After discussing with a friend what works one would include in a course on American history using fiction literature, I decided to make a list of significant literary works by American authors. This list only contains fiction literature, such as novels, short stories, poems, or plays. It does not contain non-fiction works, such as letters, diaries, essays, memoirs, or literary criticism. Some works from the New Journalism era that are technically factual but read like novels are included, however. The list also does not contain (with a few exceptions) children’s books or graphic novels. Books are listed chronologically so that it is easy to determine which works would fit into a history course that treats literature as cultural texts. If I have forgotten some key works, please let me know so I can add them.
1792: Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry
1797: Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette
1820: Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
1826: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans
1827: Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems
1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter
1851: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1855: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
1868: Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick
1868: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
1873: Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age
1881: Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady
1884: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1888: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward
1890: Emily Dickinson’s Poems
1892: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
1895: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
1899: Frank Norris’s McTeague
1899: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
1900: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
1900: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
1903: Jack London’s Call of the Wild
1904: O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings
1905: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth
1906: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
1908: Jack London’s The Iron Heel
1909: Jack London’s Martin Eden
1911: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
1912: Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage
1913: Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!
1914: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
1915: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland
1916: Robert Frost’s Mountain Interval
1918: Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons
1919: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
1920: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
1920: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise
1920: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street
1922: Ezra Pound’s The Cantos
1922: Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays
1922: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
1923: Jean Toomer’s Cane
1924: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd
1925: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
1926: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
1926: Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues
1927: Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey
1928: Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem
1928: Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude
1928: Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
1928: Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho
1929: Claude McKay’s Banjo
1929: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest
1929: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
1929: Nella Larsen’s Passing
1929: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
1930: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon
1930: Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter
1930: Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money
1930: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
1931: Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth
1933: Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris
1933: Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts
1934: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep
1934: Henry’s Miller’s Tropic of Cancer
1934: James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
1934: Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks
1934: Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour
1935: Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao
1935: Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty
1935: Langston Hughes’s Mulatto
1936: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
1936: James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity
1936: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
1937: John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
1937: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
1938: Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun
1938: John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.
1938: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town
1939: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
1939: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust
1939: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep
1940: Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
1940: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
1940: Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
1940: Henry Bellamann’s Kings Row
1940: Richard Wright’s Native Son
1941: James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce
1943: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead
1943: Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
1944: Benjamin A. Botkin’s A Treasury of American Folklore
1944: Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit
1944: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie
1945: Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville
1945: Richard Wright’s Black Boy
1946: Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar
1946: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men
1947: Arthur Miller’s All My Sons
1947: Marcia Davenport’s East Side, West Side
1947: Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire
1948: B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two
1948: Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions
1948: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead
1949: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
1949: Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky
1949: Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories
1950: Frances Parkinson Keyes’s Joy Street
1950: Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
1950: Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train
1950: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles
1951: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
1951: Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny
1951: Howard Fast’s Spartacus
1951: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
1951: James Jones’s From Here to Eternity
1952: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
1952: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
1952: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
1952: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
1953: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
1953: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain
1953: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
1953: Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye
1953: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
1954: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend
1955: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find
1955: Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park
1955: Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
1955: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions
1956: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
1957: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
1957: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
1957: John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle
1958: Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story
1958: Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American
1958: Isaac Asimov’s The Death Dealers
1958: Leon Uris’s Exodus
1958: Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder
1958: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
1959: Edward Albee’s The American Dream
1959: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
1959: Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus
1959: Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian
1959: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch
1959: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz
1960: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
1960: John Updike’s Rabbit, Run
1961: Edward Albee’s The American Dream
1961: J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
1961: Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
1961: Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road
1961: Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
1961: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
1962: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?
1962: Eugene Burdick’s Fail-Safe
1962: James Jones’s The Thin Red Line
1962: Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools
1962: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
1962: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time
1962: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
1962: Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes
1963: Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle
1963: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
1964: Saul Bellow’s Herzog
1965: Frank Herbert’s Dune
1965: Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple
1965: Robin Moore’s The Green Berets
1966: Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls
1966: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show
1966: Mary McCarthy’s The Group
1966: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Lot of 49
1966: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
1966: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
1967: Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby
1968: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
1968: Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea
1969: Joyce Carol Oates’s Them
1969: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five
1969: Philip K. Dick’s Ubik
1969: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint
1969: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
1970: James Dickey’s Deliverance
1970: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays
1970: Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
1970: Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull
1970: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
1971: Charles Bukowski’s Post Office
1971: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1971: Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland
1971: William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist
1972: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
1972: Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima
1973: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying
1973: Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions
1973: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
1973: Toni Morrison’s Sula
1974: Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island
1974: Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
1974: Stephen King’s Carrie
1974: Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio
1974: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
1975: Charles Bukowski’s Factorum
1975: Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift
1975: William Gaddis’s J. R.
1976: Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire
1976: Audre Lorde’s Coal
1976: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior
1976: Raymond Carver’s Will You Be Quiet, Please?
1976: Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster
1977: Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly
1977: Charles Bukowski’s Love Is a Dog from Hell
1978: Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream
1978: Charles Bukowski’s Women
1978: John Irving’s The World According to Garp
1978: Sam Shepard’s Buried Child
1978: Stephen King’s The Stand
1979: V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic
1979: Octavia Butler’s Kindred
1979: William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice
1980: Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior
1980: John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
1980: Philip K. Dick’s Valis
1980: Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity
1981: Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
1981: Tama Janowitz’s American Dad
1981: John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich
1982: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
1982: Howard Fast’s Max
1982: Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye
1983: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street
1984: August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
1984: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City
1984: Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October
1984: William Gibson’s Neuromancer
1985: August Wilson’s Fences
1985: Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero
1985: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
1985: Don DeLillo’s White Noise
1985: Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
1985: Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon
1987: Stephen King’s Misery
1987: Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities
1987: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
1988: David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly
1989: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
1989: Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood
1989: John Grisham’s A Time to Kill
1989: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love
1990: Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
1990: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
1990: William Gibson’s The Difference Engine
1991: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
1991: Douglas Coupland’s Generation X
1991: John Grisham’s The Firm
1991: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
1991: Wallace Shawn’s The Fever
1992: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses
1992: Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale
1992: Deborah Eisenberg’s Under the 82nd Airborne
1992: Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son
1992: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
1992: Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County
1993: Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides
1993: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Latin Deli
1993: Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
1994: John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
1994: Charles Bukowski’s Pulp
1996: Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City
1996: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
1996: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
1996: Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues
1996: Joe Klein’s Primary Colors
1996: Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back
1996: Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys
1997: Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain
1997: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
1997: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
1997: Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner
1999: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies
1999: Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower
2001: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
2002: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex
This list was compiled by Shalon van Tine.