Reading list: American Literature 
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the British colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.[1]

The American Revolutionary Period (1775–1783) is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. An early novel is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1791. The writer and critic John Neal in the early-to-mid-19th century helped to advance America toward a unique literature and culture, by criticizing his predecessors, such as Washington Irving, for imitating their British counterparts and by influencing writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, who took American poetry and short fiction in new directions.[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson pioneered the influential Transcendentalism movement; Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, was influenced by this movement. The conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, and authors of slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) explored the dark aspects of human nature, as did Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Major American poets of the 19th century include Walt Whitman, Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born in the West. Henry James achieved international recognition with novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Following World War I, modernist literature rejected nineteenth-century forms and values. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the carefree mood of the 1920s, but John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, who became famous with The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner, adopted experimental forms. American modernist poets included diverse figures such as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. Great Depression-era writers included John Steinbeck, the author of The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937). America's involvement in World War II led to works such as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Prominent playwrights of these years include Eugene O'Neill, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature. In the mid-twentieth century, drama was dominated by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Musical theater was also prominent.

In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, there has been increased popular and academic acceptance of literature written by immigrant, ethnic, and LGBT writers, and of writings in languages other than English.[3] Examples of pioneers in these areas include the LGBT author Michael Cunningham, the Asian American authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Ocean Vuong, and African American authors such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. In 2016, the folk-rock songwriter Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.