Includes bibliographical references and index.

Beginnings to 1700

The Iroquois creation story

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490-1558)

First encounters : early European accounts of Native America

Hernán Cortés : second letter to the Spanish Crown

Samuel de Champlain : the voyages of Sieur de Champlain

William Bradford and Edward Winslow : Mourt's relation

John Underhill : news from America

John Smith (1580-1631)

William Bradford (1590-1657)

John Winthrop (1588-1649)

Roger Williams (ca. 1603-1683)

Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612-1672)

Mary Rowlandson (ca. 1637-1711)

Edward Taylor (ca. 1642-1729)

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

American literature 1700-1820

Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727)

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

Native Americans : contact and conflict

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

The federalist

Olaudah Equiano (1745?-1797)

Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820)

Philip Freneau (1752-1832)

Phillis Wheatley (ca.1753-1784)

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)

American literature 1820-1865

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

William Apess (1798-1839)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Native Americans : removal and resistance

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Slavery, race, and the making of American literature

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Harriet Jacobs (ca. 1813-1897)

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910)

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)

American Literature 1865-1914

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) (1835-1910)

Bret Harte (1836-1902)

William Dean Howells (1837-1920)

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)

Henry James (1843-1916)

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

Kate Chopin (1850-1904)

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Abraham Cahan (1860-1951)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton) (1865-1914)

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

Realism and naturalism

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

Jack London (1876-1916)

Zitkala Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) (1876-1938)

American literature 1914-1945

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948)

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Modernist manifestos

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

American literature since 1945

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

John Cheever (1912-1982)

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

John Berryman (1914-1972)

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

John Ashbery (B. 1927)

James Wright (1927-1980)

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

John Updike (b. 1932-2009)

Philip Roth (b. 1933)

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (1934-2014)

N. Scott Momaday (b. 1934)

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940)

Billy Collins (b. 1941)

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004)

Alice Walker (b. 1944)

Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)

Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)

Art Spiegelman (b. 1948)

Julia Alvarez (b. 1950)

Joy Harjo (b. 1951)

Rita Dove (b. 1952)

Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954)

Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)

Cathy Song (b. 1955)

Li-young Lee (b. 1957)

Creative non-fiction

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)

Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967)

Junot Díaz (b. 1968)