American Literature & Culture: 20th Century & Beyond American Lit

• Lillian Hellman (1905 - 1984): Topic Page

  U.S. dramatist. Her works include the plays The Little Foxes (1939), The Searching Wind (1944), and the autobiographical Scoundrel Time (1976).
• George Kaufman (1889 - 1961): Topic Page

  American playwright noted for many collaborations, including Dinner at Eight (1932) with Edna Ferber and You Can't Take It with You (1936) with Moss Hart.
• Tony Kushner (1956 - ): Topic Page

  American playwright who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Millennium Approaches (1992), the first part of his trilogy Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.
• David Mamet (1947 - ): Topic Page

  U.S. dramatist and film director. His plays include Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), American Buffalo (1976), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), and The Spanish Prisoner (1998).
• Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005): Topic Page

  American playwright whose works include Death of a Salesman (1949), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Crucible (1953).
• Eugene O'Neill (1888 - 1953): Topic Page

  U.S. dramatist. His works, which are notable for their emotional power and psychological analysis, include Desire under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928), Mourning becomes Elektra (1931), Long Day's Journey into Night (1941), and The Iceman Cometh (1946): Nobel prize for literature 1936.
• Neil Simon (1927 - ): Topic Page

  American playwright whose lighthearted comedies of middle-class life include The Odd Couple (1965) and Lost in Yonkers (1991), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.
• Thornton Wilder (1897 - 1975): Topic Page

  American playwright and novelist, b. Madison, Wis., grad. Yale (B.A., 1920) and Princeton (M.A., 1925). He received most of his early education in China, where his father was in the U.S. consular service.
• Tennessee Williams (1911 - 1983): Topic Page

  Playwright, born in Columbus, Mississippi, USA. From an old Tennessee family (he adopted his first name by 1939 while in New Orleans), he was raised under the influence of his clergyman-grandfather.

• A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry

  From The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English
  Lorraine Hansberry turns the raw material of family history (her father's decision in 1938 to defy Chicago's restrictive real-estate covenants) into a play whose appeal derives in part from the specificity of its focus (on the Younger family) and the universality of its main concern (dreams deferred).
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A play by Tennessee Williams, first performed in New York in 1955 and awarded a pulitzer prize. It was revised for a revival in 1974.
• Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A play by Arthur, Miller, first performed and published in 1949. It won instant critical acclaim, running for 742 performances at the Morosco Theatre in New York and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
• Mourning Becomes Electra, by Eugene O'Neill

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A trilogy of plays by Eugene O'Neill, based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus, and first produced in New York in 1931. The 13-act trilogy is set in a small New England coastal town at the close of the Civil War.
• Our Town, by Thornton Wilder

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A play by Thornton Wilder, performed in New York in 1938 and awarded a pulitzer prize. Its three acts treat Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death, respectively, in the small New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners and focus on two families in particular: the Gibbses and the Webbs.
• The Crucible, by Arthur Miller

  From Brewer's Curious Titles
  A historical drama (1953) by the US playwright Arthur Miller (b. 1915) about the witchcraft hysteria that swept through Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.
• West Side Story: Topic Page

  Following the development of opera, operetta, and the musical play (or musical, as we now know it), American composers such as Jerome Kern (1885-1945) and Oscar Hammerstein (1846-1919) became very popular.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A play by Edward Albee, first performed in New York in 1962. The first of his three-act dramas, it is also the most admired of his plays.

• Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888): Topic Page

  U.S. novelist, noted for her children's books, especially Little Women (1869).
• Truman Capote (1924 - 1984): Topic Page

  U.S. writer; his novels include Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and In Cold Blood (1964), based on an actual multiple murder.
• William Faulkner (1897 - 1962): Topic Page

  1897-1962, US novelist, short-story writer, and poet; noted for The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930); Nobel prize for literature 1949.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940): Topic Page

  (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald), 1896–1940, American novelist and short-story writer, b. St. Paul, Minn. He is ranked among the great American novelists.
• Ernest Hemingway (1899 -1961): Topic Page

  U.S. novelist and short-story writer. His novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952): Nobel prize for literature 1954.
• Stephen King (1947 - ): Topic Page

  Writer, born in Portland, Maine, USA. He graduated from his state university and continued to live in Maine, at first supporting himself with odd jobs while establishing his writing career.
• Herman Melville (1819 - 1891): Topic Page

  1819–91, American author, b. New York City, considered one of the great American writers and a major figure in world literature.
• Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019): Topic Page

  (2/18/1931–) Novels, criticism; editor In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.
• J. D. Salinger (1919 - 2010): Topic Page

  has gained prominence and cultlike acclaim from a large cross section of the American public on the basis of a rather limited literary output-one novel, three collections of novellas and short stories, and several additional uncollected short stories.
• John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968): Topic Page

  1902–68, American writer, b. Salinas, Calif., studied at Stanford. He is probably best remembered for his strong sociological novel The Grapes of Wrath.
• Mark Twain (1835 - 1910): Topic Page

  U.S. novelist and humorist, famous for his classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
• Alice Walker (1944 - ): Topic Page

  American writer whose works include the novels Meridian (1976) and The Color Purple (1982), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.

• Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

  From The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English
  Edith Wharton's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel describes the disillusionment of its thoughtful, conformist hero with the stifling manners and mores of 19th-century New York society.
• Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1922. It depicts the complacency and materialism of George F. Babbitt, a real-estate agent and representative middle-class family man from the city of Zenith in the American Midwest.
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

  From Brewer's Curious Titles
  A novel (1961) by Joseph Heller (1923-99) about the experiences of Captain Yossarian of the 256th United States (Army) bombing squadron in Italy during the Second World War.
• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  The only novel by the American writer Margaret Mitchell (1900-49), published in 1936 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the following year. An immediate best-seller, it has sold more than 25 million copies, been translated into 27 languages and inspired an enduringly popular film.
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

  From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
  Non-fiction novel (1965) by US writer Truman Capote. Subtitled ‘A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences’, it was based on interviews and tells of the murder of a Kansas farming family in 1959.
• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A novel by Herman Melville, published in New York and London in 1851. The British title was The Whale. The highly complex story begins with the narrator Ishmael's decision to go to sea.
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

  From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
  Novel (1876) by US author Mark Twain. It describes the childhood escapades of Tom Sawyer and his friends Huckleberry Finn and Joe Harper in a small Mississippi community before the Civil War.
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger

  From The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English
  Novel by J.D. Salinger (1919-), about adolescence rather than for adolescents, and widely seen as a precursor of (or to blame for) probably the most common form of writing for young adults.
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A novel by John Steinbeck, published in 1939 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize the following year. The novel tells the story of Oklahoma farmers who are driven off their land by soil erosion.
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925.
  The narrator, Nick Carraway, rents a cottage in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the mansion of Jay Gatsby and across the water from the home of Tom Buchanan and his wife Daisy, Carraway's cousin.
• The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

  From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
  A novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926. The English edition which appeared the following year was entitled Fiesta. Set in the mid-1920s, it deals with the ‘lost generation’ of American and British expatriates who have settled in Paris, depicted here as a moral wasteland of drunkenness and promiscuity.
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

  From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
  Novel by the US writer Harper Lee (born 1926) published in 1960. Set in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s, it is a dramatic depiction of racial tension and prejudice.

Toni Morrison, 1986
Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a lecture series in the humanities held across nine universities. Toni Morrison accepted a position as a Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan in 1988, and she delivered her Tanner Lecture entitled "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" on October 7, 1988. You can read the full text of Morrison's Tanner Lecture here.

• Maya Angelou (1928 - ): Topic Page

  Poems, autobiographies, plays; news editor. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Angelou is a prolific autobiographer, poet, and writer.
• W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973): Topic Page

  English-born US poet. He wrote some of his most original poetry, such as Look, Stranger! (1936), in the 1930s when he led the influential left-wing literary group that included the writers Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis.
• Lucille Clifton (1936 - )

  From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
  Lucille Clifton, former poet laureate of Maryland, writes strikingly simple, unrhymed, epigrammatic poetry about her life, her family, and the lives of African-Americans.
• Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886): Topic Page

  1830–86, American poet, b. Amherst, Mass. She is widely considered one of the greatest poets in American literature.
• T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965): Topic Page

  American-born British critic and writer whose poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and The Waste Land (1922) established him as a major literary figure.
• Robert Frost (1874 - 1963): Topic Page

  1874–1963, American poet, b. San Francisco. Perhaps the most popular and beloved of 20th-century American poets.
  
• Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967): Topic Page

  Poet, writer, playwright, and librettist, born in Joplin, Missouri, USA. MORE
• Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963): Topic Page

  One of the outstanding poets of her generation, Sylvia Plath became a heroine to many feminist readers with her intense and harrowing work. She was married to Ted Hughes, the future poet laureate, who edited her Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems after her suicide.
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849): Topic Page

  Poet and writer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
• Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972): Topic Page

  1885–1972, American poet, critic, and translator, b. Hailey, Idaho, grad. Hamilton College, 1905, M.A. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1906.
• Adrienne Rich (1929 - ): Topic Page

  American poet and essayist whose works, notably Diving Into the Wreck (1973), concern radical feminism, lesbianism, and political activism.
• Theodore Roethke (1908 - 1963)

  From The Columbia Encyclopedia
  American poet, b. Saginaw, Mich., educated at the Univ. of Michigan and Harvard. A poet of the Midwest, Roethke combined a love of the land with his vision of the development of the individual.
• Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974): Topic Page

  American poet whose works, including the collections Live or Die (1966) and The Death Notebooks (1974), document her struggle with mental illness and her search for faith.
• Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955): Topic Page

  American poet whose artful and innovative works, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning” (both 1923), concern the role of imagination in bringing order to a chaotic world.
• Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892): Topic Page

  American poet, b. West Hills, N.Y. Considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets, Walt Whitman celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual and sang the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man.