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

1. Washington Irving
● (born April 3, 1783, New York, New York, U.S. – died November 28, 1859, Tarrytown,
New York);
● Washington Irving was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian,
and diplomat of the early 19th century;
● He is called the “first American of letters”;
● He is best known for the short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van
Winkle”.

2. James Fenimore Cooper

● (born September 15, 1789, Burlington, New Jersey, U.S. – died September 14, 1851,
Cooperstown, New York);
● James Fenimore Cooper was an American writer of the first half of the 19th century;
● First major American novelist, author of the novels of frontier adventure known as the
Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the wilderness scout called Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye;
● They include The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827),
The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841).
3. Charles Brockden Brown
● (born January 17, 1771, Philadelphia)
● Charles Brockden Brown was a writer known as the “father of the American novel”;
● His gothic romances in American settings were the first in a tradition adapted by two of
the greatest early American authors, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne;
● He called himself a “story-telling moralist”;
● His first novel is Wieland (1798), he also wrote Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799),
and Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), as well as a number of less well known novels and a
book on the rights of women.

4. John Winthrop
● (born January 22, 1588, Edwardstone, Suffolk, England – died April 5, 1649, Boston,
Massachusetts Bay Colony U.S.);
● John Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the chief figure
among the Puritan founders of New England;
● His major contributions to the literary world were “A Modell of Christian Charity (1630)
and “The History of New England (1630-1649) also known as “The Journal of John
Winthrop”, which remained unpublished until the late 18th century.
5. Cotton Mather
● (born February 12, 1663, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, U.S. – died February 13,
1728, Boston);
● Cottton Mather was an American Congregational minister and author, supporter of the
old order of the ruling clergy, who became the most celebrated of all New England
Puritans;
● He combined a mystical strain (he believed in the existence of witchcraft) with a modern
scientific interest (he supported smallpox inoculation);
● His book, Bonifacius, or Essays to do God (1710), instructs others in humanitarian acts,
some ideas being far ahead of his time.
The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)

1. William Wordsworth
● (born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, England, – died April 23, 1850, Rydal
Mount, Westmorland);
● William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication;
● He is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

● (born October 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England – died July 25, 1834,
Highgate, near London);
● Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English lyrical poet, critic and philosopher;
● His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the english Romantic
movement: and
● His Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism
produced in the English Romantic period.
3. Lord Byron
● (born January 22, 1788, London, England – died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece);
● He was an British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the
imagination of Europe;
● Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” oh his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage (1812-18) in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the
satiric realism of Don Juan (1819-24)

4. John Keats
● (born October 31, 1795, London, England – died February 23, 1821, Rome, Papal states,
Italy);
● He is an English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a
poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and as attempt to express a
philosophy through classical legend;
● All his greatest poetry was written in a single year, 1819: “Lamia,” “The Eve of St.
Agnes,” the great odes (“On Indolence,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Psyche,” “To a
Nightingale,” “On Melancholy,” and “To Autumn”), and the two unfinished versions of
an epic on Hyperion.
5. Percy Bysshe Shelley
● (born Aug. 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, Eng.—died July 8, 1822, at sea
off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]);
● English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was
gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the
English language;
● His other major works include the verse drama The Cenci (1819) and long poems such as
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815), Julian and Maddalo (1819), Adonais (1821),
Prometheus Unbound (1820)—widely considered his masterpiece—Hellas (1822), and
his final, unfinished work, The Triumph of Life (1822).
Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)

1. Louisa May Alcott

● (born November 29, 1832, Germantown, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 6, 1888,
Boston, Massachusetts);
● American author known for her children’s books, especially the classic Little Women
(1868–69).

2. James Laurence Dunbar

● (born June 27, 1872, Dayton, Ohio, U.S.—died Feb. 9, 1906, Dayton);
● U.S. author whose reputation rests upon his verse and short stories written in black
dialect;
● He was the first black writer in the U.S. to make a concerted attempt to live by his
writings and one of the first to attain national prominence;
● His most well-regarded books include: Oak and Ivy (1893) - poetry. Majors and Minors
(1895) - poetry. Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896) - poetry.
3. Stephen Crane
● (born Nov. 1, 1871, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died June 5, 1900, Badenweiler, Baden, Ger.);
● American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known for his novels Maggie: A Girl
of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the short stories “The
Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “The Blue Hotel.”

4. Mark Twain
● (born November 30, 1835, Florida, Missouri, U.S.—died April 21, 1910, Redding,
Connecticut);
● American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for
his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and
Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
5. Edith Wharton
● (born January 24, 1862, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 11, 1937,
Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, near Paris, France);
● American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into
which she was born;
● Wharton's best-known work is the long tale Ethan Frome (1911), which exploits the
grimmer possibilities of the New England farm life she observed from her home in
Lenox, Massachusetts.
The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

1. Franz Kafka
● (born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died
June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria);
● German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works—especially the novel Der
Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The
Metamorphosis)—express the anxieties and alienation felt by many in 20th-century
Europe and North America.

2. Virginia Woolf
● (born January 25, 1882, London, England—died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex);
● English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a
major influence on the genre.
● She wrote the novels The Voyage Out (1915), Jacob's Room (1922), Orlando (1928), and
The Waves (1931). Her most famous essay was A Room of One's Own (1929).
3. Gertrude Stein
● (born Feb. 3, 1874, Allegheny City [now in Pittsburgh], Pa., U.S.—died July 27, 1946,
Neuilly-sur-Seine, France);
● avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius whose Paris home was a
salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II;
● One of the most famous poems written by Gertrude Stein is A Light in the Moon.

4. Joseph Conrad
● (born December 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv,
Ukraine]—died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England);
● English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels
Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story
“Heart of Darkness” (1902).
5. Samuel Beckett
● (born April 13?, 1906, Foxrock, County Dublin, Ireland—died December 22, 1989, Paris,
France);
● Author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote
in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays, especially En
attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot).
Post-Modernism / Contemporary Period (1945 to present)

1. Thomas Berger
● (born July 20, 1924, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died July 13, 2014, Nyack, New York);
● American novelist whose darkly comic fiction probes and satirizes the American
experience;
● Thomas Wolfe is famous for his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel.

2. Richard Brautigan
● (born Jan. 30, 1935, Tacoma, Wash., U.S.—found dead Oct. 25, 1984, Bolinas, Calif.);
● American novelist and poet known for ironic, often surreal works that conceal dark
humour and social criticism;
● Brautigan is the author of the poetry collections June 30th, June 30th (1978), Loading
Mercury with a Pitchfork (1975), The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968),
Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt (1970), and The San Francisco Weather Report
(1969), among others.
3. Don DeLillo
● (born November 20, 1936, New York, New York, U.S.);
● American novelist whose postmodernist works portray the anomie of an America
cosseted by material excess and stupefied by empty mass culture and politics;
● His first novel, Americana (1971), is the story of a network television executive in search
of the “real” America.

4. William Gaddis
● (born Dec. 29, 1922, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 16, 1998, East Hampton, N.Y.);
● American novelist of complex, satiric works who is considered one of the best of the
post-World War II Modernist writers;
● He first gained note as an author with the publication of his controversial novel The
Recognitions (1955).
5. Vladimir Nabokov
● (born April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia—died July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switzerland);
● Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors;
● He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955),
feature stylish, intricate literary effects.