Listing of American's literature books

[JonathanC]

Hello everybody,

I am a french engineer and i want to study the literature of United States. I am looking for a listing of famous books.

May you advise me about it ?

Thank you.

I would like to begin by the literrature at begining of the history of united states around 1650.

[dfloyd]

I don't think there were any Americans writing in 1650. The early American writings were primarily non-fiction. You can start with the Declaration of Independence written primarily by Thomas Jefferson. The Federalist papers, by Jay, Madison, and Hamilton I think, is another early treatise in support of the US Consitution.

The Autobiography of Bemjamin Franklin is a peculiar American work.

The early fiction writers were James Fenimore Copper and Washington Irving. After these followed a number of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Non-fiction writer such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau interspersed the fiction writers.

the Journals of Lewis and Clarke detailed the exploration of the Louisiana Purchase.

The writer Harriet Beecher Stowe had a great influenc on the slavery question.

Poets include Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and the aforementioned Poe amd Emerson.

These will give you a good start in American literature, and post Civil War writers such as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Ambrose Bierce can round out your American experience. By the time you have experienced these writers, late 19th century and 20th century writers you will be able to investigate on your own.

[kelby_lake]

The 20th century stuff is my favourite, but I guess if you want an idea of the history, you might as well start with Twain.

[mal4mac]

Hello everybody,

I am a french engineer and i want to study the literature of United States. I am looking for a listing of famous books.

...

I would like to begin by the literrature at begining of the history of united states around 1650.

If you include literature "about" the United States, then Moll Flanders (1721) by Daniel Defoe is partly set in Virginia - it's also a great read!

[stlukesguild]

Washington Irving- Sketch Book
James Fenimore Cooper- Leather Stocking Tales; The Last of the Mohicans
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow- The Song of Hiawatha
Nathaniel Hawthorne- Collected Short Stories; The Scarlet Letter
Edgar Allen Poe- Collected Stories/Poems
Ralph Waldo Emerson- Essays; Poetry
Henry David Thoreau- Walden; Civil Disobedience
Herman Melville- Moby Dick; Short Stories; Poetry
Emily Dickenson- Collected Poems
Walt Whitman- Collected Poems/Leaves of Grass
Ambrose Bierce- Collected Stories
Stephen Crane- Collected Poetry
Robert Frost- Collected Poetry
Edwin Arlington Robinson- Selected Poetry
Benjamin Franklin- The Autobiography
Alexis de Tocqueville- Democracy in America (an insightful view of America by a French author)
William James- The Varieties of Religious Experience; Selected Writings
Henry James- Portrait of a Lady; The Ambassadors; Selected Short Stories
T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland and other Poems; The Four Quartets; Essays
e.e. cummings- Selected Poems
Ezra Pound- Selected Poetry
Wallace Stevens- Collected Poems; Opus Posthumous; The Palm at the End of the Mind
William Carlos Williams- Selected Poems
Mark Twain- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; short stories
Edith Wharton- The Age of Innocence
Stephen Crane- Short Stories
Henry Brooks Adams- The Education of Henry Adams
Khalil Gibran- The Prophet
F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway- The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell to Arms; Short Stories
John Steinbeck- Of Mice and Men; The Grapes of Wrath
Thomas Wolfe- Look Homeward Angel; You Can't Go Home Again
William Faulkner- As I Lay Dying; The Sound and the Fury; Absolom, Absolom!; The Light in August, etc...
Eugene O'Niel- The Emperor Jones; Desire Under the Elms; Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day's Journey into Night
Tennessee Williams- The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Orpheus Descending; Suddenly Last Summer...
Arthur Miller- Death of a Salesman; The Crucible
Saul Bellow- Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March; Seize the Day
Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita; Ada
Nathaniel West- Miss Lonelyhearts
Allen Ginsberg- Howl
Joseph Heller- Catch-22
Norman Mailer- The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night; Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Why Are We in Vietnam; Advertisements for Myself; Ancient Evenings
Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughter House Five
John Updike- Rabbit Run; The Witches of Eastwick
Phillip Roth- Zuckerman Bound; American Pastoral; The Human Stain; The Plot Against America; The Breast; Portnoy's Complaint; Sabbath's Theater
Flannery O'Conner- Collected Stories
Gore Vidal- Myra Breckenridge; Julian; Burr; Lincoln; Selected Essays
Ralph Ellison- Invisible Man
Donald Barthleme- 40 Stories; 60 Stories
John Ashberry- Hotel Lautréamont; Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Collected Poems
Richard Wilbur- Collected Poems
Richard Howard- Collected Poems
Anthony Hecht- Collected Earlier Poems; Collected Later Poems
Charles Wright- Country Music: Selected Earlier Poems; Chickamauga; Black Zodiak; Littlefoot
Marianne Moore- Collected Poems
John Crowe Ransom- Seleceted Poems
Kenneth Rexroth- Seleceted Poetry
Elizabeth Bishop- Collected Poetry
Theodore Roethke- Collected Poetry
Robert Lowell- Selected Poetry
John Berryman- The Dream Songs
Charles Olson- The Maximus Poems
Galway Kinnell- A Book of Nightmares
Mark Strand- New Selected Poems
W.S. Merwin- The First Four Books of Poems; The Second Four Books of Poems; Migration: New and Selected Poems; The Book of Fables
James Merrill- The Changing Light at Sandover
Thomas Pynchon- Gravity's Rainbow; V; The Crying of Lot 49; Mason and Dixon
Cormac McCarthy- The Border Trilogy; Blood Meridian; Child of God; No Country for Old Men; The Road
Toni Morrison- Song of Solomon
Don DeLilo- White Noise; Underworld
Jonathan Franzen- The Corrections
Jonathan Safran Foer- Everything is Illuminated

These ought to keep you busy.:smile5:

[PeterL]

From before 1700 you would just gett sermons byt people like Jonathan Edwards and personal narratives by Governor Bradford and others. The 18th century isn't much better. There was the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, but that's the only title that I can think of.

It has been said that the first novel by an American was The Spy by James Fennimore Cooper, but he is better known for some of his other attempts at writing, which earned him the fame of being the target of Mark Twain's "The Literary Offences of Fennimore Cooper",whcih is an excellent instruction on writing well.