American Literature: An

Essential Reading List

Included in this list are novels, plays, and short stories. The list is
organized chronologically by the birth date of the author.
Washington Irving (17831859)

Rip Van Winkle

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Alhambra

The Adventures of Captain Bonneville

James Fenimore Cooper (17891851)

The Last of the Mohicans

The Deerslayer

The Pathfinder
Nathaniel Hawthorne (18041864)

The Scarlet Letter

The House of Seven Gables

Edgar Allan Poe (18091849)

The Fall of the House of Usher

A Cask of Amontillado

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Pit and the Pendulum

Ligeia

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Harriet Beecher Stowe (18111896)

Uncle Toms Cabin

Frederick Douglass (18171882)

Life of an American Slave

Herman Melville (18191891)

Moby Dick

Bartleby the Scrivener

Louisa May Alcott (18321888)

Little Women
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (18351910)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court

The Innocents Abroad

The Prince and the Pauper

Henry James (18431916)

The American

The Europeans

The Portrait of a Lady

The Turn of the Screw

Kate Chopin (18511904)

The Awakening
O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (18621910)
Cabbages and Kings

The Heart of the West

Options

Roads of Destiny

The Voice of the City

Whirligigs
Edith Wharton (18621937)

The Age of Innocence

The House of Mirth

Ethan Fromme
Stephen Crane (18711900)

The Red Badge of Courage

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Theodore Dreiser (18711845)

An American Tragedy

Sister Carrie
Willa Cather (18731947)

Alexanders Bridge

My Antonia

Death Comes to the Archbishop

O Pioneers!

The Professors House

The Song of the Lark
Gertrude Stein (18741946)

Tender Buttons

Three Lives

The Making of Americans

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Portraits and Prayers

Edgar Rice Burroughs (18751950)

Tarzan of the Apes

The Gods of Mars

The Land That Time Forgot

The Warlord of Mars

Jack London (18761916)

The Call of the Wild

Upton Sinclair (18781968)

The Jungle
Sinclair Lewis (18851951)

Main Street

Babbitt

Dodsworth

Arrowsmith
Eugene ONeill (18881953)
Beyond the Horizon (Play)

Long Days Journey into Night (Play)

Mourning Becomes Electra (Play)

The Iceman Cometh (Play)

Desire Under the Elms (Play)

The Hairy Ape (Play)

Raymond Chandler (18881959)

The Big Sleep

Farewell, My Lovely

The Long Goodbye

Henry Miller (18911980)

Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Capricorn
Pearl S. Buck (18921973)

The Good Earth

The Proud Heart

Command the Morning

The Living Reed

Dashiell Hammett (18941962)

Red Harvest

The Maltese Falcon

The Glass Key

The Thin Man
F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940)

The Great Gatsby

Tender Is the Night

William Faulkner (18971962)

The Sound and the Fury

As I Lay Dying
Thornton Wilder (18971975)

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Our Town (Play)

Ernest Hemingway (18991961)

The Sun Also Rises

A Farewell to Arms

The Old Man and the Sea

Thomas Wolfe (19001938)

Look Homeward, Angel

You Cant Go Home Again

Margaret Mitchell (19001949)

Gone with the Wind

John Steinbeck (19021968)

The Grapes of Wrath

Of Mice and Men

Zora Neale Hurston (19031960)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Robert Penn Warren (19051989)

All the Kings Men

Richard Wright (19081960)

Native Son

Black Boy
Tennessee Williams (19111983)

The Glass Menagerie (Play)

A Streetcar Named Desire (Play)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Play)

The Rose Tattoo (Play)

Suddenly Last Summer (Play)

The Night of the Iguana (Play)

John Hersey (19141993)

A Bell for Adano

Hiroshima

The War Lover

White Lotus
William Burroughs (19141997)

Naked Lunch
Ralph Ellison (19141994)

Invisible Man
Saul Bellow (19152005)

The Adventures of Augie March

Herzog

Mr. Sammlers Planet

Arthur Miller (19152005)

All My Sons (Play)

Death of a Salesman (Play)

The Crucible (Play)

After the Fall (Play)

A View from the Bridge (Play)

The Price (Play)

Herman Wouk (1915 )

The Caine Mutiny

Marjorie Morningstar

Youngblood Hawke

Dont Stop the Carnival

J. D. Salinger (1919 )

Catcher in the Rye

Franny and Zooey

Ray Bradbury (1920 )

The Martian Chronicles

Fahrenheit 451
James Jones (19211977)

From Here to Eternity

Some Came Running

The Pistol

The Thin Red Line

Jack Kerouac (19221969)

On the Road

About On the Road

The Subterraneans
Kurt Vonnegut (1922 )

Slaughterhouse-Five

Breakfast of Champions
Joseph Heller (19231999)

Catch-22
Norman Mailer (1923 )

The Naked and the Dead

The Armies of the Night

Truman Capote (19241984)

Other Voices, Other Rooms

In Cold Blood

Breakfast at Tiffanys
Flannery OConnor (19251964)

Wise Blood
Gore Vidal (1925 )

Williwaw

The City and the Pillar

A Search for the King

The Judgment of Paris

Visit to a Small Planet

The Best Man

William Styron (19252006)

The Confessions of Nat Turner

Lie Down in Darkness

Harper Lee (1926 )

To Kill a Mockingbird
Edward Albee (1928 )

The Zoo Story (Play)

Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Play)

A Delicate Balance (Play)

Tiny Alice (Play)

Seascape (Play)

Three Tall Women (Play)

Ursula LeGuin (1929 )

The Lathe of Heaven

Dancing at the Edge of the World

The Dispossessed
Lorraine Hansberry (19301965)

A Raisin in the Sun (Play)

E. L. Doctorow (1931 )

The Book of Daniel

Ragtime
Toni Morrison (1931 )

Beloved

The Bluest Eye

Song of Solomon
Tom Wolfe (1931 )

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The Right Stuff

Sylvia Plath (19321963)

The Bell Jar

John Updike (1932 )

The Rabbit Series

Rabbit Run

Rabbit Redux

Rabbit is Rich

Rabbit at Rest

The Centaur
Cormac McCarthy (1933 )

The Road

Outer Dark

Child of God

Blood Meridian; or, the Evening Redness in the West

All the Pretty Horses

Philip Roth (1933 )

Portnoys Complaint

The Great American Novel

American Pastoral
John Kennedy Toole (19371969)

A Confederacy of Dunces
Joyce Carol Oates (1938 )

Them

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Alice Walker (1944 )

The Color Purple

August Wilson (1945 )

The Piano Lesson

Fences
David Mamet (1947 )

Glengarry Glen Ross (Play)

Speed the Plow (Play)

Tony Kushner (1956 )

Angels in America (Play)

American Poetry: An Essential
Reading List
The list is organized chronologically by the birth date of the author, and
the works range from single-verse poems to epic odes.
Anne Bradstreet (16121672)

Upon the Burning of Our House by Night When Others Soundly

Slept

Contemplations

A Dialogue Between Old England and New

The Flesh and the Spirit

The Four Ages of Man

Phillis Wheatley (17531784)

Liberty and Peace, A Poem

A Farewell to America to Mrs. S. W.

A Rebus, by Funeral Poem on the Death of C. E. An Infant of

Twelve Months

Ode to Neptune

On Being Brought from Africa to America

On Imagination

On Recollection

On Virtue
William Cullen Bryant (17941878)

To a Waterfowl

The Death of Lincoln

An Indian at the Burial Place of His Fathers

The Death of Slavery

To an American Painter Departing for Europe

Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)

The American Scholar

Self-Reliance

Nature
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18071882)

The Song of Hiawatha

Evangeline&rdquo#8221

Paul Reveres Ride

The Courtship of Miles Standish

John Greenleaf Whittier (18071892)

The Witch of Wenham

The Farewell: Of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold

into Southern Bondage

Barbara Frietchie

The Pumpkin
Edgar Allan Poe (18091849)

The Raven

The Bells
Oliver Wendell Holmes (18091894)

The Chambered Nautilus

Walt Whitman (18191892)

I Sing the Body Electric

Cavalry Crossing a Ford

A Noiseless Patient Spider

O Captain! My Captain!
Emily Dickinson (18301886)

Tis little I could care for pearls

Hope is a subtle glutton

Ill tell you how the sun rose

Forbidden fruit a flavor has

My life closed twice before its close

A narrow fellow in the grass

The brain is wider than the sky

The mountain sat upon the plain

Heart, we will forget him!

The bat is dun with wrinkled wings

Of bronze and blaze

Death is like the insect

So Proud she was to die

I heard a fly buzz when I died

Amy Lowell (18741925)

Before the Altar

Azure and Gold

Venetian Glass

Fatigue

Roads

Teatro Bambino

Frankincense and Myrrh

Robert Frost (18741963)

Stars

Mending Wall

The Death of the Hired Man

Home Burial

The Wood-pile

The Road Not Taken

Birches

Fire and Ice

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Vachel Lindsay (18791931)

The Flower-Fed Buffaloes

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

The Leaden-Eyed

The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmiths Son

The Congo

General William Booth Enters into Heaven

Wallace Stevens (18781955)

Disillusionment of Ten OClock

The Snow Man

Sunday Morning

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Anecdote of the Jar

The Idea of Order at Key West

Carl Sandburg (18781967)

Prairie Waters by Night

Adelaide Crapsey

Portrait of a Motor Car

Leather Leggings

Always the Mob

Near Keokuk

In Tall Grass

Chicago

Mill-Doors

Skyscraper

Murmurings in a Field Hospital

William Carlos Williams (18831963)

Berket and the Stars

April

This Is Just to Say

Spring and All

The Red Wheelbarrow

A Sort of Song

The Use of Force

Sara Teasdale (18841933)

The Long Hill

Barter

Peace

Dooryard Roses

Water Lilies

Night Wind at Amalfi

Ezra Pound (18851972)

In a Station of the Metro

Sestina: Altaforte

Ballad of the Goodley Fere

Edna St. Vincent Millay (18921950)

Renascence

Tavern
Ashes of Life

Sorrowful Dreams

Once More into My Arid Days

Night Is My Sister

The Cameo

Bluebeard
e. e. cummings (18941962)

anyone lived in a pretty wn

Buffalo Bills

in Just-

maggie and millie and molly and may

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

Spring is like a perhaps hand

what if a much of a which of a wind

the Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

why must itself up every of a park

Langston Hughes (19021967)

The Weary Blues

Harlem

Song for a Dark Girl

Ogden Nash (19021971)
The Sniffle

A Watched Example Never Boils

The Clean Platter

The Party

A Lady Thinks She Is Thirty

Riding on a Railroad Train

Shorts
W. H. Auden (19071973)

This Lunar Beauty

As I Walked Out One Evening

Muse des Beaux Arts

The Unknown Citizen

In Praise of Limestone
Theodore Roethke (19081963)

Elegy for Jane

I Knew a Woman

My Papas Waltz

In a Dark Time

The Waking
Elizabeth Bishop (19111979)

Filling Station

The Bight
Lullaby for the Cat

The Shampoo

In the Waiting Room

One Art

The Moose
Gwendolyn Brooks (19172000)

The Bean Eaters

We Real Cool

Sadie and Maud

Kitchenette Building
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919 )

Pictures of the Gone World

A Coney Island of the Mind

Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt

Sometime During Eternity

Baseball Canto

Dog
Howard Nemerov (19201991)

Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Definition

Trees

Learning by Doing
The Great Gull
Denise Levertov (19231997)

The Secret

Variation and Reflection on a Theme by Rilke

The Ache of Marriage

People at Night

Remembering
Alan Ginsberg (19261997)

Howl

Kaddish

Sunflower Sutra
James Merrill (19261995)

Lost in Translation

The Changing Light at Sandover

W. D. Snodgrass (1926 )

April Inventory

Hearts Needle
John Ashbery (1927 )

Some Trees

Faust

Forties Flick

For John Clare

James Wright (19271980)

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

Beginning
W. S. Merwin (1927 )

Yesterday

My Friends

Beggars and Kings

For the Anniversary of My Death

Some Last Questions

Anne Sexton (19281974)

Her Kind

My Friend, My Friend
Maya Angelou (1928 )

Phenomenal Women

Still I Rise
Philip Levine (1928 )

Animals Are Passing from Our Lives

They Feed They Lion

Salts and Oils

Gin

What Work Is
Adrienne Rich (1929 )

Miracle Ice Cream

In Those Years

For the Dead

From a Survivor

From Two Songs

Sylvia Plath (19321963)

Daddy

Two Sisters of Persephone

Lady Lazarus

Metaphors

Mad Girls Love Song

Mushrooms

The Colossus

Paralytic

Virgin in a Tree
Charles Simic (1938 )

The Wooden Toy

Everythings Forseeable

Against Winter

In the Fourth Year

He Held the Beast

I Was Stolen
Miracle Glass Co.
Louise Glck (1943 )

The Silver Lily

Circes Power

Confession

Celestial Music
James Tate (1943 )

More Later, Less the Same

The Wrong Way Home

Happy As the Day Is Long

The Definition of Gardening

The New Ergonomics

Days of Pie and Coffee

Restless Leg Syndrome