Famous American Authors

James Fennimore Cooper – First great American author; wrote in the early 19th century; wrote The Last of the Mohicans; popularized naturalist literature; explored the line between civilization and nature.

Washington Irving – Another famous American author writing in early 19th century; often wrote about New York or the Hudson River Valley; created “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Transcendentalist essayist and philosopher from New England; icon of the Romantic Age; wanted people to embrace change and value individuality; wrote “Self Reliance.”

Henry David Thoreau – Follower of Emerson and a believer in the power of the individual to triumph over evil social pressures; wrote “Civil Disobedience” and Walden.

Nathaniel Hawthorne – Romantic Age writer of the mid-19th century; often wrote about colonial New England; most famous for House of Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter.

Edgar Allan Poe – Romantic Age writer and poet; wrote about the dark side of mid-19^th century society; famous short stories include “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Poet of the mid-19^th century; wrote “Hiawatha” and “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Herman Melville – Writer of late 19th century; most books had a nautical theme; wrote Moby Dick.

Harriet Beecher Stowe – Northeastern political writer; her international hit Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramatized slave society and became a weapon used by abolitionists to alert people to the evils of slavery.

Walt Whitman – Romantic poet and essayist of the mid-19th century; most famous work is Leaves of Grass, a free verse collection reveling in emotions and sensations.

Mark Twain – Perhaps the most famous American author; rooted in the realist tradition, Twain used humor and satire to dramatize life during the Gilded Age; works include Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, The Innocents Abroad.

Henry James – A contemporary of Twain, James depicted the complexities of characters in sophisticated post-bellum society; works include The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians.

Upton Sinclair – Used novels to alert readers to social ills; The Jungle sensationalized and dramatized the lack of safety and sanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry.

Edith Wharton – First great female writer of the modern era; her 1920 book The Age of Innocence details the vanishing world of “old money” New York society.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The most famous of the Jazz Age authors; hard-working and hard-partying; chronicled the reckless abandon and spiritual hollowness of the twenties; famous works include The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise.

Sinclair Lewis – A contemporary of Fitzgerald; his work Main Street focused on exposing the provinciality and middle-class meanness of small-town society.

William Faulkner – Described complexities of life in the South; first to succeed with the modern technique of multiple points of view; famous works include The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom.

John Steinbeck – Most important of the Depression Era authors; most famous book The Grapes of Wrath chronicled the Joad family's migration from Oklahoma to California.

Ernest Hemingway – Famed for his hard living, his masculine prose, and his spare writing style; wrote A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and The Old Man and the Sea.

J.D. Salinger – Reclusive author; careful and studious style; most famous work is The Catcher in the Rye, a story about youth and disillusionment in postwar America.

Jack Kerouac – Most famous of the "beat" generation of writers, who were violent and free-spirited youths wandering in postwar America; books include On the Road and The Dharma Bums.

Joseph Heller – Author of Catch-22, which typifies postwar disillusionment by satirizing war.