p

1. Periodization and the
main representatives of
the development of
American
literature
Created by Stepan Yevmenchik

2. The history of American
literature stretches across
more than 400 years. It can
be divided into five major
periods:
1.The Colonial and Early
National Period (17th
century to 1830)
2.The Romantic Period (1830 to
1870)
3.Realism and Naturalism (1870
to 1910)

3. The Colonial and
Early National
Period
(17th century to
1830)

4. The first European settlers of North America wrote about their
experiences starting in the 1600s.
This was the earliest American literature:
• Practical
• Straightforward
• Often derivative of literature in Great Britain
• Focused on the future

5. In its earliest days, during the
1600s, American literature
consisted mostly of practical
nonfiction written by British
settlers who populated the
colonies that would become the
United States.

6. John Smith
(1580—1631)
Prominent works: A Description of New
England (1616), a counterpart to his Map of
Virginia with a Description of the Country (1612)
• Smith was widely regarded as a reliable
observer as well as a national hero.
• Wrote histories of Virginia based on his
experiences as an English explorer and a
president of the Jamestown Colony
• These histories, published in 1608 and 1624,
are among the earliest works of American
literature.

7. Nathaniel Ward
(1578—1652)
Prominent works: The Body of
Liberties (1641), The Simple Cobler of
Aggawam in America (1647).
• Puritan minister and writer
• He wrote books on religion
• A topic of central concern in colonial
America
• He wrote the first constitution in
North America in 1641.

8. Anne Bradstreet
(1612—1672)
• She was the most prominent of early English poets
of North America
• The first writer in England's North American
colonies to be published.
• She is the first Puritan figure in American
Literature and notable for her large corpus of
poetry, as well as personal writings published
posthumously.
Prominent works: The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung
up in America (1650), The Tenth Muse, lately
Sprung up in America, Several Poems Compiled
with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (1678)

9. A new era began when the United
States declared its independence
in 1776, and much new writing
addressed the country’s future.
American poetry and fiction were
largely modeled on what was
being published overseas in Great
Britain, and much of what American
readers consumed also came from
Great Britain.

10. Alexander Hamilton
(1755 or 1757 –1804)
• He was a major author of the The Federalist
Papers (1787–88), which shaped the political
direction of the United States.
• He was an influential interpreter and
promoter of the U.S. Constitution, as well as
the founder of the nation's financial system,
the Federalist Party, the United States
Coast Guard, and the New York
Prominent works: The Federalist
Papers (1787–88)

11. Benjamin Franklin
(1706 –1790)
Prominent works: The Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin (1791), The Way to
Wealth (1757), Poor Richard's
Almanack(1732)
• He was one of the Founding Fathers of the
United States.
• Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which
he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a
quintessentially American life story.
• He made important contributions to science,
especially in the understanding
of electricity, and is remembered for the
wit, wisdom, and elegance of his writing.

12. By the first decades of the 19th
century, a truly American
literature began to emerge. Though
still derived from British literary
tradition, the short stories and
novels published from 1800 through
the 1820s began to depict
American society and explore the
American landscape in an
unprecedented manner.

13. Washington Irving
(1783 –1859)
• Writer called the “first American man of
letters.”
• He is best known for the short stories
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip
Van Winkle.”
• Irving served as American ambassador to
Spain in the 1840s.
Prominent works: “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow” (1820), “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), The
Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–
20).

14. James Fenimore Cooper
(1789 –1851)
• First major American novelist
• He wrote novels of adventure about the
frontiersman Natty Bumppo.
• These novels, called the Leatherstocking
Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in
the American wilderness in both realistic
and highly romanticized ways.
Prominent works: Leatherstocking Tales
(1823–41), The Spy (1821), The Last of the
Mohicans (1826)

15. The Romantic Period
(1830 to 1870)

16. Romanticism is a way of
thinking that values:
• the individual over the group
• the subjective over the
objective
• a person’s emotional
experience over reason
• the wildness of nature over
human-made order.

17. Edgar Allan Poe
(1809 –1849)
• He most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the
role of the Romantic individual—a genius,
often tormented and always struggling against
convention.
• The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy
depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified
by its meter and rhyme scheme.
• The short stories “The Fall of the House of
Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado”
(1846) are gripping tales of horror.
Prominent works: “The Raven” (1845),
"Annabel Lee" (1849) and “Alone “ (1875), “A
Dream Within A Dream” (1849)

18. In New England, several
different groups of writers
and thinkers emerged
after 1830, each
exploring the
experiences of
individuals in different
segments of American
society.

19. James Russell Lowell
(1819 –1891)
Prominent works: “A Fable for Critics “ (1848),
“The Biglow Papers” (1848), “A Year's Life ”
(1841).
• He was among those who used humor and
dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday
life in the Northeast
• He became involved in the movement
to abolish slavery.
• He subscribed to the common nineteenth-
century belief that the poet was a prophet
but went further, linking religion, nature, and
poetry, as well as social reform.

20. Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow and Oliver Wendell
Holmes were the most prominent
of the upper-class Brahmins, who
filtered their depiction of America
through European models and
sensibilities.

21. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807 –1882)
Prominent works: “The Song of Hiawatha“
(1855), “The Courtship of Miles Standish”
(1858), “Paul Revere's Ride” (1860).
• Much of Longfellow's work is categorized
as lyric poetry, but he experimented with many
forms, including hexameter and free verse.
• He was a much loved poet who used American
history as his topic.
• Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for
their musicality and often presenting stories of
mythology and legend.
• He was important as a translator; He was the
first American to translate Dante
Alighieri's Divine Comedy

22. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
(1809–1894)
Prominent works: “Old Ironsides”
(1830), "Breakfast-Table" series (1858), “The
Chambered Nautilus“ (1858)
• Holmes made an indelible imprint on the
literary world of the 19th century
• For his literary achievements and other
accomplishments, he was awarded
numerous honorary degrees from
universities around the world.
• Holmes's writing often commemorated his
native Boston area, and much of it was
meant to be humorous or conversational.

23. Transcendentalism was an America
n
literary movement that emphasized
the importance and equality of the
individual.
Transcendentalists espoused
four main philosophical points.
Simply stated, these were the
ideas of:
•self-reliance
•individual conscience
•intuition over reason
•unity of all things in nature

24. Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803–1882)
Prominent works: “Self-Reliance”
(1841), “Nature” (1836), “The Over-Soul”
(1841) and "The Poet“ (1844).
• He was an essayist who wrote about
individualism and self-reliance.
• His most famous essay, "Nature" was
published in 1836.
• He was a leader of the transcendentalist
movement that occurred in the mid-19th
century.
• This movement believed in the inherent
goodness of man and the corrupting
nature of societal influences.

25. Henry David Thoreau
(1817–1862)
Prominent works: “Walden; or, Life in the
Woods” (1854), “Civil Disobedience” (1849),
“The Last Days of John Brown” (1860).
• A leading transcendentalist
• Thoreau is best known for his book
Walden (1854), a reflection upon simple
living in natural surroundings, and his
essay Civil Disobedience (1849), an
argument for disobedience to an unjust
state.
• He supported individual resistance
against unjust civil governments

26. Margaret Fuller
(1810 – 1850)
Prominent works: Summer on the
Lakes (1844), Woman in the Nineteenth
Century (1845), Papers on Literature and
Art (1846)
• She was an editor of The Dial, an important
Transcendentalist magazine.
• She was the first American female war
correspondent, writing for Horace
Greeley's New-York Tribune, and full-time
book reviewer in journalism.
• Her book ”Woman in the Nineteenth
Century” is considered the first
major feminist work in the United States.

27. Three men—Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
and Walt Whitman—began
publishing novels, short stories,
and poetry during the Romantic
period that became some of the
most-enduring works of
American literature.

28. Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804 –1864)
Prominent works: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The
House of the Seven Gables (1851), “Young
Goodman Brown” (1835), "The Birth-Mark“ (1843).
• As a young man, he published short stories,
most notable among them the allegorical “Young
Goodman Brown” (1835).
• In the 1840s he crossed paths with the
Transcendentalists before he started writing his
two most significant novels—The Scarlet
Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven
Gables (1851).
• His works often focus on history, morality, and
religion.

29. Herman Melville
(1819 —1891)
• His first books were fiction in the guise of
factual writing based upon experiences as a
sailor.
• His book “Mardi” (1849) is an uneven and
disjointed transitional book that used allegory
to comment upon ideas afloat in the period—
about nations, politics,
institutions, literature, and religion.
• The centennial of his birth in 1919 was the
starting point of a Melville revival, and Moby-
Dick grew to be considered one of the great
American novels.
Prominent works: “Moby-Dick” (1851),
“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), “Benito
Cereno” (1855), " Typee: A Peep at Polynesian
Life “ (1846).

30. Walter Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
Prominent works: “ Leaves of
Grass,” (1855), "O Captain! My Captain!"
(1865) and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom'd“ (1865)
• He wrote poetry that described his home,
New York City.
• He refused the traditional constraints of
rhyme and meter in favor of free verse
in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his
frankness in subject matter and tone
repelled some critics.
• But the book, which went through many
subsequent editions, became a landmark
in American poetry, and it epitomized the
ethos of the Romantic period.

31. During the 1850s, as
the United States
headed toward civil
war, more and more
stories by and about
enslaved and free
African Americans
were written.

32. Brown
(1814–1884)
• Published what is considered the first
black American novel, Clotel, in 1853.
• He also wrote the first African American
play to be published, The Escape (1858).
• Brown’s only novel, Clotel (1853), tells
the story of the daughters and
granddaughters of President Thomas
Jefferson and his slave Currer.
Prominent works: Clotel (1853), The
Escape (1858), The Black Man (1863)

33. Harper
(1825—1911)
• She became one of the first black women
to publish fiction in the United States
• She became a director of the American
Association of Education of Colored
Youth in 1894
• In 1896 she helped organize the National
Association of Colored Women, of which
she was elected a vice president in 1897.
Prominent works: Poems on Miscellaneous
Subjects (1854), “Sketches of Southern Life”
(1872), Forest Leaves (1845)

34. Emily Dickinson
(1830 –1886)
• She lived a life quite unlike other writers of the
Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion;
• Only a handful of her poems were published
before her death in 1886;
• And she was a woman working at a time when
men dominated the literary scene.
• Yet her poems express a Romantic vision as
clearly as Walt Whitman’s or Edgar Allan
Prominent works: “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”,
“Because I could not stop for Death –”, “My Life
had stood – a Loaded Gun”, “A Bird, came down
the Walk –”, “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

35. Realism and Naturalism
(1870 to 1910)

36. This was the essen
ce of realism
• The human cost of the Civil War
in the United States was immen
se.
• And what emerged in the followi
ngdecades was a
literature that presented a detail
ed and unembellished
vision of the world as it truly was
.

37. Naturalism was an intensified
form of realism. After the grim
realities of a devastating war,
they became writers’ primary
mode of expression.

38. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne
Clemens)
(1835 –1910)
• Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a
riverboat captain before he became, Mark Twain.
• He first used that name while reporting on politics
in the Nevada Territory.
• It then appeared on the short story “The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,”
published in 1865, which catapulted him to
national fame.
• Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its
characters were realistic depictions of actual
Prominent works: The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),
The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872)

39. Naturalism, like realism, was
a literary movement that drew
inspiration from French
authors of the 19th century
who sought to document,
through fiction, the reality
that they saw around them,
particularly among the middle
and working classes living in
cities.

40. Theodore Dreiser
(1871 –1945)
Prominent works: Sister Carrie (1900) , The
Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), A Traveler at
Forty (1913)
• He was foremost among American writers who
embraced naturalism.
• His Sister Carrie (1900) is the most important
American naturalist novel.
• He was the leading figure in a national
literary movement that replaced the
observance of Victorian notions of propriety
with the unflinching presentation of real-life
subject matter.

41. Dunbar
(1872—1906)
• He was an African American writer who wrote
poetry in black dialect—“Possum,” “When de Co’n
Pone’s Hot”
• They were popular with his white audience and
gave them what they believed was reality for black
Americans.
• Dunbar also wrote poems not in dialect—“We Wear
the Mask,” “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality
of racism in America during Reconstruction and
afterward.
Prominent works: Oak and Ivy (1893), Majors
and Minors (1895), Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)

42. Henry James
(1843 –1916)
• Henry James shared the view of the
realists and naturalists that literature
ought to present reality
• But his writing style and use of literary
form sought to also create an aesthetic
experience, not simply document truth.
• He was preoccupied with the clash in
values between the United States and
Europe.
Prominent works: The American (1877),
The Portrait of a, Lady (1881), What
Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of the
Dove (1902), The Golden Bowl (1904)

43. The Modernist
Period
(1910 to 1945)

44. These contradictory
impulses can be found
swirling within modernism,
a movement in the arts
defined first and foremost
as a radical break from the
past.
Advances in science and
technology in Western
countries rapidly intensified at
the start of the 20th century
and brought about a sense of
unprecedented progress.
The devastation of World War
I and the Great Depression
also caused widespread
suffering in Europe and the
United States.

45. But this break was often an
act of destruction, and it
caused a loss of faith in
traditional structures and
beliefs. Despite, or perhaps
because of, these
contradictory impulses, the
modernist period proved to
be one of the richest and
most productive in
American literature
USA .1900-1920

46. F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896 –1940)
• American short-story writer and novelist
• He skewered the American Dream
in The Great Gatsby (1925).
• He was best known for his novels
depicting the flamboyance and excess of
the Jazz Age—a term which he
popularized.
Prominent works: The Great Gatsby
(1925), This Side of Paradise (1920),
Tender Is the Night (1934)

47. Richard Wright
(1908–1960)
Prominent works: Native Son
(1940), Black Boy (1945).
• Novelist and short-story writer who was
among the first African American writers
to protest white treatment of Blacks.
• He exposed and attacked American
racism in Native Son (1940).
• He inaugurated the tradition of protest
explored by other Black writers
after World War II.

48. y
(1899 –1961)
• American novelist and short-story writer,
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1954
• His early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926)
and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the
disillusionment of the Lost Generation.
• His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a
powerful influence on American and British
Prominent works: The Sun Also
Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

49. William Faulkner
(1897 –1962)
• American novelist and short-story writer who
was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for
Literature.
• Faulkner was known for his experimental style
with meticulous attention
to diction and cadence.
• He used stream-of-consciousness
monologues and other formal techniques to
Prominent works: The Sound and the Fury
(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August
(1932).

50. T.S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
Prominent works: The Waste Land (1922), The
Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930) and
Four Quartets (1943).
• Rejected the romantic view of the individual’s
perfectibility, stressed the doctrine of the original
sin
• His poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist
movement
• ‘The Waste Land’ – a 400 lines poem – pictured
a materialistic age dying of lack of belief in
anything
• Was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in

51. Harlem Renaissance, a blossoming (c.
1918–37) of African American culture,
particularly in the creative arts, and the
most influential movement in African
American literary history. It produced a
rich coterie of poets, among
them Countee Cullen, Langston
Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice
Dunbar Nelson.

52. Countee Cullen
(1903—1946)
Prominent works: Color (1925),
The Black Christ and Other
Poems (1929), Copper Sun (1927).
• In 1923, Cullen won second prize in the Witter
Bynner undergraduate poetry contest, which
was sponsored by the Poetry Society of
America
• His poems examine African roots and
intertwine them with a fresh aspect of African
American life.
• Countee Cullen's work intersects with the
Harlem community and such prominent figures

53. Langston Hughes
(1901–1967)
Prominent works: “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers” (1921), Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927),
The Ways of White Folks (1934)
• American writer who was an important figure in
the Harlem Renaissance
• Made the African American experience the
subject of his writings, which ranged
from poetry and plays to novels and
newspaper columns.
• The Panther and the Lash, published
posthumously in 1967, reflected and engaged
with the Black Power movement.

54. Drama came to prominence for
the first time in the United
States in the early 20th
century. Playwrights drew
inspiration from European
theater but created plays that
were uniquely and enduringly
American.

55. Eugene O'Neill
(1888 –1953)
• He was the foremost American playwright of the
period.
• His Long Day’s Journey into Night (written
1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of
more than 20 years of creativity that began in
1920.
• Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna
Christie, perhaps the classic American example
Prominent works: Long Day’s Journey into
Night (posthumously 1956): Beyond the
Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange
Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The
Iceman Cometh (1946).

56. The Contemporary
Period
(1945 to present)

57. The United States, which emerged from World War II confident
and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s.
This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped American literature
during the second half of the 20th century.
The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the
United States driven by the civil rights movement and the
women’s movement.
Prior to the last decades of the 20th century, American
literature was largely the story of dead white men who had created
Art and of living white men doing the same.
By the turn of the 21st century, American literature had
become a much more complex and inclusive story grounded on a
wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States
by people of different backgrounds and open to more
Americans in the present day.

58. Ellison
(1914—1994)
• His novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the
story of an unnamed black man adrift in, and
ignored by, America.
• For The New York Times, the best of these
essays in addition to the novel put him
"among the gods of America's
literary Parnassus
• A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was
published after being assembled from
Prominent works: Invisible Man (1952),
Shadow and Act (1964), Going to the
Territory (1986)

59. James Baldwin
(1924 –1987)
Prominent works: The Fire Next Time (1963),
Another Country (1962), Go Tell It on the
Mountain (1953)
• He wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and
sexuality throughout his life.
• His first novel, Go Tell It on the
Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished
and influential.
• Baldwin's novels, short stories,
and plays fictionalize fundamental personal
questions and dilemmas amid
complex social and psychological pressures.

60. Toni Morrison
(1931—2019)
Prominent works: The Bluest Eye (1970),
Beloved
(1987), Song of Solomon (1977).
• Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a
writing career that would put the lives of black
women at its center.
• The critically acclaimed Beloved (1987), which won
a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the true
story of a runaway slave who, at the point of
recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare
her a life of slavery.
• In 1975, her second novel Sula (1973), about a
friendship between two black women, was nominated

61. Charles Bukowski
(1920 –1994)
Prominent works: Post Office (1971),
Ham on Rye (1982), Women (1978).
• His writing was influenced by the social,
cultural, and economic ambience of his home
city of Los Angeles.
• His work addresses the ordinary lives of poor
Americans, the act of writing, alcohol,
relationships with women, and the drudgery of
work.
• Bukowski wrote thousands of poems,
hundreds of short stories and six novels,
eventually publishing over 60 books.

62. Among representative novels are:
• Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s
Song (1979)
• Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)
• Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)
• Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
• Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
• Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

63. Chicago literature is
writing, primarily by writers born
or living in Chicago, that
reflects the culture of the city.
Due to these rapid
changes, Chicago writers of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries
faced the challenge of how to
depict this potentially
disorienting new urban reality.

64. Chicago's dynamic growth, as well as the
manufacturing, economics, and politics that fueled this
growth, can be seen in the works of writers like Carl
Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood
Anderson, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, Upton
Sinclair, Willa Cather, and Edna Ferber.

65. Carl Sandburg
(1878 –1967)
Prominent works: Chicago Poems (1916),
Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920)
• He was an American poet, biographer,
journalist, and editor.
• He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his
poetry and one for his biography of Abraham
Lincoln.
• He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his
day, perhaps because the breadth of his
experiences connected him with so many
strands of American life"

66. The Beat
movement was short-
lived—starting and
ending in the 1950s—
but had a lasting
influence on American
poetry during the
contemporary period.

67. Its adherents, self-styled as
“beat” (originally meaning
“weary,” but later also
connoting a musical sense, a
“beatific” spirituality, and other
meanings) and derisively called
“beatniks,” expressed their
alienation from conventional,
or “square,” society by
adopting a style of dress,
manners, and “hip” vocabulary
borrowed from jazz musicians.

68. Allen Ginsberg
(1926 –1997)
Prominent works: Howl and Other Poems
(1956),
Kaddish and Other Poems (1961)
• He became an influential guru of the American
youth counterculture in the late 1960s.
• Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) pushed aside the
formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that
had come to dominate American poetry.
• Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset
Americans’ expectations for poetry during the
second half of the 20th century and beyond.

69. Jack Kerouac
(1922-1969)
Prominent works: “On the Road” (1957),
“The Dharma Bums” (1958), “Book of Dreams”
(1961), “Big Sur” (1962), “Visions of Gerar”
(1963).
• He was an American writer.
• Best known for the novel 'On the Road,'
which became an American classic.
• Pioneering the Beat Generation in the
1950s.

70. Confessional poetry is a style of poetry that
emerged in the US during the late 1950s and
early 1960s.
It is sometimes also classified as a form
of Postmodernism.
It has been described as poetry of the personal
or "I", focusing on extreme moments of
individual experience, the psyche, and personal
trauma, including previously and occasionally
still taboo matters such as mental illness,
sexuality, and suicide, often set in relation to
broader social themes.

71. Sylvia Plath
(1932 –1963)
Prominent works: The Colossus and Other
Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), The Bell Jar
(1963).
• She was an American poet, novelist, and short-
story writer.
• She is credited with advancing the genre
of confessional poetry.
• The Collected Poems were published in 1981,
which included many previously unpublished
works.
• For this collection Plath was awarded
a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982.

72. Robert Lowell
(1917–1977)
Prominent works: “Land of Unlikeness” (1944),
“Lord Weary's Castle” (1946), “The Mills of The
Kavanaughs” (1951), “Life Studies” (1959).
• He was an American poet.
• Lowell was a conscientious objector during
World War II.
• During the 1960s, Lowell was the most public,
well-known American poet.
• He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947
and 1974, the National Book Critics Circle
Award in 1977, and a National Institute of
Arts and Letters Award in 1947.

73. Anne Sexton
(1928–1974)
Prominent works: “Winter Colony” (1959),
“Her Kind” (1981), “The Truth the Dead Know”
(1981), “Wanting to Die” (1981), “Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs” (1981).
• She was an American poet known for her
highly personal, confessional verse.
• She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in
1967 for her book Live or Die.
• Her poetry details her long battle with
depression, suicidal tendencies, and
intimate details from her private life.

74. New Journalism, American literary
movement in the 1960s and ’70s
that pushed the boundaries of
traditional journalism and nonficti
on writing.
The genre combined journalistic
research with the techniques
of fiction writing in the reporting of
stories about real-life events.

75. Tom Wolfe
(1930–2018)
Prominent works: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-
Flake Streamline Baby” (1965), The Right
Stuff (1979), “From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)
• He was one of the most influential promoters of the
New Journalism.
• In 1973 Wolfe published The New Journalism, in
which he explicated the features of the genre.
• Wolfe’s third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004),
examines modern-day student life at fictional Dupont
University through the eyes of small-town protagonist
Charlotte Simmons.
• In 2010 Wolfe was awarded the Medal for
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from
the National Book Foundation

76. Gay Talese
(1932)
Prominent works: “Thy Neighbor's Wife” (1980),
“The Voyeur's Motel” (2016), his most famous articles
are about Joe DiMaggio, Dean Martin and Frank
Sinatra
• He did not consider himself a New Journalist but
rather a very traditional writer who wanted to “do
something that would hold up over time, something
that could get old and still have the same resonance.”
• He also came to associate New Journalism with
writers who were more interested in flashiness and
celebrity than the hard legwork required of good
reporters.
• Yet Talese admired the work of Wolfe and Norman
Mailer, and he influenced many others writers in the

77. Truman Capote
(1924–1984)
Prominent works: ”In Cold Blood” (1965),
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1958),
• He became a central figure in the New Journalism
in 1965 when The New Yorker magazine serialized
Capote’s nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.
• His aim was to write about real-life events in a
way that had the dramatic power, excitement, and
intricate structure of a novel.
• He also triggered controversy as skeptical
reporters, wary of his attempts to combine fiction
and journalism.

78. Jewish American literature encompasses
traditions of writing in English, primarily, as
well as in other languages, the most
important of which has been Yiddish.
While critics and authors generally
acknowledge the notion of a distinctive
corpus and practice of writing
about Jewishness in America, many writers
resist being pigeonholed as "Jewish voices."
Also, many nominally Jewish writers cannot
be considered representative of Jewish
American literature, one example
being Isaac Asimov.

79. Isaac Asimov
(1920 –1992)
Prominent works: Foundation (1951), I,
Robot
(1950)
• He was an American writer and professor
of biochemistry at Boston University.
• He was known for his works of science
fiction and popular science.
• Asimov was a prolific writer, and wrote or edited
more than 500 books. He also wrote an
estimated 90,000 letters and postcards

80. Gertrude Stein
(1874 –1946)
Prominent works:Three Lives (1909), The
Making of Americans (1925), Four Saints in
Three Acts (1934)
• She was an American novelist, poet, playwright,
and art collector.
• Her works include novels, plays, stories, libretti,
and poems written in a highly idiosyncratic,
playful, repetitive, and humorous style.
• any of the experimental works such as Tender
Buttons have since been interpreted by critics as
a feminist reworking of patriarchal language.

81. • Asian American literature is the body of
literature produced in the US by writers of
Asian descent.
• It became a category during the 1970s.
• Common themes in Asian American literature
include race, culture, and finding a sense
of identity.
• While these topics can be subjective, some
of the pinpointed ideas tie into gender,
sexuality, age, establishing traditional and
adaptive culture, and
Western racism towards Asians.

82. Amy Ruth
Tan (1952)
Prominent works: The Joy Luck Club
(1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The
Hundred Secret Senses (1995)
• She is is an American author known for the
novel The Joy Luck Club, which was adapted into
a film of the same name in 1993 by director Wayne
Wang.
• Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife,
focuses on the relationship between an immigrant
Chinese mother and her American-born daughter.
• Tan's third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses,
was a departure from the first two novels, in

83. Justin Chin (1969–
2015)
Prominent works: Bite Hard (1997), Harmless
Medicine (2001), and Gutted (2006), Mongrel:
Essays, Diatribes, & Pranks (1998), Burden of
Ashes (2002)
• Hу was a Malaysian American poet, essayist
and performer.
• In his work he often dealt with queer Asian
American identity and interrogated this
category's personal and political
circumstances.
• Through his works Justin Chin worked to
give voice to marginalized groups of racial,
national or sexual minorities.

84. Southern United States
literature consists of American
literature written about
the Southern US or by writers from
the region.
Literature written about the
American South first begun during
the colonial era, and developed
significantly during and after the
period of slavery in the US.

85. Traditional historiography of Southern US literature emphasized a
unifying history of the region;
• the significance of family in the South's culture
• a sense of community
• the role of the individual
• Justice
• the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts
of religion
• racial tensions
• social class
• the usage of local dialects.

86. Notable works
Black Boy Richard Wright 1945
Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men James Agee 1941
The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929
Mind of the South Wilbur Cash 1929
Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe 1929
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960
The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937
Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner 1936
Lanterns on the Levee William Alexander Percy 1941
All the King's Men Robert Penn Warren 1946

87. Thank you for your
attention!