Key Writers and Writings:

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"- Jonathan Wintrop

Declaration of Independence- Thomas Jefferson

Common Sense- Thomas Paine

The Federalist Papers: Hamilton, Madison, John Jay

Knickerbockers: First American Literature

         Washington Irving-

                Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

        James Fenimore Cooper-

                The Leatherstocking Tales

               The Last of the Mohicans

        William Cullen Bryant- "Thanatopsis" (poetry)     

Transcendentalists:

        Henry David Thoreau- Walden, "On Civil Disobedience"

        Ralph Waldo Emerson- The Dial, "Self Reliance", "The American Scholar"

        Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass

Early American "Literary Lights":

        Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poetry)

        John Greenleaf Whittier (anti-slavery writings)

        James Russell Lowell- "Biglow Papers"

        Oliver Wendell Holmes

        Emily Dickinson (poetry)

        Louisa May Alcott- Little Women

        William Gilmore Simms- (the Cooper of the South)

        Edgar Allan Poe- "The Raven"

        Nathaniel Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter

        Herman Melville- Moby Dick

New Englanders: America's First Historians:

        George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, Francis Parkman

Declaration of Sentiments: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott

Uncle Tom's Cabin- Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Impending Crisis of the South- Hinton Helper

American Slavery As It Is-

The Liberator- William Lloyd Garrison

"Manifest Destiny"- John L. O'Sullivan

"The Frontier Thesis"- Frederick Jackson Turner

"Cross of Gold Speech"- William Jennings Bryan

Political Cartoons of Thomas Nast

A Century of Dishonor- Helen Hunt Jackson

The Impact of Sea Power Upon History- Alfred Thayer Mahan

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution- Charles and Mary Beard

Muckrakers:

        The Jungle- Upton Sinclair

       The Shame of the Cities- Lincoln Steffens

        How the Other Half Lives- Jacob Riis

        A History of Standard Oil- Ida Tarbell

The 1920's: Disillusionment in Literature

        H.L. Mencken- American Mercury

        The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald

        An American Tragedy- Theodore Dreiser

        A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway

        Main Street, Babbitt- Sinclair Lewis

        Poets: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings

1950's: Concerns about conformity

        The Lonely Crowd- David Riesman

        The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit- Sloan Wilson

        The Organization Man- William H. Whyte Jr.

        The Affluent Society- John Kenneth Galbraith

        The Power Elite- C. Wright Mills

        Beatniks: Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac

        Playwrights:

                Arthur Miller- Death of a Salesman

                Tennessee Williams- Streetcar Named Desire

                Lorraine Hansberry- A Raisin in the Sun

        Richard Wright- Native Son

        Ralph Ellison- The Fire Next Time

        J.D. Salinger- Catcher in the Rye

1960's:

        "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"- Martin Luther King

        "I Have a Dream"- Martin Luther King

        The Feminine Mystique- Betty Friedan

        Unsafe at Any Speed- Ralph Nader

        Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughterhouse Five

        The Naked and the Dead- Norman Mailer

        Catch 22- Joseph Heller

        Rabbit, Run- John Updike

"The Pentagon Papers"- Daniel Ellsberg

Silent Spring- Rachel Carson