Checklist of Reading American Literature

I found an out-of-print e-book called American Literature 101. It only took a few minutes to read, but I got a survey of the different eras of American Literature movements. I remember these from high school, and I have also read many of the selections listed in the book, but I wanted to read them again.

Using the book, I made a list of items to read to cover American Literature. Of course, there are so many more that could be added, but I like to start with a foundation and build on it.

Here’s the “foundation”

Colonial

• John Smith, A Select Edition of His Writings
• Ben Franklin, autobiography
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense
• Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
• Phyllis Wheatley, poetry

Romanticism and poetry

• Edgar Allen Poe, poetry and stories
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Revere’s Ride

Romanticism and prose

• Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
• Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Transcendentalism

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Self-reliance
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience
• Emily Dickinson, poetry
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Realism/Naturalism

• Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
• Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Modernist experimentation

• Booker T Washington, Up From Slavery
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
• F Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
• Robert Frost, poetry

Postmodern literature

• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
• Allen Ginsberg, poetry
• Susan Sontag, The Way We Live Now
• Gwendolyn Brooks, poetry
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions

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