1975); known for collage-like stories mixing high and low culture, fragmentation, and dark humor; frequent New Yorker contributor.
Robert Coover — The Origin of the Brunists (1966); The Public Burning (1977), metafictional account of the Rosenberg execution; Pricksongs and Descants (1969), experimental stories; Gerald’s Party (1986); known for mythopoeic deconstructions of American narratives.
John Hawkes — The Lime Twig (1961); Second Skin (1964); The Blood Oranges (1971); said he considered “plot, character, setting, and theme” the true enemies of the novel; associated with postmodern experimental fiction.
Tim O’Brien — Going After Cacciato (1978, National Book Award); The Things They Carried (1990), linked stories of the Vietnam War; In the Lake of the Woods (1994); blurs memoir and fiction; “On the Rainy River.”
N. Scott Momaday — House Made of Dawn (1968; Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 1969), the first Native American novel to win the prize; The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Kiowa oral history and personal memoir; Kiowa heritage; helped open the space for the Native American Renaissance in literature.³
Don DeLillo — White Noise (1985, National Book Award); Libra (1988); Underworld (1997); Falling Man (2007); postmodern treatment of media, consumerism, and American paranoia.
Toni Morrison — The Bluest Eye (1970); Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977, National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction); Beloved (1987, Pulitzer); Jazz (1992); Paradise (1997); Nobel Prize 1993; slavery, memory, and Black womanhood.⁴
Alice Walker — The Color Purple (1982, Pulitzer and National Book Award); Meridian (1976); also credited with recovering Hurston’s reputation.
Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian (1985); Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, 1992, National Book Award; The Crossing, 1994; Cities of the Plain, 1998); No Country for Old Men (2005); The Road (2006, Pulitzer).
Raymond Carver — Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976); What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981); Cathedral (1983); minimalist short fiction; dirty realism.
John Cheever — The Wapshot Chronicle (1957, National Book Award); Falconer (1977); The Stories of John Cheever (1978, Pulitzer); “The Swimmer” (1964), a story in which Neddy Merrill decides to swim home through the backyard pools of his Westchester neighbors and gradually discovers his life has disintegrated; suburban alienation and moral ambiguity.
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Left Hand of Darkness (1969); The Dispossessed (1974); Earthsea series; integrated literary fiction and speculative forms.
Joan Didion — Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968); The White Album (1979); Play It as It Lays (1970); The Year of Magical Thinking (2005, National Book Award); essayist and cultural observer.

Contemporary and Recent

Fiction

Michael Chabon — The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000, Pulitzer Prize); follows two Jewish cousins — Joe Kavalier, a Czech escapist and artist, and Sam Clay — who create a superhero comic called The Escapist in golden-age New York; blends the history of comic books with themes of escape, identity, and WWII; also wrote The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).
David Foster Wallace — Infinite Jest (1996), a 1,079-page novel set at a tennis academy and a halfway house, structured around a lethal film called the Entertainment; The Broom of the System (1987); essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005); The Pale King (2011, posthumous, Pulitzer finalist); died by suicide 2008.
Marilynne Robinson — Housekeeping (1980); Gilead (2004, Pulitzer); Home (2008, Orange Prize); Lila (2014); Jack (2020); Iowa Writers’ Workshop teacher.
Junot Díaz — Drown (1996); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award); This Is How You Lose Her (2012).
Colson Whitehead — The Intuitionist (1999); The Underground Railroad (2016, Pulitzer and National Book Award); The Nickel Boys (2019, Pulitzer); consecutive Pulitzers.
Anthony Doerr — All the Light We Cannot See (2014, Pulitzer); Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021).
Donna Tartt — The Secret History (1992); The Goldfinch (2013, Pulitzer).
Jeffrey Eugenides — The Virgin Suicides (1993); Middlesex (2002, Pulitzer); The Marriage Plot (2011).
Jonathan Franzen — The Corrections (2001, National Book Award); Freedom (2010); The Corrections declined Oprah’s Book Club selection controversially.
George Saunders — CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996); Tenth of December (2013); Lincoln in the Bardo (2017, Man Booker Prize).
Jhumpa Lahiri — Interpreter of Maladies (1999, Pulitzer); The Namesake (2003); The Lowland (2013); Indian-American diaspora themes.
Louise Erdrich — Love Medicine (1984, National Book Critics Circle Award); The Beet Queen (1986); Tracks (1988); The Night Watchman (2020, Pulitzer); Chippewa (Ojibwe) heritage; North Dakota setting.
Jesmyn Ward — Salvage the Bones (2011, National Book Award); Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017, National Book Award); Men We Reaped (memoir, 2013); only woman to win two National Book Awards for Fiction; Mississippi Gulf Coast setting.
Denis Johnson — Jesus’ Son (1992), linked short stories of addiction and revelation; Tree of Smoke (2007, National Book Award), a Vietnam War novel; Train Dreams (2011, Pulitzer finalist); known for visionary, spiritually charged prose.
Paul Auster — The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, 1985; Ghosts, 1986; The Locked Room, 1986); Moon Palace (1989); postmodern detective fiction; The Book of Illusions (2002).
Richard Powers — The Gold Bug Variations (1991); The Echo Maker (2006, National Book Award); The Overstory (2018, Pulitzer), a novel of trees and environmental activism; known for interweaving scientific and humanistic themes.
Toni Cade Bambara — Gorilla, My Love (1972), short stories; The Salt Eaters (1980, National Book Award); central voice in African American women’s literature; also edited The Black Woman anthology (1970).
Sandra Cisneros — The House on Mango Street (1984), a coming-of-age novel in vignettes about a Chicana girl in Chicago; Woman Hollering Creek (1991); foundational text of Chicana literature.
Natalie Babbitt — Tuck Everlasting (1975), a children’s novel in which young Winnie Foster discovers the Tuck family, who drank from a spring granting immortality; raises questions about the desirability of eternal life; a staple of American middle-grade literature.
Helen Hunt Jackson — Ramona (1884), a novel set in Southern California following a half-Native American girl on a Spanish rancho; written as a protest against the mistreatment of Native Americans, it instead became a romanticized portrait of mission-era California that shaped the region’s popular mythology; Jackson also wrote the non-fiction indictment A Century of Dishonor (1881).
Amy Tan — The Joy Luck Club (1989), linked stories of Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters; The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991); The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001); Chinese-American identity and intergenerational conflict.
Octavia Butler — Kindred (1979), a time-travel novel confronting American slavery; the Patternist series; Parable of the Sower (1993); Fledgling (2005); first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (1995).
Larry McMurtry — Lonesome Dove (1985, Pulitzer), an epic cattle-drive novel set after the Civil War; The Last Picture Show (1966); Terms of Endearment (1975); revisionist Westerns; also an essayist and bookseller.
Annie Proulx — The Shipping News (1993, Pulitzer and National Book Award); Brokeback Mountain (story, in Close Range, 1999); Accordion Crimes (1996); Barkskins (2016); Wyoming and Newfoundland settings.
Tobias Wolff — This Boy’s Life (memoir, 1989); In Pharaoh’s Army (Vietnam memoir, 1994); Our Story Begins (2008); “Bullet in the Brain” (story); associated with dirty realism alongside Carver.
Orson Scott Card — Ender’s Game (1985), science fiction novel in which the child genius Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is trained at a Battle School in space to command Earth’s forces against the alien Formics; won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards; Speaker for the Dead (1986, also Hugo and Nebula); the Ender series is among the most widely read American science fiction franchises.
Norton Juster — The Phantom Tollbooth (1961, illustrated by Jules Feiffer), a children’s fantasy novel in which the bored boy Milo drives a toy car through a magic tollbooth into the Lands Beyond, where he encounters the Mathmagician, the Demons of Ignorance, and the cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis; a sustained allegory on the value of learning and imagination.
Suzanne Collins — The Hunger Games trilogy (The Hunger Games, 2008; Catching Fire, 2009; Mockingjay, 2010); dystopian young-adult fiction set in the nation of Panem; protagonist Katniss Everdeen volunteers to replace her sister in a televised fight-to-the-death; her fellow tribute from District 12 is Peeta Mellark, the baker’s son who loves her; among the best-selling YA series of the 21st century.
Ta-Nehisi Coates — Between the World and Me (2015, National Book Award), an open letter to his son on the history of racial violence and the “black body” in America; We Were Eight Years in Power (2017); also wrote acclaimed runs of Black Panther and Captain America comic series; compared to James Baldwin in his essayistic voice.
Kate DiCamillo — Because of Winn-Dixie (2000, Newbery Honor), a children’s novel narrated by ten-year-old Opal, who bonds with her community after adopting a stray dog; The Tale of Despereaux (2003, Newbery Medal); The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (2006); two-time Newbery medalist.
Katherine Paterson — Bridge to Terabithia (1977, Newbery Medal), a children’s novel about the friendship between Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke, who create an imaginary kingdom in the woods; Leslie’s sudden death is among the most affecting moments in American children’s literature; Jacob Have I Loved (1980, Newbery Medal).
Ocean Vuong — Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016, debut poetry collection, Whiting Award, T. S. Eliot Prize); On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019, novel in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother); Vietnamese-born, raised in Connecticut; became one of the most celebrated young poets in American literature.

Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop — North & South (1946); A Cold Spring (1955, Pulitzer); Geography III (1976, National Book Critics Circle Award); “One Art,” “The Fish,” “In the Waiting Room”; precise observation; friend and correspondent of Robert Lowell.
Sylvia Plath — The Colossus (1960); Ariel (1965, posthumous); The Bell Jar (novel, 1963); “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus”; confessional poetry; died 1963.
Robert Lowell — Lord Weary’s Castle (1946, Pulitzer); Life Studies (1959, National Book Award), which contains “Skunk Hour” (dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop), the late-night vigil poem with the speaker watching lovers’ cars and admitting “I myself am hell”; For the Union Dead (1964); confessional poetry pioneer.
Gwendolyn Brooks — Annie Allen (1949, Pulitzer), first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize; A Street in Bronzeville (1945); “We Real Cool”; Illinois Poet Laureate.
Frank O’Hara — Lunch Poems (1964); Meditations in an Emergency (1957); New York School; informal, conversational “I do this, I do that” poems.
Anne Sexton — Live or Die (1966, Pulitzer); confessional poet alongside Plath; Transformations (1971) retelling fairy tales.
Allen Ginsberg — Howl and Other Poems (1956), subject of obscenity trial; Kaddish (1961); central figure of the Beat Generation alongside Kerouac and Burroughs.
Jack Kerouac — On the Road (1957); The Dharma Bums (1958); Beat prose; typed On the Road on a scroll of teletype paper.
Theodore Roethke — The Waking (1953, Pulitzer); Words for the Wind (1958, National Book Award); “My Papa’s Waltz,” “The Lost Son”; greenhouse poems drawing on his father’s Michigan nursery; confessional themes preceding Lowell and Plath.
John Berryman — 77 Dream Songs (1964, Pulitzer); His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968, National Book Award); the sequence features the persona Henry and his minstrel interlocutor “Mr. Bones”; Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956); confessional poet; died by suicide 1972.
Robert Hayden — Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940); “Middle Passage” and “Those Winter Sundays”; Angle of Ascent (1975); first African American to be appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position now called Poet Laureate); rejected the “Black poet” label in favor of “American poet.”
John Ashbery — Some Trees (1956, chosen by Auden for the Yale Series); Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975, Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award — the only collection to win all three); The Tennis Court Oath (1962); associated with the New York School.
Adrienne Rich — Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963); Diving into the Wreck (1973, National Book Award shared with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker); Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (Norton critical edition); radical feminist politics; later declined the National Medal of Arts in 1997 on political grounds.
A.R. Ammons — Corsons Inlet (1965); Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974, National Book Award); Garbage (1993, National Book Award); Romantic landscape poetry with scientific underpinning; taught at Cornell for decades.
Yusef Komunyakaa — Dien Cai Dau (1988), poems of the Vietnam War; Neon Vernacular (1993, Pulitzer and Kingsley Tufts Award); “Facing It” (at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall); jazz-inflected diction; grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana.
Rita Dove — Thomas and Beulah (1986, Pulitzer), a lyric sequence following her grandparents’ lives; U.S. Poet Laureate 1993–1995, youngest and first African American to hold the position; Grace Notes (1989); American Smooth (2004).
William S. Burroughs — Junkie (1953); Naked Lunch (1959, subject of obscenity case); Nova Express (1964); cut-up technique; Beat Generation; The Soft Machine (1961).
Charles Olson — Call Me Ishmael (1947), study of Melville; The Maximus Poems (1960–1975), a long poem centered on Gloucester, Massachusetts; essay “Projective Verse” (1950) influenced the Black Mountain poets; rector of Black Mountain College.
Denise Levertov — With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959); The Jacob’s Ladder (1961); anti-Vietnam War activism in later work; associated with the Black Mountain poets and then became more lyrical; “Pleasures,” “O Taste and See.”

Key Terms and Movements

Puritanism — religious and literary foundation of New England writing; plain style; typology; sermon as literary form.
Transcendentalism — 1830s–1850s New England movement; individual intuition over institutional authority; nature as spiritual text; key figures: Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott.
American Renaissance — F.O. Matthiessen’s term for the 1850–1855 flowering of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman.
Local color / Regionalism — post-Civil War movement emphasizing dialect, setting, and regional specificity; Twain (South/Midwest), Jewett (New England), Chopin (Louisiana).
Naturalism — late 19th–early 20th century; deterministic view of human behavior shaped by heredity, environment, and chance; Dreiser, Crane, Norris, London.
Modernism — roughly 1910–1945; experimentation, stream of consciousness, free verse, fragmentation, disillusionment post-WWI.
Harlem Renaissance — 1920s–early 1930s flourishing of African American art, literature, and music in Harlem; also called the New Negro Movement.
The Lost Generation — Gertrude Stein’s phrase for expatriate American writers in Paris post-WWI: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings.
Beat Generation — late 1940s–1950s; Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs; rebellion against conformity; spontaneous prose and poetry.
Confessional poetry — late 1950s–1960s; autobiographical, emotionally raw verse; Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Berryman.
Postmodernism — self-referentiality, metafiction, pastiche, unreliable narrators; Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo, Nabokov (adopted American).
Dirty realism — minimalist, working-class fiction; Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff; term coined by Bill Buford in Granta (1983).