Pre-1900 American

Pre-1900 American

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) – “The Author to Her Book,” “Verses Upon the Burning of our House, July 18th 1666”

Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711) – A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682)

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – "The Way to Wealth," The Autobiography (1771, 1784, 1788)

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813) ''Letters from an American Farmer ''(1782)

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) – "On Being Brought from Africa to America" (1773) "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770” (1773) "On Recollection" (1773) "On Imagination" (1773) "To S. M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works" (1773) “To his Excellency General Washington”

Washington Irving (1783-1859) – “A History of New York” (1809), "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” "Rip Van Winkle" (1819)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket (1838)

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)

"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)

"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1844)

"The Purloined Letter,” (1843)

“The Poetic Principle” (1848)

poems

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) – Nature (1836), “The American Scholar” (1837) “Self-Reliance,” (1841)'' ''“The Poet” (1844)

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) – Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864) – “Young Goodman Brown,” (1835) “The Minister’s Black Veil,” (1836) “The Birthmark,” (1843) “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  (1844) '' The Blithedale Romance'' (1852) (house of seven gables?)

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) – Narrative of the Life (1845), What to a Slave is the 4th of July? (1852)

Herman Melville (1819-1891) – Moby Dick (1851) Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) Benito Cereno (1855) Billy Budd (1891)

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) – Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) – Walden (1854)

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) – Leaves of Grass, preface to (1855)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) – “Success is counted sweetest” [ J67/Fr112] (c. 1859) “Wild Nights – Wild Nights” [ J249/Fr269] (c. 1861) "I'm nobody! Who are you" [ J288/Fr260] (c. 1861) “There’s a certain slant of light” [ J258/Fr320] (c. 1861) “I felt a funeral in my brain” [ J280/Fr340] (c. 1861) "I taste a liquor never brewed" [ J214/Fr207] (c. 1861) “Title divine is mine” [ J1072/Fr194] (c. 1862) “A bird came down the walk” [ J360/Fr359] (c. 1862) "He fumbles at your soul" [ J315/Fr477] (c.1862) “Death sets a thing significant” [ J360/Fr640] (c. 1862) "I'm ceded – I’ve stopped being their’s" [ J508/Fr353] (c. 1862) “This was a poet” [ J448/Fr446] (c. 1862 “I heard a fly buzz when I died” [ J465/Fr591] (c. 1862) “I started early – took my dog” [ J520/Fr656] (c. 1862) “They shut me up in prose” [ J613/Fr445] (c. 1862) "The soul selects her own society" [ J303/Fr409] (c. 1862) "I'm “wife” – I’ve finished that" [ J199/Fr225] (c. 1862) "It don’t sound so terrible quite as it did" [ J426/Fr384] (c. 1862) "Mine by the right of the white election" [ J528/Fr411] (c. 1862) “Essential oils are wrung” [ J675/Fr772] (c. 1863) “Publication is the auction” [ J709/Fr778] (c. 1863) “Because I could not stop for death” [ J712/Fr479] (c. 1863) "I reckon when I count at all" [ J569/Fr533) (c.1863) "This is my letter to the world" [ J441/Fr519] (c. 1863) "It feels a shame to be alive" [ J444/Fr524] (c. 1863) “My life had stood a loaded gun” [ J754/Fr764] (c. 1863) "My portion is defeat today" [ J639/Fr704] (c. 1863) “A loss of something ever felt I” [ J959/Fr1072] (c. 1864) “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” [ J1129/Fr1263] (c. 1868) “What mystery pervades a well” [ J1400/Fr1433] (c. 1877?) "Those dying then" [ J1551/Fr1581] (c. 1882) “Of God we ask one favor” [ J1601/Fr1675] (c. 1884)

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) – ''Life in the Iron Mills ''(1861)

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) – Little Women (1868)

Mark Twain (1835-1910) – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)'' ''Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

Frank Norris (1870-1902) – ''McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901)''

Henry James (1843-1916) – “Daisy Miller” (1878)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) – ''Maggie: A Girl of the Streets'' (1893)

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) – The Awakening (1899)

Theodore Dresier (1871-1945) – Sister Carrie (1900)

WEB Dubois (1868-1963) – ''The Souls of Black Folk ''(1903)

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) – The House of Mirth (1905)

Criticism & Biography

F.O. Matthiessen: ''American Renaissance; Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman''. New York: Oxford U P, 1968

= David S. Reynolds, ''Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville'' = Wendy Martin ''An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich''

Jane Tompkins, ''Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790 - 1860'' (1986)

(David Haven Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (2006))

Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (2006)

Cheryl Walker, ''The Nightengale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900''

DH Lawrence, ''Studies in Classic American Literature ''

Joel Porte: The Romance in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University P, 1969