American Literature Reading list

*Apess, William. A Son of the Forest

*Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward

*Brown, William Wells. Clotel

*Bryant, William Cullen. “Abraham Lincoln, ” “Thanatopsis, ” “The Yellow Violet, ” “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, ” "I Cannot Forget with what Fervid Devotion, " “To a Waterfowl, ” “The Burial-Place, ” “A Fragment, ” “Green River, ” “A Winter Piece, ” “The Rivulet, ” “Summer Wind, ” “Autumn Woods, ” “After a Tempest, ” “Sonnets: Midsummer, October, November, ” “The Prairies, ” “The Fountain, ” “The Painted Cup, ” “To the Fringed Gentian, ” “To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe”

*Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes

*Child, Lydia Maria. Hobomok, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans

*Clemens, Samuel [Mark Twain]. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

*Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers or The Last of the Mohicans or Satanstoe

*Davis, Rebecca Harding. "Life in the Iron Mills"

*DeForest, William. Miss Ravenal’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

*Dickinson, Emily. selected poems

*Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, “The Heroic Slave, ” “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

*Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature, ” “The Rhodora, ” “Each and All, ” “Compensation, ” “The Snow-Storm, ”

“The Problem, ” “Uriel, ” “Hamatreya, ” “Ode, ” “Days, ” “The Sphinx, ” “Bacchus, ” “Merlin, ” “Brahma, ” “Nature, ” “The American Scholar, ” “The Transcendentalist, " "Self-Reliance, " “Circles, ” The Poet, ” “Experience, ” “Montaigne, ” “1851 Address, ” “Fate, ” “Illusions”

*Wilkins, Mary. A New England Nun and Other Stories

*Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, Woman in the Nineteenth Century

*Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux, ” “Young Goodman Brown, ” “The Minister’s Black Veil, ” “The Maypole of Marymount, ” “The Birth-mark, ” “The Artist, ” “Egotism, ” “Banquet, ” “Rappaccini’s Daughter, ” “Ethan Brand”

*Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham or A Modern Instance

*Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book

*Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

*James, Henry. The American, The Portrait of a Lady

*Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs

*Lowell, James Russell. “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, ” A Fable for Critics, selections from The Biglow Papers

*Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener, ” “Benito Cereno, ” “Billy Budd, ” “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids, ” “Battle-Pieces”

*Poe, Edgar Allan. "Al Aaraaf, ” “Romance, ” “Dreams, ” “To Science, ” “To Helen, ” “Silence, ” “The Raven, ” “Ulalume, ” “Poetic Principle, ” “Ligeia, " "The Fall of the House of Usher, " "The Tell-Tale Heart, " "William Wilson, " "Maelstrom, ” “The Purloined Letter, ” "The Masque of the Red Death, " "The Philosophy of Composition, " Eureka

*Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin

*Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, "Walk to Wachusett, " "Resistance to Civil Government [Civil Disobedience], " "A Plea for Captain John Brown, " “Slavery in Massachusetts, ” selected poems

*Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World

*Whittier, James Greenleaf. “The Hunters of Men, ” “The Farewell, ” “At Port Royal, ” “Proem, ” “Songs of Labor”, “Dedication, ” “Song of Slaves in the Desert, ” “Ichabod, ” “The Haschish, ” “Skipper Ireson's Ride, ” “Snow-Bound, ” “Among the Hills, ” “Telling the Bees, ” “My Playmate, ” “What the Birds Said, ” “My Triumph”

*Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass (1855), “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, ” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, ” Drum-Taps, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, ” “Passage to India, ” “Pioneers, ” Democratic Vistas

For Further Reading

Prose

Abrahams, Roger ed., Afro-American Folktales