Part One The Literature of Colonial America Historical Background · William Bradford (1590-1657) · John Winthrop (1588-1649) · Anne Bradstreet (i6i2-1672) · Edward Taylor (2645-1729) The Witchcraft Trials in the 1690s Part Two The Literature of Reason and Revolution Historical Background · Benjamin Franklin (i706-1790) · Thomas Paine (2737-i809) · Thomas Jefferson (2743-1826) · Philip Freneau (1752-1832) Part Three American Romanticism Historical Background Early Romanticism · Washington Irving (1783-1895) · James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) · William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) Summit of Romanticism--Transcendentalism · Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882i · Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) · Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) · Nathaniel Hawthorne (2804-1864) · Herman Melville (1819-1891) · Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) · Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Part Four American Realism Debates over Slavery · Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) Historical Background after the Civil War · Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) · Mark Twain (1835-1910) · Henry James (1843-1916) Naturalism · Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) · Jack London (1876-1916) · O. Henry (1862-1910) Part Five American Modernism Philosophical and Historical Background · Ezra Pound (1885-1972) · Robert Frost (1874-1963) · F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) · Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) · William Faulkner (1897-1962) · T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) · John Steinbeck (1902-1968) · Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) Part Six American Literature since 1945 Philosophical and Historical Background · Saul Bellow (1915-2005) · Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) · Arthur Miller (1915-2005) · Toni Morrison (1931-) · Alice Walker (1944-) · Joseph Heller (1923-1999) · Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) · Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) · J. D. Salinger (1919-2010) References