American writers

Henry James (1843-1916)

He is an American novelist and, as a naturalised English citizen from 1915, a great figure of transatlantic culture. His main theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the Old.
Notable works:

• Daisy Miller

• The Ambassadors

• The American

• The Turn of the Screw

• Washington Square

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

American short-story writer, poet, critic and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. He is part of the American renaissance movement. His novel The Murders in the Rue Morgue initiated the modern detective story and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivalled in American fiction. 
Notable works:

• Annabel Lee

• Leonor

• The Fall of the House of Usher

• The Raven

• The Tell-Tale Heart

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature. Child of a farmer’s family, he lived in the North of the US. After some financial difficulties the family moved to Brooklyn. The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) Whitman sold a house and printed it at his own cost, no publisher name nor author’s name appeared on the first cover, only a portrait of himself. This publication was acclaimed, especially by poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Notable works:

• I Sing the Body Electric

• O Captain! My Captain!

• Song of Myself

• Drum-Traps

• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

He was an American poet who was one of the leading late 20th-century exponents of the Transcendentalist tradition. He won three prizes during his career: National Book Award, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1995) and Bollingen Prize (1975). From 1964 to 1998 he taught creative writing at Cornell University. As Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ammons wrote about nature and the self. His work is both cerebral and conversational, embodying the often lofty meditations of one well-rooted in the mundane. 

Notable works:

• A Coast of Trees

• Sumerian Vistas

Richard Powers (1957-)

American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Award for fiction. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. In 1989 he was named a MacArthur Fellow: prize awarded annually to typically between 20 and 30 individuals working in any field who have shown ‘extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction’ and are citizens or residents of the United States.

Notable works:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

• Prisoner’s Dilemma

• The Gold Bug Variations

Margaret Atwood (1939-)

She is a Canadian writer best known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective, though she does not like the idea of feminism. She writes works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and dystopias. She won the Governor General’s Literary Awards (1985) and the Booker Prize (2000, 2009). She lived in the woods since her father, an entomologist conducted research, and started writing at a very young age. Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centering on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them. 

Notable works:

• The Handmaid’s Tale

• The Testaments

• Oryx and Crake

• Cat’s Eye

• MaddAddam

Harriet Beecher (1811-1896)

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American writer and philanthropist. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed so much to popular  feeling against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American Civil War. 

Notable works:

• A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• The Minister’s Wooing

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)

He was an American writer who won eminence with his first novel, Invisible Man which won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction. At first, he wrote short stories, reviews, and essays. He lectured widely on Black culture, folklore, and creative writing and taught at various American colleges and universities. 

Notable works:

• Flying Home and Other Stories

• Going to the Territory

• Invisible Man

• Shadow and Act

Langston Hughs (1902-1967)

American writer and poet who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and made the African American experience the subject of his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns. 

Notable works:

• Dream Variation

• Harlem

• Mule Bone

• Not Without Laughter

• The Big Sea

Percival Everett (1956-)

He is an American writer whose work reflects a wide range of subjects and styles and often deals head-on with philosophy and preconceptions concerning race. His 2020 novel Telephone was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 

Notable works:

• The trees

• Half an Inch of Water

• Trout’s Lie

• I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Don de Lillo (1936-)

American novelist whose postmodernist works portray the anomie of an American cosseted by material excess and stupefied by empty mass culture and politics. After his studies, he worked for years as a copywriter at an advertising agency. In addition to his novels, he wrote many plays, the screenplay to the independent film Game 6 and a short-story collection. He received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013 and the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2015. 

Notable works:

• Americana

• Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

• Falling Man

• White Noise

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977-)

He is an American novelist and teaches creative writing at the New York University. His father is a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute and his mother is the child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland. 

Notable works:

• Everything is Illuminated

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

• Eating Animals

• Here I Am

Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784)

Though she was an enslaved person, she was one of the best known poets in pre-19th century America. She was seized from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa when she was seven years old and transported to Boston docks. The Wheatley family, to whom she belonged, taught her how to read and write, though not taking away her domestic duties. In addition to classical and neoclassical techniques, Wheatley applied biblical symbolism to evangelise and to comment on slavery. 

Notable works:

• Poems on Various Subjects

• On Being Brought from Africa to America

Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

She is an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly of Black female experience) within the Black community and for her poetic, luminous prose. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, becoming the first Black female writer in history to be honoured with the prize. She grew up in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for Black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were deeply formative parts of her childhood. She began working as a textbook editor, then became Random House’s first female African American editor. After this, she began teaching writing at the State University of New York. 

Notable works:

• The Bluest Eye

• Beloved

• Home

• Sula

• Son of Solomon

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

He is an American novelist and short-story writer whose works are characterised by an acute ear for dialogue, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful entanglements of sexual and familial love. For his work American Pastoral, Roth was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He retired from writing in 2012.  

Notable works:

• American Pastoral

• The Ghost Writer

• My Life as a Man

• Portnoy’s Complaint

• The Anatomy Lesson

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

He was an American playwright, who combined social awareness with a searching concern for his characters’ inner lives. He was shaped by the Great Depression, which brought financial ruin onto his father, a small manufacturer, and demonstrated to the young Miller the insecurity of modern existence. For Death of a Salesman, he won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. 

Notable works:

• After the Fall

• Death of a Salesman

• All my Sons

• The Crucible

• A Memory of Two Mondays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He was an American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism. He was part of the American Renaissance. He inherited the profession of divinity, his father being a Unitarian clergyman, which had attracted all his ancestors in direct line from Puritan days. 

Notable works:

• English Traits

• Nature

• Self-Reliance

• The Conduct of Life

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

He is a Russian-born American author and biochemist, a highly successful and prolific writer of science fiction and of science books for the layperson. He wrote or edited about 500 volumes, of which the most famous are those in the Foundation and robot series. 

Notable works:

• The Fun They Had

• I, Robot

• Foundation and Empire

• Second Foundation

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

He is an American short-story writer and novelist for his depiction of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was the only son of an unsuccessful, aristocratic father and an energetic, provincial mother. To escape the life that they feared might bring them to this end, the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera in 1924 and joined a group of American expatriates. He describes this society in his last complete novel Tender is the Night.

Notable works:

• The Great Gatsby

• Tales of the Jazz Age

• Tender is Night

• The Last Tycoon

Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-)

She is a Chinese-American writer, much of whose work is rooted in her experience as a first-generation Chinese American. His father arrived in the US first and was joined by his wife about 20 years later because of the Chinese Exclusion Act limiting immigration from Asian people in the US. She was teaching creative writing in University. She was arrested in 2003 while protesting against the Iraq War. 

Notable works:

• I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

• The Woman Warrior

• China Men

• To Be the Poet

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

She is an American folklorist and writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who celebrated African American culture of the rural South. She moved, at the age of 10 an all-black town in the country. When things got tougher at home, following her mom’s death, she went to university to study anthropology. 

Notable works:

• Dust Tracks on a Road

• Every Tongue Got to Confess

• Mules and Men

• Their Eyes Were Watching God

Paul Auster (1947-2024)

He was an American novelist, essayist, translator, screenwriter, and poet whose complex novels, several of which are mysteries, are often concerned with the search for identity and personal meaning.

Notable works:

• The New-York Trilogy 

• Moon Palace

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist, poet and leader of the Beat movement, whose most famous novel is On the Road (1957). While Kerouac’s mother worked in a shoe factory and his father worked as a printer, Kerouac attended a French Canadian school in the morning and continued his studies in English in the afternoon. He spoke joual, a Canadian dialect of French, and so, though he was an American, he viewed his country as if he were a foreigner.

Notable works:

• On the Road

• Desolation Angel

• Visions of Cody

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

She was an American novelist and short story writer, part of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen was born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a West Indian father who died when she was two years old. She studied for a year at Fisk University, one of America’s historically Black colleges and universities, where she first experienced life within an all-Black community.

Notable works:

• Passing

• Quicksand

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

He was an American dramatist whose plays reveal a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility.

Notable works:

• A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur

• A Streetcar Named Desire

• The Rose Tattoo