FOUNDING TO REVOLUTION (1600-1800):

John Bunyan: "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1678)

Thomas Paine: "Common Sense" (1776)

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay: "The Federalist Papers" (1787-1788)

Benjamin Franklin: "Autobiography" (1791)



THE YOUNG NATION, AMERICAN NAISSANCE (1800-1850):

Washington Irving: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories" (1819-1820)

James Fenimore Cooper: "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826)

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nature" (1836)

Edgar Allan Poe: "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838)

Nathaniel Hawthorne: "The Scarlet Letter" (1850)

Herman Melville: "Moby-Dick" (1851)

Henry David Thoureau: "Walden" (1854)



SLAVERY AND CIVIL WAR (1850-1865):

Harriet Beecher Stowe: "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852)

Frederick Douglass: "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,  An 
American Slave" (1855)



REBUILDING AMERICA AND THE GILDED AGE (1865-1901):

Walt Whitman: "Leaves of Grass" (1855)

Mark Twain: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884)

Henry James: "The Bostonians" (1886)

Emily Dickinson: "Complete Poems" (1890-1914)

W.E.B. Du Bois: "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)



PROGRESSIVE ERA AND REACTION (1901-1929):

Jack London: "White Fang" (1906)

Upton Sinclair: "The Jungle" (1906)

Robert Frost: "North of Boston" (1914)

Edith Wharton: "Age of Innocence" (1920)

T. S. Eliot: "The Waste Land" (1922)

John Dos Passos: "Manhattan Transfer" (1925)

F. Scott Fiztgerald: "The Great Gatsby" (1925)

Ernest Hemingway: "The Sun Also Rises" (1926)



DEPRESSION AND WAR (1929-1945):

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury" (1929)

John Steinbeck: "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939)



EARLY COLD WAR (1945-1961):

Ezra Pound: "Cantos" (1925-1969)

Tennessee Williams: "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947)

Arthur Miller: "Death of a Salesman" (1949)

J. D. Salinger: "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951)

Saul Below: "The Adventures of Augie March" (1953)

Ray Bradbury: "Farenheit 451" (1953)

e. e. cummings: "Poems, 1923-1954" (1954)

Vladimir Nabokov: "Lolita" (1955)

Jack Kerouac: "On the Road" (1957)

William Burroughs: "The Naked Lunch" (1959)  

Harper Lee: "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960)

Joseph Heller: "Catch-22" (1961)

Truman Capote: "In Cold Blood" (1966)



SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION TO VIETNAM (1961-1975):

Allen Ginsberg: "Howl" (1956)

John Updike: "Rabbit, Run" (1960)

Betty Friedan: "The Feminine Mystique" (1963)

Sylvia Plath: "Ariel" (1965)

Norman Mailer: "Armies of the Night" (1968)

Kurt Vonnegut: "Slaughterhouse Five" (1969)

Hunter S. Thompson: "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1972)

Thomas Pynchon: "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973)



FROM STAGNATION TO THE 21st CENTURY(1975-2002):

Raymond Carver: "Cathedral" (1983)

Gore Vidal: "Armageddon" (1987)

Tom Wolfe: "Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987)

Toni Morrison: "Beloved" (1987)

E. L. Doctorow: "Ragtime"

Saul Bellow: "Ravelstein" (2000)

Philip Roth: "The Human Stain" (2000)

Jonathan Franzen: "The Corrections" (2001)

Paul Auster: "The Book of Illusions" (2004)