American Literature Timeline

PRE-SETTLEMENT PERIOD (< 1620s)

PURITANISM (1620s 1783)
.Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
.Edward Taylor (1645-1729)
ENLIGHTENMENT (1750-1800)
Benjamin Franklin (1706 1790)
Thomas Paine (1737 1809)
Thomas Jefferson (1743 1826)

ROMANTICISM (1800-1855)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849): "The Raven", "Fall of the House of Usher.
Herman Melville (1819-1891): Moby Dick
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): "Nature"
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): Walden
Poetry
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18071882)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892): "Song of Myself"
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

REALISM/NATURALISM (1860s-1915)
Mark Twain (18351910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Henry James (1843 1916): The Portrait of a Lady
Kate Chopin (1851 1904): The Awakening
Theodore Dreiser (1871 1945)
Poetry
Edward Arlington Robinson (1869 1935)

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MODERNISM (1915-1945)
Ernest Hemingway (18991961): A Farewell to Arms
John Dos Passos (1896 1970): Manhattan Transfer
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 1940): The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner (1897 1962): Absalom, Absalom
Poetry
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Thomas Stearns Eliot (18881965)
William Carlos WilliamS (1883 1963)
Wallace Stevens (1879 1955)
Ezra Pound (1885 1972)
Drama
Eugene ONeill (1888 1953)
CONTEMPORARY (1945-present)
Flannery OConnor (1925 1964)
Truman Capote (1924 1984)
Saul Bellow (1915 - 2005)
Philip Roth (b. 1933)
J.D. Salinger (b. 1919)
John Updike (b. 1932)
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)

Poetry
Robert Lowell (1917 1977)
Sylvia Plath (1932 1963)
Theodore Roethke (1908 1963)
Frank OHara (1926 1966)
John Ashbery (b. 1927)

Drama
Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
Tennessee Williams (1911-83)
David Mamet (b. 1947)