Other American Literature Since 1865's


As I hope I've made clear all along, our reading list is only one of many possible reading lists that could all be called "Am Lit since 1865." If you'd like to keep reading, and discover for yourself how much great literature I left off the syllabus (and how reading it enriches, complicates, maybe even explodes the version of ENAM312 my syllabus created), here are some good books from the period we studied (1855 to 1965) to start with.

Fiction

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes (1880)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1882)
Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896)
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901) & The Pit (1903)
Jack London, The Sea Wolf (1904)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905) &
        The Age of Innocence (1920)
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909) &
        The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920)
Theodore Drieser, An American Tragedy (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. -- The 42nd Parallel (1931),
        1919 (1931), & The Big Money (1936)
Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) &
        Day of the Locust (1939)
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (1939)
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories (1971)
Thomas Pynchon, V (1963)
Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

Poetry

Robert Frost
Ezra Pound
e. e. cummings
Hart Crane
Langston Hughes
Marianne Moore
Elizabeth Bishop
Theodore Roethke
John Berryman
Adrienne Rich

Autobiography & Non-Fiction

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)
John Muir, Mountains of California (1894)
Thorsten Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain (1903)
Henry Adams, Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Waldo Frank, Our America (1919)
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925)
Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931)
Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)

Drama

Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty (1935)
Tennessee Williams, Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949)
Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night (1956)
Lorraine Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Dutchman (1964)

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