Transcendentalism · The American Scholar
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Reliance
The founder of Transcendentalism — who told Americans to stop borrowing their thoughts from Europe.
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The Scarlet Letter · Romance
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
The novelist of Puritan guilt — who inherited the sin he spent his life writing about.
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Gothic · Detective Fiction
Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven
Inventor of the detective story, theorist of the short story, and the first American writer to live by his pen alone.
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Walden · Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
Two years in a cabin, one night in jail — and two of the most consequential essays ever written by an American.
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Leaves of Grass · Free Verse
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
The poet who invented an American voice — free verse, the catalogue, and the self as a whole nation.
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Moby-Dick · Melville Revival
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
Wrote the most ambitious novel in American literature, watched it fail, and died forgotten.
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1,789 poems · 10 published in her life
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death
Nearly eighteen hundred poems written in private, almost none published in her lifetime.
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Huckleberry Finn · Vernacular
Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The writer who put American vernacular speech at the centre of American fiction.
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The International Theme
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
The novelist of consciousness and of Americans in Europe — and the first great theorist of fiction in English.
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Pulitzer Prize 1921
Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence
The novelist of old New York's cruelties — first woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction.
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Four Pulitzer Prizes
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
The most popular American poet of his century — and far darker than the popularity suggests.
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The Supreme Fiction
Wallace Stevens
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
An insurance executive who wrote the most philosophically demanding poetry in American English.
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Imagism · Make It New
Ezra Pound
In a Station of the Metro
The impresario of modernism — who made the movement possible and then broke his own reputation.
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Nobel Prize 1948 · The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
The poem that defined modernism, and the criticism that defined how the century read.
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Nobel Prize 1936 · Four Pulitzers
Eugene O'Neill
Long Day's Journey into Night
The father of serious American drama — who turned his own family into its greatest play.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Harlem Renaissance novelist and folklorist — dismissed in her lifetime, recovered as a foundational Black woman writer.
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The Great Gatsby · Jazz Age
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
The chronicler of the Jazz Age — and of the American Dream's cost.
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Nobel Prize 1949 · Yoknapatawpha
William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury
The modernist of the American South — who built a county out of one small Mississippi world.
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Nobel Prize 1954 · Iceberg Theory
Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
The prose style that changed twentieth-century writing — everything essential left out.
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Harlem Renaissance · Jazz Poetry
Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues
The poet who put blues and jazz rhythm into American verse and made Harlem its subject.
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Nobel Prize 1962 · Pulitzer 1940
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
The novelist of the Depression, migrant labour, and the California valleys he grew up in.
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Native Son · Protest Fiction
Richard Wright
Native Son
The novelist who forced white America to read about Black rage rather than Black endurance.
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Two Pulitzers · Plastic Theatre
Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire
The lyrical dramatist of desire, illusion, and the American South's ruined gentility.
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Pulitzer 1956 · The Art of Losing
Elizabeth Bishop
One Art
Published barely a hundred poems and is read as one of the century's finest American poets.
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Invisible Man · National Book Award 1953
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
One novel, and one of the decisive American books on race, identity, and being unseen.
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Death of a Salesman · Pulitzer 1949
Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman
The dramatist who argued that tragedy belongs to the common man.
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Nobel Prize 1976 · Three National Book Awards
Saul Bellow
Herzog
The novelist of the talkative, over-educated modern intellectual trying to think his way out of his own life.
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Southern Gothic · A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Southern Gothic at its most violent and most theological — thirty-two stories in thirty-nine years.
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Howl · Beat Generation
Allen Ginsberg
Howl
The Beat poet whose obscenity trial changed what American publishing was allowed to print.
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Three Pulitzer Prizes
Edward Albee
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The dramatist who brought the absurd into the American living room.
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Diving into the Wreck
Adrienne Rich
Diving into the Wreck
Poet and theorist whose work moved from formal accomplishment to radical feminist politics.
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Nobel Prize 1993 · Pulitzer 1988
Toni Morrison
Beloved
The first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — and the great novelist of American slavery's afterlife.
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Ariel · Pulitzer 1982
Sylvia Plath
Ariel
The most formally controlled of the confessional poets — and the most widely read.
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Pulitzer 1998 · American Pastoral
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
Newark, Jewish America, and the self as a set of masks — over thirty books in fifty years.
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Pulitzer 1983 · Womanism
Alice Walker
The Color Purple
Author of The Color Purple and the writer who coined womanism.
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