The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A novel by Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn, a boy running away from his father, and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, take to the Mississippi River on a raft. Eventually Jim is captured, and Huck helps him escape. The lessons Huck learns about life are a prev
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A novel by Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer is a wily and adventurous boy. In one famous episode, Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into painting a fence for him by pretending it is a great privilege and making them pay to take over the job. The Adventures of Huckleber
Captain Ahab
The captain of the ship the Pequod in Moby Dick by James Melville. Ahab is obsessed with capturing the great white whale, Moby Dick.
Louisa May Alcott
19th Century author, known for Little Women and Little Men, along with other books for and about children.
Horatio Alger Jr.
19th Century author known for his many books in which poor boys become rich through their earnest attitudes and hard work. A true story of spectacular worldly success achieved by someone who started near the bottom is often called a 'Horatio Alger story".
Maya Angelou
A 20th Century writer whose best-known work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is an autobiographical account of growing up as a black girl in the rural south.
Anti-Transcendentalism/ Dark Romanticism
It is a literary subgenre centered on the writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. As opposed to the perfectionist beliefs of Transcendentalism, the Dark Romantics emphasized human fallibility and proneness to sin and self-destru
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand. Rand's fourth and last novel, it was also her longest, and the one she considered to be her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing. Atlas Shrugged includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
A homespun account by Benjamin Franklin of his early and middle years. He advocates hard work and stresses the importance of worldly success.
Babbitt
A novel by Sinclair Lewis. The title character, an American real estate agent in a small city, is portrayed as a crass, loud, overoptimistic boor who thinks only about money and speaks in clich�s such as "You've gotta have pep, by golly!" By extension, a
James Baldwin
20th Century author whose writings, mostly about the black experience in the United States, include such novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain, and essays such as The Fire Next Time.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
A standard American Reference work for quotations from literature and speeches. The original compiler, John Bartlett, was an American publisher of the 19th Century.
The Beat Poets
A group flourishing in the 1950's that emphasized mysticism and rejection of social taboos. Within the 'beat' counterculture, the poet is a central figure, a guru of sorts, whose style of living, as much as his poetry, challenges social values and offers
Saul Bellow
Perhaps the foremost among the American novelists who came into prominence after WWII. A 1976 Nobel Prize winner, Bellow is part of the novelistic mainstream. His books have the rich flavor of his urban Jewish upbringing. Henderson the Rain King and Herzo
Ambrose Bierce
He was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. He wrote the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto "Nothing m
Black Boy
An autobiographical novel by Richard Wright, portraying racial conflicts in the rural South.
Anne Bradstreet
17th century writer who was the first poet and first female writer in the British North American colonies to be published. Her first volume of poetry was The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, published in 1650. Her poetry often focuses on the roles
Natty Bumppo
The central character in The Leatherstocking Tales, by James Fenimore Cooper. Natty, a settler, is taught by the Native Americans and adopts their way of life
Call me Ismael
Probably the most famous opening line of any American novel. This line opens Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
Truman Capote
He was an American author, screenwriter and playwright, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which h
Casey at the Bat
A poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer from the late 19th century about Casey, an arrogant, overconfident baseball player who brings his team down to defeat by refusing to swing at the first two balls pitched to him, and then missing the third. The poem's final
Casey Jones
A ballad from the early 20th century about a railroad engineer who dies valiantly in a train wreck.
Catch-22
A war novel from the 1960s by Joseph Heller. In the novel, a "Catch-22" is a provision in army regulations; it stipulates that a soldier's request to be relieved from active duty can be accepted only if he is mentally unfit to fight. Any soldier, however,
The Catcher in the Rye
A novel from the 1950s by J.D. Salinger. It relates the experiences of Holden Caulfield, a sensitive but rebellious youth who runs away from his boarding school.
Willa Cather
Author of the early 20th century known for My Antonia and other novels of frontier life. A regionalist and a Realist, she describes the lives of immigration farm people in Nebraska where she grew up.
Kate Chopin
An American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of the feminist authors of the 20th century. Her most famous novel is The Awakening which centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her
Civil Disobedience
An essay by Henry David Thoreau. It contains his famous statement, "That government is best which governs least" and asserts that people's obligations to their own conscience take precedence over their obligations to their government. Thoreau also argues
The Color Purple
A 1980s novel by Alice Walker. Celie suffers the poverty, racism, sexual abuse, and ignorance of a sharecropper family. Through strength of character she endures it all and rises in the end to a serene accommodation to her existence and restoration to tho
James Fenimore Cooper
19th century author known for his works set on the American frontier, such as the series The Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper was America's first major novelist. His stories focused on the frontier, the wilderness beyond, and the sea, creating romances often
E.E Cummings
20th century author who spurned the use of many conventions of standard written English in his poetry. He often avoided using capital letters, even in his name, and experimented freely with typographic conventions, grammar, and syntax. He wrote poetry on
Death of a Salesman
A play from the 1940s by Arthur Miller. In the play, Willie Loman, a salesman who finds himself regarded as useless in this occupation because of his age, kills himself. A speech made by a friend of Willie's after his suicide is well known, and it ends wi
Deism
An 18th century Enlightenment religion emphasizing reason, not miracles; partly a reaction against Calvinism and religious superstition
Emily Dickinson
19th century poet famous for her short, untitled, evocative poems. Some of her famous poems begin, "There is no frigate like a book", "Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me", "I never saw a moor", and "I'm nobody, who are you?". Dick
John Don Passos
20th century author best known for the three novels that make up the U.S.A. trilogy. Passos relied heavily on the stream-of-consciousness effect in his novels. East of Eden John Steinbeck's novel that is made up of three stories: a history of the Salinas
The Education of Henry Adams
The autobiography of a member of the presidential Adams family of New England. Adams mingles a partial story of his life with an indictment of his education and reflections on the fundamental ideas of modern time and of the Middle Ages.
T.S. Eliot
20th century author born and raised in America. Eliot immigrated to England where he wrote poems, plays, and essays and urged the use of ordinary language in poetry. He was much concerned with the general emptiness of modern life and with the revitalizati
Ralph Ellison
20th century author best known for the book The Invisible Man. The novel won the National Book Award and is regarded as a classic of modern literature. Ellison resists being categorized as a black writer, aiming his fiction to address the universal human
Ralph Waldo Emerson
20th century author and lecturer and leader of the Transcendentalism movement. In his essay "Self-Reliance" and in other works, Emerson stressed the importance of the individual and encouraged people to rely on their own judgment.
Enlightenment
An 18th century movement that focused on the ideals of good sense, benevolence, and a belief in liberty, justice, and equality as the natural rights of man.
Ethan Frome
A novel by Edith Wharton. Ethan Frome is a farmer frustrated in his ambition to become an engineer and in his marriage to a nagging, sour, sickly wife. He falls in love with his wife's cousin. The novel depicts Ethan's wasted talents and passions and desc
Existentialism
A philosophical movement embracing the view that the suffering individual must create meaning in an unknowable, chaotic, and seemingly empty universe.
The Fall of the House of Usher
A horror story by Edgar Allen Poe. At the end of the story, two of the Usher family fall dead, and the ancestral mansion of the Ushers splits in two and sinks into a lake.
A Farewell to Arms
Novel by Ernest Hemingway set in WWI. An American soldier and an English nurse fall in love; he deserts to join her, and she dies giving birth to their child. Robert Jordan and Maria emerge as two of the most famous American literary characters.
William Faulkner
20th century author whose works, set mostly in the South, include The Sound and the Fury and As I lay Dying. A major writer of his time, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949. All of his stories are set in the fictional "Yoknapatawpha County" in Mississipp
F. Scott Fitzgerald
20th century author known for his short stories and for his novels, including The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise. He led a tempestuous life with his wife, Zelda, and was one of several talented Americans, including Ernest Hemingway, who lived in P
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Novel by Ernest Hemingway set in the Spanish Civil War. The title is taken from a line in a sermon by English essayist and poet John Donne.
The Fountainhead
A 1943 novel by Ayn Rand, and her first major literary success. More than 6.5 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. The Fountainhead's protagonist, Howard Roark, is an individualistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rat
Robert Frost
Most popular of the 20th century poets. Some of his best works include "The Road Not Taken", "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" (Which contains the line "And miles to go before I sleep"), "Mending Wall" (The source of the line: "Good fences make g
The Gift of the Magi
A short story by O. Henry. An extremely poor young couple is determined to give Christmas gifts to each other. He sells his watch to buy a set of combs for her long hair, and she cuts off her hair and sells it to buy him a watch chain.
Give me your tired, your poor
A line from the poem "The New Colossus" by 19th century poet Emma Lazarus. "The New Colossus", describing the Statue of Liberty, appears on a plaque at the base of the statue. It ends with the statue herself speaking:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your hu
Gone with the Wind
A novel from the 1930s by Margaret Mitchell. Set in Georgia in the period of the Civil War, it tells of the three marriages of the central character, Scarlett O'Hara and of the devastation caused by the war. The film version of Gone with the Wind, also fr
Good Country People
A short story by Flannery O'Connor. Satan appears in the form of a suave young bible salesman who comes to the well-to-do farm of the divorced Mrs. Hopewell and her crippled daughter, Hulga.
The Grapes of Wrath
A novel by John Steinbeck about the hardships of an American farm family in the Dust Bowl during the 1930s. Forced off the land, they traveled to California to earn a living harvesting fruit.
The Great Gatsby
A novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald recounting the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby, a millionaire who makes elaborate schemes to win back his former mistress. The novel shows the rise and fall of one man's American Dream.
Harlem Renaissance
Name given to the period from the end of WWI and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African-American writers produced a sizable body of literature in the four prominent genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and essay.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
19th century author known for his novels and short stories that explore the themes of sin and guilt. His works include The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
Ernest Hemingway
20th century author. One of the Lost Generation of Americans living in Paris during the 1920s. In such books as A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, he glorified heroic male exploits such as bullfig
O Henry
The pen name for William Sydney Porter. 20th century author know for "The Gift of the Magi" and other short stories. He specialized in surprise endings and tales filled with irony.
Howard Roark
As Ayn Rand's protagonist of The Fountainhead, Roark is an aspiring architect who firmly believes that a person must be a "prime mover" to achieve pure art, not mitigated by others, as opposed to councils or committees of individuals which lead to comprom
Langston Hughes
20th century author known for his poems about the black experience in the United States. Hughes was the leader of the Harlem Renaissance. A well-known line from his poem "Dream Deferred" is "What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin i
Zora Neal Hurston
An important Harlem Renaissance writer whose masterpiece was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her writing was very regional and closely followed the speech patterns of central Florida.
In Cold Blood
A non-fiction book first published in 1966, written by American author Truman Capote; it details the 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife, and two of their four children. When Capote learned of the quadruple murder, bef
Invisible Man
A novel by Ralph Ellison, set in the United States in the 1930s; it depicts a black man's struggle for identity. In the end, the unnamed narrator runs for his life and falls into a cellar. He decided to remain underground and write a novel about the absur
I would prefer not to
The story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," of the lawyer-narrator who cannot bring himself to remove from his office the silent scrivener, Bartleby (save for the repeated phrase "I would prefer not to"), who neither works nor eats, has always fascinated both r
Washington Irving
19th century author. His works include "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle".
Henry James
Late 19th and early 20th century author known for his novels The Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady.
Stephen King
An American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many of them have been adapted into feature films, television movies and comic books. King has published fifty novels,
The land was ours before we were the land's
The first line of the poem "The Gift Outright" by Robert Frost.
The Last of the Mohicans
A novel by James Fenimore Cooper; part of the Leatherstocking Tales. The main character, Natty Bumppo, learned from and adopted the Native American's way of life.
The Leatherstocking Tales
A series of five novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, each featuring the main hero Natty Bumppo. He is known as "Deerslayer" in The Deerslayer, "Hawkeye" and "La Longue Carabine" in The Last of the Mohicans, "Pathfinder" in The Pathfinder, "Le
Leaves of Grass
A collection of poems by Walt Whitman, written mainly in free verse. Published with revisions every few years in the late 19th century, it contains such well known poems as "I Hear America Singing", "Song of Myself", and "Oh Captain, My Captain".
The Legend of Sleepy Hallow
A story by Washington Irving. Its central character, Ichabod Crane, is a vain and cowardly teacher, and he rivals Brom Bones for the love of a woman. Bones terrorizes Crane by disguising himself as a legendary headless horseman.
Simon Legree
The cruel overseer of slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Though the book describes conditions in the slave-holding states of the South, Legree, the most vicious character in it, is from New England.
Sinclair Lewis
20th century author known for using his novels to criticize aspects of American life such as small-town narrowness, insincere preachers, and the discouragement of scientific curiosity. His books include Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and Main Street. Lewis was aw
Little Women
A novel by Louisa May Alcott, about four sisters growing up in New England in the 19th century.
Local Color Writing
The Civil War and the rapid expansion of railroads that followed awakened a new interest among Americans in the regions and localities of their reunited nation. One interest was the emergence of regional writing and local color. Local color writers includ
Jack London
An American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of hi
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
19th century poet. Among his works are "The Song of Hiawatha" and "Paul Revere's Ride".
The Lost Generation
A group of writers and artists who lived and wandered in Europe during and after WWI. They were called 'lost' because after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into a settled life. Gertrude Stein is usua
H. P. Lovecraft
He was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century author
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
A statement from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.
Herman Melville
19th century author known for Moby Dick. In his writing, Melville drew on several adventurous years spent at sea.
H. L. Mencken
20th century writer known for his works of satire, mainly essays. Mencken mocked American society for its Puritanism, its anti-intellectualism, and its emphasis on conformity.
Miles to go before I sleep
Words from the poem "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.
Arthur Miller
Miller shares with Tennessee Williams the distinction of being the best American dramatist from WWII to the present. Williams' plays are based on emotion, often looking at the struggle between right and wrong, the American myth of success, generation gaps
Walter Mitty
Title character in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", a short story by James Thurber. Mitty is a repressed, ordinary man who daydreams of doing great things.
Moby Dick
A novel by Herman Melville. Its central character, Captain Ahab, engages in a mad obsessive quest for Mo by Dick, a great white whale. The novel opens with the famous sentence: "Call me Ishmael.
Modernism
Literary movement from the beginning of the 20th century to around 1950. In general, Modernism rejects tradition and has a hostile attitude toward the immediate past.
Toni Morrison
20th century American author awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. Morrison's literary stern was to William Faulkner and American writers from further south. Her lasting impression in literature is of sympathy and humanity, both based on profound humor. Her wo
Mourning Becomes Electra
A drama by Eugene O'Neill. The Mannon family is driven to their self-destructive behavior by inner needs, forbidden love, and compulsions they can neither understand nor control.
My Antonia
A novel by Willa Cather. My Antonia is the story of a Bohemian girl whose family came from the Old Country to settle on the open prairies of Nebraska. While she lives on her farm and tills the soil, she is a child of the prairie, but when Antonia goes to
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
The autobiography of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Published in 1945 when Douglass was only 27, the book tells the story from childhood until his escape to freedom at the age of 20.
Ogden Nash
20th century author known for his witty poems, many of them published in The New Yorker. They are marked by outrageous rhymes such as those in "The Baby" ("A bit of talcum/all is walcum") or in "Reflections on Ice-Breaking" ("Candy/is dandy/But liquor/is
Native Son
A novel by Richard Wright about a young black man whose life is destroyed by poverty and racism.
Naturalism
A literary movement that shares with Realism its attention to the speech and behavior of the present, but considers people's behavior to be determined by social and economic forces beyond human control. Some of the best known Naturalists are Frank Norris
The New Yorker
A weekly magazine known for nonfiction and short stories, and for its cartoons. Ogdon Nash, Dorothy Parker, and James Thurber are notable authors whose work appeared regularly in the magazine.
Nobel Prize
Prizes given annually for achievement in eight fields, including literature. The awards are considered a mark of world-wide leadership in which they are given. A cash prize of up to one million dollars is given to each winner.
Of Mice and Men
A novella written by Nobel-Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in search of new job opportunities during the Great
Oh Captain, My Captain
A poem by Walt Whitman about a captain who dies just as his ship has reached the end of a stormy and dangerous voyage. The captain represents Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated just after the end of the Civil War.
Flannery O'Connor
A devout Catholic in the rural Protestant South. Her intense devotion is present in the situations of her characters, who are frequently grotesque, often eccentric, even dull and decent, or even genuinely satanic. Her fiction is charged with violence, bot
Scarlett O'Hara
The heroine of the book Gone With the Wind. Scarlett is a shrewd, manipulative southern belle who survives two husbands and finally is matched with by a third, Rhett Buttler.
The Old Man and the Sea
The novel that ensured Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize. Old Santiago seeks to end 84 straight day without catching a single fish. The story examines the unconquerable spirit of man and is filled with religious symbols and metaphors.
Eugene O'Neil
20th century playwright. Three of his best known plays are A Long Day's Journey into the Night, Mourning Becomes Electra, and The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill was the first American playwright of significance and to give respectability to the American drama. O'
Our Town
A play by Thorton Wilder dealing with everyday life in a small town in New England.
The Outsiders
A coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton. Hinton was 15 when she started writing the novel, but did most of the work when she was 16 and a junior in high school. Hinton was 18 when the book was published. The book follows two rival groups, the Greasers and t
Dorothy Parker
20th century author known for her often sarcastic wit. Parker wrote poems, short stories, film scripts, and reviews for plays and books. Her poetry contains some often-quoted lines such as, "Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.
Paul Revere's Ride
A poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, celebrating the ride made on horseback by Paul Revere to warn the American rebels of approaching British troops. It begins with these lines: "Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
Edgar Allan Poe
19th century author known for his poems and horror stories. Among his works are the stories "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Cask of Amontillado", and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", and the poems
Poet laureate
America's national poet. The position was created in 1985, and Robert Penn Warren was appointed in 1986. The position lasts for one year. The current poet Laureate as of 2014 is Charles Wright.
Poor Richard's Almanack
A collection of periodicals (each one was call Poor Richard or Poor Richard Improved) by Benjamin Franklin, issued over twenty-five years in the middle of the 18th century. They contain humor, information, and proverbial wisdom, such as "Early to bed and
Post-Modernism
Media-influenced literary movement of the late 20th century characterized by open-endedness and collage. Post-Modernism questions the foundations of cultural and artistic forms through irony and the opposites. Popular culture and electronic technology are
Pulitzer Prize
The prestigious awards given annually for excellence in American journalism, literature, and music.
Puritanism
Emerged in England around the middle 1500s. Its aim was to "purify" the Church of England. The term is frequently used to refer to a strictly, even rigidly moral attitude.
Rabbit Run
A novel by John Updike. Since his glory days of high school basketball, Rabbit Angstrom's life has gone gently downhill. He reacts to his growing despair by abandoning his mistress and his wife and child and running away into aimless drifting.
Ayn Rand
She was a 20th century American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Born and educated in
The Raven
A poem by Edgar Allan Poe. A man mourning for his lost lover is visited by a raven that tells him he will see her "nevermore." The poem begins with these famous lines:
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and
Realism
Movement in literature in the second half of the 19th century that sought to record accurately the speech and behavior of ordinary people and to depict life honestly, without recourse to melodrama or improbable events. Some of the best-known Realists are
The Red Badge of Courage
A novel from the late 19th century by Stephen Crane, about a young man, Henry Fleming, whose romantic notions of heroism in combat are shattered when he fights in the Civil War. This psychological masterpiece examines Henry's "cowardly" flight and "heroic
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated'
The text of a cable sent by Mark Twain from London to the press in the United States after his obituary had been mistakenly published. Twain died at the age of 75 on his birthday. His birth and death were both marked by the passing of Haley's Comet
Rip Van Winkle
A story by Washington Irving. The title character goes to sleep after a game of bowling and much drinking in the mountains with a band of dwarves. He awakes 25 years later, an old man. Back home, Rip finds that all has changed: his wife is dead, his daugh
Romanticism
A movement in literature and the fine arts, beginning in the early 19th century that stressed personal emotion, free play of the imagination, and freedom from rules of form. Among the leaders of the movement were Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Roots
A novel by the 20th century American author Alex Haley, later made into a popular television drama. It traces a black American man's heritage to Africa, where his ancestors had been captured and sold as slaves.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
A line by Gertrude Stein, suggesting, perhaps, that some things resist definition in words.
Carl Sandburg
20th century author. His widely varied works include poems about the countryside and industrial heartland of the United States, especially Chicago, using the rhythms of their speech, the structure of the way they said things.
The Scarlett Letter
A novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne about Hester Prynne, a woman in 17th century New England who is convicted of adultery. At the beginning of the story, she is forced to wear a scarlett letter A on her dress as a sign of her guilt. Hester will not reveal the
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
A story by James Thurber about a henpecked husband with extravagant daydreams: he imagines himself as a heroic pilot in wartime, a world-famous surgeon, and a soldier who can face a firing squad. An ordinary person who dreams of leading a romantic life ma
Shoot, if you must, this old grey head
A line from the poem "Barbara Frietchie," a poem from the Civil War years by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, which describes a fictional incident in the war. Barbara Frietchie, aged over 90, displays the Union flag when Confederate troops march through
The Song of Hiawatha
An epic by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, based on the story of an actual Native American hero. The historical Hiawatha was an Onondaga from what is now New York State, but Longfellow makes him an Ojibwa living near Lake Superior. The poem begins:
"By the sh
Spoon River Anthology
A collection of interrelated poems by Edgar Lee Masters. Masters recreates the fictional town of Spoon River and writes in verse the epitaphs of the deceased. Masters' villagers speak one after the other from their graves�their understanding of their lies
Gertrude Stein
20th century author who lived most of her life in France. She wrote her life story as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Toklas was her companion), and she is said to have introduced the phrase 'Lost Generation" to describe the Americans who wandered a
John Steinbeck
20th century author best known for his novels, including The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden. He had his greatest success during the Depression of the 1930s and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Gloria Steinem
20th century author, journalist, and advocate of woman's rights; one of the leaders of the women's liberation movement. Steinem was a founder of Ms. Magazine.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
19th century author best known for Uncle Tom's Cabin, a powerful novel that inflamed sentiment against slavery. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln met Stowe and is reputed to have said to her, "So you are the little woman who started this big war.
A Streetcar Named Desire
A play by Tennessee Williams about the decline and tragic end of Blanche DuBois, a southern belle who, as she puts it, has 'always depended on the kindness of strangers." Set in New Orleans, DuBois is an alcoholic nymphomaniac with a lurid past. She distu
The Sun Also Rises
A novel by Ernest Hemingway about a group of young Americans living in Europe in the 1920s. It captures the disillusionment and cynicism of the Lost Generation.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
A novel by Zora Neal Hurston. The novel is the story of the search by a young black woman for self-knowledge and self-fulfillment. An excellent novel of the black experience that is sincere and authentic.
Henry David Thoreau
19th century author who was a strong advocate of individual rights and an opponent of social conformity. His best-known works are the book Walden and the essay "Civil Disobedience.
James Thurber
20th century author and cartoonist; author of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" His humorous drawing, short stories, and essays poke gentle fun at the lives and folly of men and women.
Tobacco Road
A novel from the 1930s by Erskine Caldwell, about a family of sharecroppers from Georgia and their many tragedies. Tobacco Road was made into a play that ran for several years on Broadway. A 'tobacco road' is a poor shantytown, usually in the rural south,
To Kill a Mockingbird
A novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American Literature. The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and
Transcendentalism
A movement in American Literature and thought in the 19th century. It called on people to view the objects in the world as small versions of the whole universe and to trust their individual intuitions. The two most noted American Transcendentalists were R
Mark Twain
The nom de plume of Samuel L Clemens, an author and humorist of the late 19th and early 20th century. He is famous for his stories with settings along the Mississippi River, his books include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and The
Uncle Tom's Cabin
A novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe; it paints a grim picture of life under slavery. The title character is a pious, passive slave, who is eventually beaten to death by the overseer Simon Legree. Published shortly before the Civil War, Uncle Tom's Cabin won
John Updike
A 'new-realist' celebrated for the precision of his style and the painterly way he recreates his fictional worlds. His stories convey his vision of middle America and of the middle class holding onto its style of life while at the same time trying to adju
The Village Blacksmith
A poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about a village blacksmith in New England. It begins:
"Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands.
Walden
A book by Henry David Thoreau describing his two years of life alone at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He recounts his daily life in the woods, and celebrates nature and the individual's ability to life independently of society. A famous line from the book
Alice Walker
An African-American and feminist writer. Her fiction draws upon the black experience in the American South and by creating strong women characters of near-heroic achievement, she endows the African-American woman with a new identity, both distinct and adm
Eudora Welty
20th century author who was a Southern regional realist. Her pictures of 20th century life in rural and small town Mississippi accurately reflect both its surfaces and its deeper psychological currents. Her most famous stories are "Why I Live at the P.O.
Edith Wharton
Author of the late 19th and early 20 century. Wharton is best known for her novel, Ethan Frome. Wharton was from one of New York's wealthiest families, and her writing has been criticized as being too elite and her subject matter as being confined to the
Walt Whitman
19th century poet, his principle work, Leaves of Grass, is a collection of poems that celebrate nature, democracy, and individualism. The earthiness of Whitman's poetry shocked many readers of his time. Walt Whitman's rugged appearance is memorable, espec
Thornton Wilder
20th century writer best known for his play Our Town.
Tennessee Williams
20th century writer famous for his plays, which portray violent passions in ordinary people; these plays include A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie. From WWII until his accidental death in 1983, Williams shared with A
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
This is a children's novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. The story chronicles the adventures of a young girl named Dorothy Gale in the Land of Oz, after being swept away from her Kansas farm home in a cyclone. She then goes to
Richard Wright
20th century writer best known for his novels dealing with the black experience in the United States. Two of his best known works are Black Boy and Native Son. Wright was the first African-American writer to win broad response from the reading public.
The Yellow Wallpaper
A 19th century 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health. The sto