NAQT American Lit

James Agee

20th; Death in the Family, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (about AL farmers in the Depression, with photographer Walker Evans)

John Barth

20th; Giles Goat-Boy The New Revised Syllabus (computer WESAC's developer Max Spielman designates George Giles, who had been raised by goats and opposed by poet Harold Bray, as Our Great Tutor; Giles's teachings are edited by WESAC, the academician JB, and a publisher), The Sot-Weed Factor (Ebenezer Cooke comes from England to take charge of MD tobacco plantation Malden)

Walter Clark

he Ox-Bow Incident (three alleged cattle rustlers are lynched just as news comes that they are innocent)

Ken Kesey

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (mental hospital patient Randle Patrick McMurphy stages guerilla warfare against evil nurse Miss Ratched)

John Trumbull

Revolutionary; Hartford Wit; M'Fingal (American Revolution: Scotch-American Tory orator M'Fingal is tarred and feathered and repents)

Hugh Henry Brackenridge

Revolutionary; Modern Chivalry (Captain Farrago and Teague O'Regan travel, seeing unqualified office holders, including Teague)

William Brown

Revolutionary; Power of Sympathy (first American novel; Harrington can't marry Harriot Fawcett because she is his half-sister; both die)

John Jay, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton

Revolutionary; The Federalist

Charles Brown

Revolutionary; Wieland or the Transformation (first American novel popular in Europe), Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly

Sylvia Plath

(committed suicide) Ariel (love songs to death; dehumanize people as mannequins and paper figures), The Bell Jar (schoolgirl prodigy Esther Greenwood has mental breakdowns)

Emily Dickinson

Late 19th; Poems (not famous until long after her death)

Allen Ginsberg

1950's; Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems (elegy for mom Naomi)

Jack Kerouac

1950's; On the Road (Sal Paradise [the author] hitch-hikes across US with Carlo Marx [Ginsberg] and Dean Moriarity [Cassady]),

Lawrence Ferlingheti

1950's; Pictures from the World Gone Wild

William Burroughs

1950's; The Naked Lunch

N Scott Momaday

20th; (American Indian) The House Made of Dawn

William Carlos Williams

20th; (NJ pediatrician) Paterson (Passaic River, NJ: mythical Paterson wanders about his environs and reflect on history of the locale and contemporary scene), In the American Grain (study of Columbus, Cortez, De Soto, Raleigh, Franklin, and others)

O Henry

20th; (William Sydney Porter) The Four Million (title from NYC population; 25 stories including An Unfinished Story and The Gift of the Magi [poor man sells watch to buy combs for wife, who sells hair to buy watch fob for him]), The Last Leaf (ill girl decides to die when last of five leaves outside her window falls but one hangs) , A Retrieved Restoration (Jimmy Valentine tries to reform but foiled when he opens a safe during an emergency)

Sinclair Lewis

20th; (first American to win Nobel Prize) Main Street (Carol Kennicott tires of physician husband Will and tries to bring culture to dull Gopher Praire, MN [based on Sauk Centre]), Dodsworth, Arrowsmith (Martin Arrowsmith, a bacteriologist, goes to VT farm and West Indies), Babbit (Zenith, the Zip City: George F. Babbitt, real estate broker, fears ostracism but encourages son Tom to rebel), Elmer Gantry (Kansas City: ex-football player Elmer Gantry becomes popular but hypocritical minister), It Can't Happen Here (Berzelius Windrip sets up fascist dictatorship in US; Doremus Jessup and Walt Trowbridge in Canada oppose him)

John Hersey

20th; A Bell for Adano, Hiroshima (tells of nuclear bombing throught the eyes of six people, including priest, minister, and two doctors)

Willa Cather

20th; A Lost Lady (Marian Forrester's pioneer husband dies and she becomes mistress of Ivy Peters; Niel Herbert adores her; she disappears to South America), Death Comes for the Archbishop (Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant establish diocese in NM), My Antonia (Bohemian immigrant Antonia Shimerda works on farms after father's suicide, elopes with railway conductor, and marries farmer Anton Cuzak; others include lawyer Jim Burden), O Pioneers (Alexandra Bergson takes over NE farm when dad dies; brother Emil killed; marries Carl Linstrum), One of Ours (Claude Wheeler grows up on Western farm, goes to college, killed in army in France), The Song of the Lark (Coloradoan Thea Kronborg, daughter of Swedish clergyman, goes to Chicago, has affair with Fred Ottenburg, and becomes soprano at Met. Opera House in NY), Alexander's Bridge, Youth and the Bright Medusa (stories, including Paul's Case)

Robert Warren

20th; All the King's Men (US South: Willie Stark, like Huey Long; narrated by Jack Burden)

Edna St. Vincent Millay

20th; Ballad of the Harp Weaver, A Few Figs from Thistles

Joseph Heller

20th; Catch-22 (Pianosa Island during WWII: Yossarian can only stop bombing missions if insane but wanting to stop is sane), Something Happened, Good as Gold

Archibald MacLeich

20th; Collected Poems, The Pot of Earth (fertility rite)

Thomas Clayton Wolfe

20th; Look Homeward Angel (describes youth of Eugene Gant in Altamont, Catawba [based on Asheville, NC]; Eugene attends mother's boarding house, has romance, and goes to college; brother Ben Gant dies at St.Louis World's Fair), Of Time and the River (Eugene Gant studies drama at Harvard under James Hatcher; dad dies; tours France; teaches literature in NYC), The Web and the Rock (George Webber goes to "Enfabled Rock" of NY and has affair with scenic designer Mrs. Esther Jack but he breaks from her web of devotion to NY to seek stability), You Can't Go Home Again (George Webber returns from Germany, resumes affair with Esther Jack, becomes writer, and is disillusioned by hometown)

Robert and Helen Lynd

20th; Middletown (Muncie IN)

Nathaniel West

20th; Miss Lonelyhearts (love advice columnist murdered), The Day of the Locust (Hollywood painter Tod loves starlet; paints "The Burning of Los Angeles")

Robert Frost

20th; North of Boston, Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken (takes the one less traveled and "that has made all the difference"), The Gift Outright, Fire and Ice, Mending Wall (narrator's neighbor says "good fences make good neighbors"), A Boy's Will, Birches, The Death of the Hired Man (farmer and wife debate keeping returned hired man), A Further Range (including Ten Mills and Build Soil)

John Steinbeck

20th; Of Mice and Men (strong giant half-wit migrant worker Lennie accidentally kills woman who seduces him and is shot by friend George to protect him from lynch mob), The Grapes of Wrath (Joad family travels from OK to CA during the Great Depression to find work picking fruit; Tom Joad becomes involved in strikes and kills a man; Rose of Sharon has baby), In Dubious Battle (Communist Mac's friend Jim Nolan murdered; Doc Burton helps striking CA fruit pickers), East of Eden (Salinas Valley: Adam Trask and Cathy have two sons; Cal kills Aron by telling him mom is a prostitute), Tortilla Flat (carefree Danny meets with simple friends Pablo, Big Joe Portagee, Jesus Maria Corcoran, and Pirate in his home, "like the Round Table"), The Pearl (CA Indian pearl-fisher and wife Juana's baby bitten by scorpion; they pay doctor with large pearl)

Ezra Pound

20th; Pipostes, Cantos (ancient Greece, 1800s US, Renaissance Italy; Pisan Cantos written when arrested for pro-Fascist Italian radio broadcasts, awarded Bollingen Prize; Section Rock-Drill), Personae ("masks of the actor")

John Updike

20th; Rabbit Run (salesman Harry Angstrom leaves alcoholic wife Janice and child to find freedom but returns), Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest

Zane Grey

20th; Riders of the Purple Sage, The Last of the Plainsmen, Tales of Fishing

Kurt Vonnegut

20th; Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance with Death (optometrist Billy Pilgrim survives Dresden firebombing and returns to Illium NY; kidnapped by aliens from Talfamadore who teach about 4D world), Cat's Cradle, Player Piano

Ray Bradbury

20th; Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles

Robert Heinlein

20th; Stranger in a Strange Land (a martian)

Jame Michener

20th; Tales of the South Pacific

JD Salinger

20th; The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caulfield runs away from his prep school and drifts about NY), Franny and Zooey (college student Franny Glass and actor brother Zooey feel alienated)20th;

Lillian Hellman

20th; The Children's Hour (lesbian teachers), The Little Foxes (story of Hubbard family condemns new industrial Southerners), Watch on the Rhine (German refugee kills informer at German embassy in US)

Stephen Benet

20th; The Devil and Daniel Webster (NE farmer Jabez Stone sells his soul to the devil but is saved by Webster's oratory before demonic jury, John Brown's Body (Civil War narrative beginning with Harper's Ferry), Western Star

EE Cummings

20th; The Enormous Room (WWI French concentration camp where author was imprisoned on false treason charge)

Ayn Rand

20th; The Fountainhead (architect Howard Roark, possibly based on Frank Lloyd Wright, turns down commissions rather than sacrifice integrity), Atlas Shrugged (railroad worker Dagny Taggart finds government-free utopia at Gat's Gulch, CO)

F Scott Fitzgerald

20th; The Great Gatsby (Jazz Age Long Island: Jay Gatsby loves Daisy Buchanan, cousin of narrator Nick Carraway, but she stays with husband Tom; Daisy runs over Tom's mistress Myrtle Wilson and Tom shoots Jay), Tender Is the Night (wealthy schizophrenic Nicole Warren marries her psychiatrist Dick Diver; she becomes mentally stable but he deteriorates; she leaves him for a lover), This Side of Paradise (spoiled Middle Westerner Amory Blaine goes to Princeton and joins literary cults; loves Rosaline Commase but is rejected; serves in WWI; starts career in advertising)

Edith Wharton

20th; The House of Mirth (orphan Lily Bart loves Lawrence Seldon but reject him because he is poor; blackmailed and falsely accused by other men; becomes milliner and takes overdose of sleeping pills), The Age of Innocence (NY 1870s: Neland Archer marries May Welland but loves her cousin Ellen Olenska), Ethan Frome (MA farm: farmer Ethan Frome marries whining hypochondriac Zeena but loves her cousin Mattie; Ethan and Mattie injured in bobsled suicide attempt; Zeena becomes devoted nurse and Mattie becomes nag), The Custom of the Country (Undine Spragg samples pleasures, marries millionaire from hometown), Old New York (4 novellas about 1840 to 1880, including False Dawn [Lewis Raycie buys modern pictures], The Old Maid [Charlotte Lovell's cousin raises her illegitimate daughter Tina], The Spark [Walt Whitman influences old man], New Year's Day [wife sacrifices for sick husband])

John Phillips Marquand

20th; The Late George Apley (A Novel in the Form of a Memoir; Horatio Willing tells about life of Bostonian George Apley), Wickford Point (upper-class family near Boston declines)

Norman Mailer

20th; The Naked and the Dead (Lt. Robert Hearn's infantry platoon invade Japanese island in Pacific in WWII), The Executioner's Song, An American Dream (Stephen Rojack), Armies of the Night ("History as a Novel, the Novel as History" from Dover Beach; anti-Vietnam march on Pentagon)

William Faulkner

20th; The Sound and the Fury (4 sections narrated by Compson family: idiot Benjy; Harvard student Quentin, whose ties with sister Caddy shattered by her loveless marriage; Jason, who keeps money Caddy sends to support daughter Quentin; black cook Dilsey), Absalom Absalom (Thomas Sutpen elected colonel in Jefferson MS's Civil War regiment; daughter Judith's lover Charles Bon killed by Sutpen's son), As I Lay Dying (husband Anse and kids Cash, Darl, Jewel, Vardaman, and Dewey Dell carry body of Addie Bundren to Jefferson MS), A Fable (allegory of Jesus in WWI France), Knight's Gambit (stories involving Detective Gavin Stevens, including Monk), Requiem for a Nun (Temple Drake marries Gowan Stevens; Pete blackmails her; black servant Nancy Manningoe kills her youngest child, but Temple also is responsible), Intruder in the Dust (Chick Mallison, Aleck Sander, and Miss Eunice Habersham prove innocence of non-servile black Lucas Beuchamp), Sartoris (Col. John Sartoris's descendant Bayard returns from WWI guilty about brother John's death; grandfather dies of heart attack in car; Bayard marries Horace Benbow's sister Narcissa; Bayard dies as Ohio test pilot), The Unvanquished (7 stories about Sartoris family during Civil War; adventures of Bayard Sartoris and black companion Ringo), These Thirteen (short stories including A Rose for Emily [Southern spinster Emily Grierson locks Yankee construction worker Homer Barron, who courted her, in upstairs bedroom, where he dies]) The Hamlet - The Town - The Mansion trilogy (Flem Snopes becomes part owner of Will Varner's store in Frenchman's Bend and marries his daughter Eula; becomes VP of bank in Jefferson and drives president Manfred De Spain from town; Gavin Stevens loves Eula and her daughter Linda), Go Down Moses (series of stories about McCaslin family in Yoknapatawpha County, including Was, The Fire and the Hearth, Pantaloon in Black, and The Bear [hunt for Big Ben]), Light in August (part-black Joe Christmas employed by Joe Brown has affair with Joanna Burden and kills her; Christmas is killed by mob; pregnant Lena Grove comes to Jefferson looking for her lover; Revereand Gail Hightower loses his church because of devotion to the past), Sanctuary (Popeye rapes Temple Drake with corn cob and takes her to a Memphis brothel, but she protest him and testifies against Lee Goodwin, defended by Horace Benbow, and Goodwin is lynched), Soldier's Pay, The Reivers

Ernest Hemingway

20th; The Sun Also Rises (Lost Generation 1925 France: journalist Jake Barnes narrates; Lady Brett Ashley is divorcing and may love Jake but plans to marry Michael Campbell and has affair with Spanish bullfighter Pedro Romero in Pamplona; others include Greek Bill Gorton and American-Jewish writer Robert Cohn), A Farewell to Arms (WWI ambulance driver Lt. Frederic Henry loves English nurse Catherine Barkley, who becomes pregnant; Henry deserts after Caporetto in Italy and they go to Switzerland, where she dies), In Our Time (short stories about Nick Adams, including Indian Camp and Big Two-Hearted River), Men Without Women (short stories including The Killers [Nick Adams warns Ole Andreson that two hired gunmen from city are coming to kill him], The Undefeated, Fifty Grand, Hills Like White Elephants, A Simple Inquiry), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Spanish Civil War: American professor Robert Jordan assigned by Pablo and Pilar to blow up a bridge; Jordan loves Maria for three days; Jordan carries out mission but is left to die; title from Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions), The Old Man and the Sea (Cuban fisherman Santiago catches marlin on 85th day but it is slowly eaten by sharks on way home), The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (English guide Wilson saves Macombers from lion on African safari; next day Macomber fights wild buffalo but wife shoots him), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (writer Harry goes on African safari to "work fat off his mind" but gets gangrene, sees vision of a frozen leopard, and dies), To Have and Have Not (Harry Morgan smuggles Chinese and liquor in Key West during Depression and is shot)

Edwin Robinson

20th; The Town Down the River, Miniver Cheevey, Richard Cory, The Man Against the Sky

John Cheever

20th; The Wapshot Chronicle, Falconer

Sherwood Anderson

20th; Winesburg Ohio (23 stories; reporter George Willard develops), Dark Laughter, The Triumph of the Egg (chicken farmer is unable to perform simple trick with an egg)

John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Knowles

A Separate Peace (NE prep school: narrator Gene Forrester and good student Brinker each cause adventurous Phineas to fall, and he dies)

James Baldwin

African-American; Go Tell It on the Mountain, Nobody Knows My Name, Another Country (study of love among blacks and whites in NYC)

Ralph Ellison

African-American; Invisible Man (narrator-hero searches for identity in South and in Harlem)

Maya Angelou

African-American; Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Die, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Richard Wright

African-American; Native Son (Bigger Thomas, from Chicago slums, is victimized for being black, commits two murders, is defended by a Communist lawyer, and sentenced to death), Black Boy

Toni Morrison

African-American; The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved (Sethe kills her daughter Beloved rather than have her grow up a slave)

Alice Walker

African-American; The Color Purple (Celie made pregnant twice by dad by age 14 and sold to Albert but befriends Shug), Meridian

Zora Neal Hurston

African-American; Their Eyes Were Watching God(Janie Crawford marries Logan Killicks at grandma Nanny's orders, leaves him for Joe Starks, who dies and leaves her with a fortune, marries Tea Cake who she loves even though he whips her, but gets rabies and tries to shoot her; she shoots in self-defense, acquitted by all-white jury)

Lee Wallace

Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ (Judah Ben-Hur falsely accused by Messala, whom he defeats in chariot race)

Phillis Wheatley

Colonial; (1st famous black) Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral

Crevecoeur

Colonial; (J. Hector St. John) Letters from an American Farmer

Jupiter Hammon

Colonial; (black slave) An Evening Thought Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries

Lucy Terry

Colonial; (first by black American) Bar's Fight August 28 1746

William Byrd

Colonial; (satire) History of the Dividing Line, Secret Diary, Another Secret Diary

Mary Rowlandson

Colonial; (wrote about captivity by Wampanoags under King Philip [Metacomet, son of Massasoit])

Daniel Denton

Colonial; A Brief Description of New York

George Alsop

Colonial; A Character of the Province of Maryland

Andrew Bradford

Colonial; American Magazine (one of first two magazines, 1741)

Increase Mather

Colonial; An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences

John Campbell

Colonial; Boston News-Leter (first regular newspaper, 1704)

John Mason

Colonial; Brief History of the Pequod War

Michael Wigglesworth

Colonial; Day of Doom (sinners and unbaptized infants condemned to Hell on Day of Judgement)

Benjamin Franklin

Colonial; General Magazine and Historical Chronicle (one of first two magazines, 1741), Autobiography, Poor Richard's Almanack (Richard Saunders)

John Smith

Colonial; Generall Historie of Virginia New England and the Summer Isles

John Winthrop

Colonial; History of New England, "city upon a hill"

William Bradford

Colonial; History of Plimmoth Plantation

Cotton Mather

Colonial; Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of NE from its First Planting

Thomas Morton

Colonial; New English Canaan

Edward Taylor

Colonial; Poetical Works, God's Determinations Touching His Elect, Huswifery

Jonathan Edwards

Colonial; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, Freedom of the Will

Anne Bradstreet

Colonial; Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (poems including A Dialogue between Old England and New, Four Elements, Four Constitutions, Four Ages of Man, Four Seasons, Four Monarchies, and Contemplations)

Eugene O'Neill

Drama; Ah, Wilderness (July 4 1906: adolescent Tommy Miller in adult world), All God's Chillun Got Wings (Ella Downey marries lawyer Jim Harris, becomes racist to feel superior), Anna Chrisitie (Christopher Christopherson, a Swedish-American barge captain, sends daughter Anna Chrisite to St. Paul where she becomes a prostitute; she loves Mat Burke), Beyond the Horizon (brothers Robert and Andrew Mayo love same woman), Desire Under the Elms (elderly father Ephraim Cabot marries Abbie, who seduces his son Eban), Emperor Jones (Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter, sets himself up as a West Indian island dictator but is killed in revolt), The Great God Brown (successful businessman takes the mask of artist Dion Anthony), The Iceman Cometh (NYC: salesman Theodore Hickman in End of the Line Cafe bar tells about killing his wife), Lazarus Laughed (Lazarus preaches new religion of laughter after being raised by Jesus; Caligula stabs Lazarus), Long Day's Journey Into Night (autobiographical story of actor Edmund Tyrone and family, including drunk son and servant Cathlen), Marco Millions (Kublai Khan's daughter loves Marco Polo but he only wants money), A Moon for the Misbegotten (unfulfilled love of alcoholic and farm woman), Mourning Becomes Electra (trilogy based on Oresteia by Aeschylus, set in post Civil War NE; General Ezra Mannon's [ Agamemnon] wife Christine [Clytemnestra] has affair with Adam Brant [Aegisthus], and daughter Lavinia [Electra] persuades her brother Orin [Orestes] to shoot him), Strange Interlude (Nina Leeds' fianc�e dies in WWI; she marries Sam Evans but aborts their child but has baby from affair with Dr. Darrell), The Hairy Ape (ship stoker Yank rejected by IWW and crushed by gorilla at NYC zoo)

Tony Kushner

Drama; Angels in America

Neil Simon

Drama; Biloxi Blues, Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, Broadway Bound, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Lost in Yonkers

Tennessee Williams

Drama; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Big Daddy Pollitt is dying of cancer on MS Delta; son Gooper wants inheritance; other son Brick accuses his wife Maggie of causing his friend's death; Maggie says she is pregnant to help Brick get inheritance), The Glass Menagerie (St. Louis: Tom Wingfield narrates; mother Amanda asks Tom to bring a gentleman caller for crippled sister Laura, who has withdrawn to private universe of her glass animals; Laura temporarily emerges into real world when the horn of the glass unicorn breaks), A Streetcar Named Desire (New Orleans: faded belle Blanche DuBois comes to live with sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski, who warns a friend not to marry Blanche and then rapes her; streetcars Desire and Cemetery run on same track), The Rose Tattoo (dressmaker Serafina Delle Rose's truckdriver husband is killed; 3 years later she marries truckdriver with tattoo on chest like husband did)

Robert Sherwood

Drama; Idiot's Delight, Road to Rome, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, The Petrified Forest (Alan Squier, hitchhiking NE author, gets gangster to kill him so his insurance money can save lunchroom owner's daughter), There Shall Be No Night

Thornton Wilder

Drama; Our Town (Grover's Corners, NH: Stage Manager talks to audience; Professor Willard and Editor Webb commend on daily life; Webb's daughter Emily marries George Gibbs; Emily dies in childbirth), The Skin of Our Teeth (George Antrobus, his family, and temptress maid Sabina survive world upheavals throughout history, including Ice Age, Deluge, and WWII), The Matchmaker, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1714 Peru: Brother Juniper investigates death of 5 travelers on bridge), Theophilus North

Artur Miller

Drama; The Crucible (1692 Salem: John and Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail Williams accuses Elizabeth of witchcraft, Mary Warren also makes accusations, Giles Corey), Death of a Salesman (salesman Willy Loman considers himself a failure and commits suicide; other characters include wife Linda and sons Biff and Happy)

William Saroyan

Drama; The Human Comedy, The Time of Your Life (lovable eccentrics and Detective Blick of the Vice Squad meet in waterfront saloon)

Edward Albee

Drama; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (history professor George and wife Martha invite new instructor and barren wife for a drink; all get drunk and become sadistic), Seascape, Tiny Alice, Three Tall Women, The Zoo Story (bum Jerry accosts Peter in Central Park and stabs himself)

Maxwell Anderson

Drama; Winterset (based on Saccho and Vanzetti; Mio, whose Italian radical father was executed for murder he didn't commit, loves Miriamne; both killed by gangsters), Gods of the Lightning, Night Over Taos, What Price Glory? (written with Laurence Stallings; Capt. Flag and Sgt. Quirt compete for French girl in WWI)

George Kaufman

Drama; You Can't Take It with You (written with Moss Hart; happy but bizarre NY Vanderhof family), Of Thee I Sing (Presidential candidate John Wintergreen campaigns on love platform and marries Atlantic City beauty contest winner)

William Wells Brown

Early 19th; (escaped slave) Clotel (about racial intermarriage, first novel by black American)

Fredrick Douglass

Early 19th; (escaped slave) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Washington Irving

Early 19th; (the "American Goldsmith"),coined "Gotham", A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (satire of historians), Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (including Rip Van Winkle [Rip Van Winkle drinks from dwarf's keg with dog Wolf in Catskills and sleeps for 20 years; like German Peter Klaus], Sleepy Hollow [schoolmater Ichabod Crane loves Katrina Van Tassel but is scared away by rival Brom Bones who masquerades as headless horseman]), The Alhambra, A Tour of the Praires, biographies of Columbus and Washington

Count Alexis de Tocqueville

Early 19th; Democracy in America

James Fenimore Cooper

Early 19th; Leatherstocking series: Pioneers (Templeton, NY: Natty Bumppo punished for killing deer while others kill many pigeons; Elizabeth Temple marries Edward Effingham, resolving question of Judge Temple's lands), Last of the Mohicans (Alice and Cora Munro try to join father at Fort William Henry; opposed by Hurons under Magua; Uncas, his dad Delaware Chief Chingachgook, and Hawkeye [Natty Bumppo] oppose Hurons), Prairie (old Natty Bumppo dies; Ishmael Bush squatters), Pathfinder (Pathfinder dumps Mabel Dunham when he learns she loves suspected but vindicated traitor Jasper Western; Indian heroine Dew-of-June), Deerslayer (Lake Otsego [Glimmerglass], NY: Natty Bumppo and Hurry Harry March fight Hurons; Judith Hunter fails to interest Natty); Pilot, Spy, Littlepage Manuscripts (Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, The Redskins; tenants of NY patrons refuse to pay rent)

Walt Whitman

Early 19th; Leaves of Grass (including When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, O Captain My Captain [both about Abraham Lincoln's death], and Song of Myself ["a uniform hieroglyphic" grass, "barbaric yawp", "look for me under your bootsoles", "origin of all poems", reading it is "good health"]), Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas (alarmed at superficial US), Specimen Days & Collect, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Song of the Open Road

Edgar Allen Poe

Early 19th; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (stories including The Fall of the House of Usher [narrator visits Roderick Usher; twin sister Madeline Usher emerges from burial vault; house and family destroyed] and Berenice), The Murders in the Rue Morgue (detective C. Auguste Dupin discovers a mother and daughter were murdered by an "Ourang-Outang"), The Pit and the Pendulum (victim of Spanish Inquisition escapes prison by falling into a pit; rats save him from knife-swinging pendulum; rescued by opposing army), The Purloined Letter (C. Auguste Dupin solves case of royal woman blackmailed by a cabinet minister on the basis of a compromising letter), The Raven (poet is startled by raven tapping at chamber door; raven perches on bust of Pallas Athene and answers questions about dead lover "Nevermore"), The Tell-Tale Heart (murderer hides body of victim under floor but hears a beating heart and confesses), Ulalume (narrator and his soul walk in woodland on Halloween following Venus and are stopped by door of forgotten tomb of beloved Ulalume), Annabel Lee, The Bells, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (NE boy steals away on a whaler; drifts towards South Pole in a canoe), Ligeia (Ligeia dies and husband marries Rowena, who dies and turns into Ligeia), The Golden Bug (Sullivan's Island SC: William Le Grand discovers cipher telling of buried treasure, and drops beetle through one eye of a skull), The Masque of the Red Death (castle masquerade ball during Plague years: Prince Prospero), The City in the Sea

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Early 19th; The American Scholar, Nature, Address at Divinity College (stressed Christ's humanity and man's divinity), Essays, Self-Reliance, Compensation (evil and good balance each other), Concord Hymn, Days, Merlin, The Over-Soul, Representative Men (Shakespeare, Plato, Goethe, Swedenborg, Napoleon, Montaigne)

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Early 19th; The Scarlet Letter (Salem: Hestor Prynne forced to wear A for committing adultery but won't reveal dad's name; physician husband Richard Chillingsworth suspects minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who dies after confessing; daughter Pearl finally cries), Twice-Told Tales (tales including Howe's Masquerade, The Grey Champion, The Great Carbuncle, and The Minister's Black Veil; title from King John), Mosses from an Old Manse (25 stories including Young Goodman Brown [Puritan Brown, led by old man, observes wife Faith at a witches' Sabbath in the woods and returns to Salem a sad man], The Birthmark [Aylmer removes birthmark from perfect wife Georgiana, killing her], Rappaccini's Daughter [doctor Rappaccini nourishes daughter Beatrice on poisons so she may help with dangerous plant experiments; she dies drinking antidote from faithless suitor], and The Celestial Railroad), House of the Seven Gables (Salem: Colonel Pyncheon obtained land for House of Seven Gables by accusing owner Matthew Maule of witchcraft; Maule cursed Pyncheons; Clifford Pyncheon jailed for murder of uncle actually committed by Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon; Phoebe and Holgrave, a descendant of Maule, fall in love and break the curse), Marble Faun (Italian count Donatello loves Miriam and kills her pursuer Antonio; artist Hilda witnesses murder, confesses to priest, and loves Kenyon), Blithedale Romance (based on Brook Farm; Miles Coverdale narrates; Zenobia loves Hollingsworth who loves Priscilla), Fanshawe (Fanshawe loves Ellen Langdon, ward of Harley College President Dr. Melmoth but gives her to man she loves and dies; modeled on Bowdoin), The Dolliver Romance (unfinished; Dr. Dolliver makes elixir to care for granddaughter Pansie but Colonel Dabney wants it for selfish reasons and dies), Tanglewood Tales

Herman Melville

Early 19th; Typee A Peep at Polynesian Life (hero and friend Toby jump ship in Marquesas Islands and wander into valley of Typee where cannibals capture them; Fayaway nurses hero but he chooses to return to civilization), Omoo A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (crew of Julia is imprisoned on Tahiti; hero and fried Doctor Long Ghost are released and explore the island), Mardi and a Voyage Thither (5 men sail through Mardi on King Media's boat; stop in Vivenza [US]; Taji kills priest Aleema to rescue Yillah; Hautia seeks Taji; others include philosopher Babbalanja, poet Yoomy, and historian Mohi), Moby-Dick or the White Whale (monomaniacal Captain Ahab pursues Moby-Dick; others on the Pequod include God-fearing Starbuck, Stubb, harpooners Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, black Pip, and fire-worshipping Parsee; only narrator Ishmael survives), Pierre or the Ambiguities (writer Pierre Glendinning leaves mom and fiance Lucy Tartan for illegitimate sister, whom he comes to love; commits suicide in prison), White Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War (white jacket nearly drowns narrator when he falls into water; Jack Chase appears on US Navy man-of-war; brutal floggings condemned) Billy Budd Foretopman (Claggart falsely accuses Billy; Billy kills Claggart; Captain Vere reluctantly hangs Billy), Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, Clarel A Poem and A Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (theological student Clarel loves Jew Ruth while in Holy Land), The Confidence-Man His Masquerade (Fidele MS River boat on April Fool's Day; no plot), The Piazza Tales (short stories including The Bell Tower [artist Bannadonna rivals God], The Lightning-Rod Man [man refuses to buy lightning-rod because he does not control or fear God], The Enchanted Isles [sketches based on Galapagos Islands], Benito Cerreno, Bartleby the Scrivener [Bartleby refuses to do his job proofreading legal documents, is imprisoned, and starves]),

Henry David Thoreau

Early 19th; Walden or Life in the Woods (about simple life near Concord NH), Civil Disobedience ("that government is best which governs least"), Life Without Principle

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Fireside Poet; Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; The Chambered Nautilus (sea creature enlarges its shell as it grows), The Deacon's Masterpiece or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay (shay fell apart, satirizing Calvinist permanence), Elsie Venner A Romance of Destiny (Elsie Venner has serpentine qualities because mom was bitten by snake; loves Bernard Langdon but she dies), Old Ironsides (saved USS Constitution from being scrapped)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Fireside Poet; Evangeline (Gabriel Lajeunesse sent to LA and Evangeline Bellefontaine to NE when Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia; meet again in Philadelphia where she is nurse and he dies) , Song of Hiawatha (Ojibway Indian Hiawatha raised by grandmother Nokomis, daughter of the moon; revenges mom Wenonah against dad West Wind; teaches peace with whites; wife Minnehaha becomes ill and they go to Northwest Wind), Courtship of Miles Standish (Plymouth Plantation: shy military man Miles Standish asks John Alden to woo Priscilla Mullins for him, but she marries John instead, and Miles gives blessing), translated the Divine Comedy, My Lost Youth (youth in Portland ME), Village Blacksmith, The Building of the Ship, The Children's Hour, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Tales of a Wayside Inn (collection of poems in style of Canterbury Tales; includes Paul Revere's Ride, Elizabeth, The Battle of Carmilhan, Emma and Eginhard, The Saga of King Olaf)

John Greenleaf Whittier

Fireside Poet; Snow-Bound, Massachusetts to Virginia (anti-slavery), Barbara Frietchie, Maud Muller (judge and Maude meet; "It might have been"), Telling the Bees

William Cullen Bryant

Fireside Poet; Thanatopsis, Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, edited New York Post

James Russell Lowell

Fireside Poet; The Biglow Papers, Harvard Commemoration Ode (in honor of Civil War dead), Among My Books, A Fable for Critics, edited the Atlantic Monthly

Daniel Keyes

Flowers for Algernon

James Jones

From Here to Eternity (story of life in US army before Pearl Harbor; title from Kipling's Gentlemen Rankers)

Margaret Mitchell

Gone With the Wind (Civil War Georgia: Scarlett O'Hara of Tara plantation loves Ashley Wilkes but he marries Melanie Hamilton; Scarlett is widowed twice, then marries Rhett Butler; Alexandra Ripley wrote 1992 sequel Scarlett)

Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow (bureaucracies use WWII to gain power), The Crying of Lot 49

Jean Toomer

Harlem Renaissance; Cane

Countee Cullen

Harlem Renaissance; Color, the Ballad of the Brown Girl

Claude McKay

Harlem Renaissance; Home to Harlem, Banjo

Langston Hughes

Harlem Renaissance; The Weary Blues, A Negro Speaks of Rivers, A Dream Deferred

Carl Sandburg

Illinois Group; Grass, Chicago Poems, Abraham Lincoln (The Prairie Years, The War Years), The People Yes, Rootabaga Stories

Edgar Lee Masters

Illinois Group; Spoon River Anthology (deceased people from Spoon River narrate biographies from cemetery)

Vachel Lindsay

Illinois Group; The Congo, The Santa Fe Trail A Humoresque (contrasts industrial civilization with Rachel-Jane bird)

Philip Roth

Jewish; Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint (Alexander Portnoy resents expectations and sacrifice of domineering mother Sophie Portnoy), Zuckerman Bound, American Pastoral

Saul Bellow

Jewish; The Adventures of Augie March (Chicago 1930s: Augie March refuses settled life; brother Simon March marries rich), Herzog (Prof. Moses Herzog, at his MA summer home, writes letters about ex-wife Madeleine and ex-friend; brought to senses by semicomic misadventures), Humboldt's Gift (Charles Citrine falls under spell of Von Humboldt Fleisher and Rinaldo Cantabile; debates isolated life of art)

Bernard Malamud

Jewish; The Assistant, Idiots First, The Fixer, The Natural

Isaac Singer

Jewish; The Magician of Lublin

Henry Charles Corey

Late 19th; (economist) Past Present and Future

Henry George

Late 19th; (economist) Progress and Poverty

Helen Hunt Jackson

Late 19th; A Century of Dishonor (US treatment of Indians), Ramona (Scottish-Indian Ramona elopes with Indian Alessandro)

Francis Hopkinson Smith

Late 19th; Colonel Carter of Cartersville

William Dean Howells

Late 19th; Criticism and Fiction, A Modern Instance (Squire Gaylord tries to prevent Bartley Hubbard from divorcing his daughter Marcia; Ben Halleck debates marrying divorced Marcia), The Rise of Silas Lapham (Silas Lapham and wife Persis grow rich from Back Bay paint mine on his farm and build home on Beacon Hill and try to acclimate to rich social scene; daughter Penelope marries Tom Corey and goes to Mexico; family is financially ruined), A Hazard of New Fortunes (Dryfoos moves to NY and makes son Conrad publisher of a magazine; Basil March refuses to fire a socialist; Conrad is killed in a labor riot), A Chance Acquaintance (Kitty Ellison loves Miles Arbuton as they travel on St. Lawrence River but he ignores her) A Traveller from Altruria (Aristides Homos likes utopia Altruria with democratic Christian socialist government)

Lester Frank Ward

Late 19th; Dynamic Sociology

William Prescott

Late 19th; History of the Conquest of Mexico

George Bancroft

Late 19th; History of the United States

Henry Adams

Late 19th; History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, The Education of Henry Adams

Jacob Riis

Late 19th; How the Other Half Lives

Artemus Ward

Late 19th; Humor; Artemus Ward his Book

Josh Bilings

Late 19th; Humor; Josh Billings His Sayings

Finley Peter Dunne

Late 19th; Humor; Mr. Dooley's Opinions

Petroleum Nasby

Late 19th; Humor; The Nasby Papers

Sutton Griggs

Late 19th; Imperium in Imperio

Ambrose Bierce

Late 19th; In the Midst of Life (26 stories; young soldiers die), The Devil's Dictionary

James Riley

Late 19th; Little Orphan Annie, The Raggedy Man (boy admires farm hand)

Louisa May Alcott

Late 19th; Little Women (Meg marries tutor John Brooke; Beth likes music but dies young; fashionable Amy marries Theodore "Laurie"; tomboyish and literary Jo marries German professor Mr. Bhaer), Little Men (Meg and John Brooke have twins Daisy and Demi), Jo's Boys (Jo and Mr. Bhaer turn their home into school for boys)

Edward Bellamy

Late 19th; Looking Backward 2000-1887

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Late 19th; Lyrics of a Lowly Life

Dean Garland

Late 19th; Main-Traveled Roads

George Washington Cable

Late 19th; Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes A Story of Creole Live (Frowenfeld learns of De Grapion vs. Grandissimes family feud; African king Bras Coupe tortured to death)

Theodore Dreiser

Late 19th; Sister Carrie (country girl Carrie Meeber saved from cruel 1890s Chicago by salesman Charles Drouet; George Hurstwood takes her to NY and she becomes actress but he kills self), Trilogy: The Financier (magnate Frank Cowperwood watches lobster devour a squid; caught in stock crash and imprisoned; goes to Chicago to try again), The Titan (Frank Cowperwood marries Aileen Butler and tries to gain monopoly of utilities in Chicago; citizens foil plans and he goes to Europe with Berenice Fleming, daughter of a Louisville madam), The Stoic, An American Tragedy (Clyde Griffiths seduces Roberta Alden but loves Sondra Finchly; plans to murder Roberta but lacks the courage; fails to rescue Roberta when boat overturns; charged with murder; based on story of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown 1906)

George Santayana

Late 19th; Sonnets and Other Verses, The Last Puritan (A Memoir in the Form of a Novel; Puritan Oliver Alden out of place in 1900s)

WEB Du Bois

Late 19th; Souls of Black Folk, The Quest for the Silver Fleece

David Phillips

Late 19th; Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise

Henry James

Late 19th; The American (Christopher Newman, an unsophisticated American, loves Claire de Bellegarde but opposed by aristocratic family; he decides not to reveal her mom and brother murdered her father), The Aspern Papers (former mistress of poet Jeffrey Aspern won't let his poems be published), The Awkward Age (Nanda Brookenham and her mom love Vanderbank), The Bostonians (post-Civil War Boston: Olive Chancellor, a radical feminist, and Basil Ransom, a MS Confederate veteran, compete for Verena Tarrant; Miss Birdseye), Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer marries Gilbert Osmond in Italy; Isabel becomes disillusioned but stays to raise Pansy, daughter of Gilbert and Madame Merle), The Wings of the Dove (Kate Croy loves English journalist Merton Densher but gets him to marry dying friend Milly Theale to inherit her money; Densher cannot accept money or promise he doesn't love memory of Milly so Kate leaves), The Ambassadors (New England and France: Lambert Strether sent to Paris by fiance Mrs. Newsome to get her son Chad who loves Madame de Vionnet), The Golden Bowl (Prince Amerigo marries Maggie Verver but has affair with Maggie's friend Charlotte Stant; Charlotte marries Maggie's dad Adam Verver), The Turn of the Screw (governess, in love with employer, cares for orphans Miles and Flora, who are under evil influence of the ghosts of Peter Quint, ex-stewart, and Miss Jessel, ex-governess), Roderick Hudson (American sculptor Roderick Hudson, who loves Christina Light, goes to Rome and becomes disillusioned), The Princess of Casamassima (Princess Casamassima, formerly Christiana Light, studies poverty in London and meets radical Hyacinth Robinson), The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Stories (Clement Searle goes to England to claim rich estate but dies), The Spoils of Pynton (Owen Gereth refuses to marry Fleda Vetch so his mom removes art treasures from his house; he marries Mona Brigstock and offers Fleda art but house burns down), What Maisie Knew (12-year-old Maisie Farange spends 6 months with each of divorced parents, each of whom are remarried and having affairs again), Notes on Novelists, The Sacred Fount (older partner is refreshed and younger depleted in marriage), The Art of the Novel, Daisy Miller (narrator Frederick Winterbourne regrets rigid adherence to European conventions when Daisy Miller dies of Roman fever), The Europeans (artist Felix Young and his sister Baroness Munster visit relatives the Wentworths in Boston)

Kate Chopin

Late 19th; The Awakening

Mark Twain

Late 19th; The Celbrated Jumping Fog of Calaveras County (Simon Wheeler narrators, Jim Smiley bets his frog Dan'l Webster can outjump any; stranger pours quail shot in frog), The Innocents Abroad (travel letters from Europe; burlesqued sentimental travel books), Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi (autobiographical; river loses its romance over 7 years), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Tom Sawyer, cared for by Aunt Polly, and friend Huck Finn witness murder by Injun Joe in cemetery but run away in fear to Jackson's Island; they return to witness their funerals; Tom testifies at trial of falsely accused Muff Potter; Tom and Becky Thatcher get lost in cave with Injun Joe but escape), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (narrated by Huck, who escapes from drunken father and journeys down Mississippi River with runaway slave Jim), Pudd'nhead Wilson (lawyer David Wilson exposes that Roxy's mulatto son murdered his uncle and accused Luigi), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Tom Sawyer Detective, The Gilded Age, The Mysterious Stranger (Satan disguised as Philip Traum disillusions boy in 1590 Eseldorf Austria), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (stranger leaves sack of money [actually lead] in a bank in Hadleyburg and sends letters to 19 telling them how to claim it), The Prince and the Pauper (Edward VI and pauper Tom Canty switch places for several days), 1601 ("Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors")

Charles Chesnutt

Late 19th; The Conjure Woman, The Marrow of a Tradition

Sarah Ome Jewett

Late 19th; The Country of the Pointed Firs

Frank J Webb

Late 19th; The Garies and Their Friends

Upton Sinclair

Late 19th; The Jungle (Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and wife Ono work in early 1900s Chicago stockyard)

Bret Harte

Late 19th; The Luck of the Roaring Camp (miners adopt Thomas Luck, son of dying prostitute Cherokee Sal, but he dies in Kentuck's arms in flood), The Outcast of Poker Flat (gambler John Oakhurst, two prostitutes, and a drunkard sacrifice themselves in a blizzard to save young eloping couple)

Sidney Lanier

Late 19th; The Marshes of Glynn (sea marshes of Glynn County GA), The Revenge of Hamish

Frank Norris

Late 19th; The Octopus (CA wheat farmers battle the railroad; love affair of Vanamee; The Pit sequel), McTeague (McTeague prevented from practicing dentistry and murders wife Trina who had won $5000 in a lottery; he kills Marcus Schouler but is handcuffed to the corpse and dies of thirst in the desert)

William James

Late 19th; The Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe

Stephen Crane

Late 19th; The Red Badge of Courage (study of fear in US Civil War soldier Henry Fleming), Maggie A Girl of the Streets (Maggie Johnson in NY slums is seduced by bartender Pete, becomes a prostitute, and commits suicide), The Open Boat (captain, cook, oiler, and correspondent escape sinking ship on small boat; oiler dies as they come ashore), The Black Riders and Other Lines, War Is Kind (poems, including Do Not Weep Maiden for War Is Kind), Whilomville Stores (stories set in Port Jervis NY; in Lynx-Hunting Jimmie Trescott shoots a cow), The Blue Hotel (Swede comes to Nebraska looking for romantic violence), The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (Sheriff Jack Potter, who has no gun, encounters Scratchy Wilson)

Jack London

Late 19th; The Sea Wolf (literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden is shipwrecked in SF Bay and rescued by Wolf Larsen on the Ghost, who makes him work as cabin boy; Maude Brewster also rescued; Ghost wrecks and blinded Larsen prevents its repair), The Call of the Wild (dog Buck taken from CA to Klondike; kills lead dog Spitz; owner John Thornton killed by Indians), White Fang (wolf-dog White Fang is abused by first owner but rescued and tamed by mining engineer Weedon Scott in CA; Fang defends Scott from convict), Martin Eden

Joel Chandler Harris

Late 19th; Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (black servant tells white boy tales involving Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Tar Baby)

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Late 19th; Uncle Tom's Cabin: Life Among the Lowly (Vermonter plantation owner Simon Legree beats slave Uncle Tom to death; Uncle Tom cared for owner Augustine St. Clare's daughter Little Eva; others include mulatto Eliza, impish black child Topsy, Miss Ophelia St. Clare, and slave catcher Marks)

James Parton

Late 19th; biographies of Greeley, Jefferson, and others

Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita (Humbert Humbert loves 12-year-old Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita, and marries her mom Charlotte, who dies; Lolita seduces him but marries Clare Quilty, whom Humbert murders), Pale Fire (Charles Kinbote, who imagines himself king of Zembla, edits murdered John Shade's poem; 999 lines)

Tom Clancy

Modern; Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger

Michael Crichton

Modern; Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Rising Sun, Sphere

Larry McMurty

Modern; Lonesome Dove

John Grisham

Modern; The Firm, The Client, The Chamber, The Testament, A Time to Kill

Stephen King

Modern; The Shining, The Stand, Insomnia

Charles Bernard Nordhoff & James Normal Hal

Mutiny on the Bounty (Roger Byam narrates mutiny of Fletcher Christian against Capt. William Bligh on the HMS Bounty in 1789; sequels Men against the Sea and Pitcairn's Island)

Joel Barlow

Revolutionary; Hartford Wit; Hasty Pudding

DuBose Heyward

Porgy (crippled black beggar Porgy becomes involved in murder in Catfish Row, Charleston; others include Bes, Sportin' Life, Crown, and Serena)

Olaudah Equiano

Revolutionary; (freed slave) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African

Thomas Paine

Revolutionary; Common Sense, Crisis, Age of Reason (controversial book expounding deism), The Rights of Man (defends French Revolution)

Timothy Dwight

Revolutionary; Hartford Wit; (grandson of Jonathan Edwards) - The Conquest of Canaan, The Triumph of Infidelity, Greenfield Hill

Robinson Jeffers

Roan Stallion, Tamar (Monterey coast girl based on King David's daughter), The Tower Beyond Tragedy (based on Agamemnon), Thurso's Landing

Alex Haley

Roots (many generations of slaves from Gambia, including Kunta Kinte)

Katherine Anne Porter

Ship of Fools (German ship sails from Veracruz to Bremerhaven 1931), Pale Horse Pale Rider (3 novels including Pale Horse Pale Rider [WWI soldier and Southern journalist have affair during influenza epidemic], Noon Wine [farmer Mr. Thompson kills stranger], and Old Mortality)

Truman Capote

Southern Gothic; Other Voices Other Rooms (Joel Knox meets Randolph, Jesus Fever, and dad at Skully's Landing and achieves self-awareness at Cloud Hotel), In Cold Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany's

Carson McCullers

Southern Gothic; The Member of the Wedding (Frankie Addams wants to accompany her brother on his honeymoon; cousin John Henry gets sick; black cook Berenice Sadie Brown), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (eccentric tomboy Mick Kelly, goodhearted Biff Brannon, drunken Jake Blount, and black intellectual Dr. Benedict Copeland admire deaf mute Singer, who commits suicide), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (Amelia Evans rejects her husband Marvin Macy and turns her general store into a cafe when her cousin Lymon comes; 6 years later Lymon loves Marvin and they torment)

Eudora Welty

Southern Gothic; The Ponder Heart, The Optimist's Daughter, The Wide Net, The Delta Wedding

Flannery O'Connor

Southern Gothic; The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man is Hard to Find

James Thomas Farrell

Studs Lonigan (trilogy: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day; Studs Lonigan, son of Irish Catholics in Chicago, has affair with Iris, loves Lucy Scanlan, and works as house painter; friend Wery Reilley rapes Irene at party; Studs becomes unemployed and has affair with Catherine Banahan)

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tarzan of the Apes

Malcolm X and Alex Haley

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Betty Frieden

The Feminine Mystique

Pearl Buck

The House of Earth Trilogy including The Good Earth (China: Wang Lung and wife O-lan rise from poverty to wealth but sons don't share their respect for the land)

Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club

Shirley Jackson

The Lottery (winner is stoned)

Dashiel Hammett

The Maltese Falcon (private eye Sam Spade investigates theft of jewel-encrusted Maltese Falcon of Knights Templar; hard-boiled fiction), The Thin Man

Edward Hale

The Man Without a Country

L Frank Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Marjorie Rawlings

The Yearling (northern Florida boy Jody loves a fawn but must shoot it when it eats family corn)

Gertrude Stein

Three Lives (The Good Anna [kindly German servant], Melanctha [uneducated black girl], The Gentle Lena [dumb German maid]), Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (her secretary), Four Saints in Three Acts (opera by Virgil Thomson with all-black cast), The Making of Americans (autobiographical Martha Hersland)

Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird (AL town: lawyer Atticus Finch defends a black man; his daughter Scout Finch narrates)

Erskine Caldwell

Tobacco Road (Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and sickly wife Ada have 3 kids; Jeeter's widowed preacher sister Bessie Rice gets Jeeter's son Dude to marry her by buying him a car, which he crashes, killing his grandmother; daughter Pearl married at 12 to railroad worker Lov Bensey, who then lives with other daughter Ellie May; Jeeter and Ada die in shack fire), God's Little Acre (protagonist shifts location of acre on his farm dedicated to the church)

Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Cool, A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, Winnie