Books

Celebrating American Literary History

In honor of Independence Day, Bookshare.org is pleased to present this list of fifty notable books and authors that have shaped American literary history. From beatniks to poets, these authors, through their evocative, and sometimes provocative, words have made American literature what it is today.

• The Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 3 by Samuel Adams, Harry Alonso Cushing (editor)
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• The Complete Stories of Truman Capote by Truman Capote, Reynolds Price (Introduction)
• Fairy Tales by E. E. Cummings
• Poems, Series 1 by Emily Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd (editor), T. W. Higginson (editor)
• My Escape from Slavery by Frederick Douglass
• The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
• The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• Essays, First Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
• You Come Too by Robert Frost
• Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams (introduction)
• Roots by Alex Haley
• The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway
• The Gift of the Magi and Other Short Stories by O. Henry
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
• A Nation of Immigrants (revised and enlarged edition) by John F. Kennedy
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• John Adams by David McCullough
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Focus by Arthur Miller
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
• Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike
• Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• Native Son by Richard Wright

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