The List

Below is the complete A-list of American literature I'm working through in preparation for my comprehensive area exam. The primary (literary) list is organized chronologically. My B-list consists of 20-25 texts that more specifically address my area of specialization (detective and noir fiction) and is TBA; I will be posting that in August or September.

The secondary list consists of theoretical and critical texts on American literature.

 American Literature - Primary A-List
17th Century (1600-1699)

• Of Plymouth Plantation - William Bradford (1630-1651)
• A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson - Mary Rowlandson (1682)

18th Century (1700-1799)

• Autobiography - Benjamin Franklin (1771, 1793)

19th Century (1800-1899)

• A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker - Washington Irving (1809) 
• Selections from The Sketch-Book - Washington Irving (1819-1820) 
• Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832)
• “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832)
• “Young Goodman Brown” (1837)
• “The Maypole of Merrymount” (1837)
• “The Birth-Mark” (1843)
• The Scarlet Letter (1850)

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - Frederick Douglass (1845)
• Selection of poetry + “The Cask of Amontillado, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” “The Purloined Letter,” “Philosophy of Composition” - Edgar Allen Poe (1840s)
• Selected essays incl “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Nature,” and “The Poet” - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850)
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe (1850)
• Moby-Dick - Herman Melville (1851)
• “Bartleby, the Scrivener” - Herman Melville (1852)
• Billy Budd - Herman Melville (published posthumously 1924)
• Walden - Henry David Thoreau (1854)
• Preface to Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman (1855). Selection of poetry including “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle,” “Song Myself,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloomed”
• Selection of poetry - Emily Dickinson (mid to late 19th century)
• “Daisy Miller” - Henry James (1879)
• Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (1885)

20th Century (1900+)

• Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser (1900)
• The Souls of Black Folk - W. E. B. Dubois (1903)
• Portrait of a Lady - Henry James (1880, 1908)
• My Antonia - Willa Cather (1918)
• Selection of poetry - Ezra Pound (1910s-1960s)
• The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (1920)
• Selection of poetry - Wallace Stevens (1920s-1960s)
• Selection of poetry - William Carlos Williams (1920s-1950s)
• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway (1925)
• The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (1926)
• Selection of poetry, start with The Weary Blues - Langston Hughes (1926)
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner (1929)
• As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner (1930)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
• Selection of poetry - start with The Collected Poems of - Robert Frost (1939)
• Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
• Long Day’s Journey into Night - Eugene O’Neill (written 1941, perf. 1956)
• Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller (1949)
• A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams (1949)
• Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
• Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov (1955)
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee (1962)
• The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (1966)
• Selection of poetry - start with The Complete Poems - Elizabeth Bishop (1969)
• Rabbit Redux - John Updike
• Selection of poetry incl Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror - John Ashbery (1976)
• Selection of poetry, incl The Dream of a Common Language (1978) and When We Dead Awaken (1976) - Adrienne Rich
• Love Medicine - Louise Erdich (1983)
• Glengarry Glen Ross - David Mamet (1984)
• White Noise - Don Delillo (1985)
• “My Life” - Lyn Hejinian (1987)
• Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)

American Literature - Secondary List

Required

• The Ignoble Savage - Louise Barnett
• Ideology and Classic American Literature - Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen.
• The Resisting Reader - Judith Fetterley
• Love and Death in the American Novel - Leslie Fiedler
• The Signifying Monkey - Henry Louis Gates
• Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Chapters 1&2) - Frederic Jameson
• The Machine in the Garden - Lee Marx
• American Renaissance - F. O. Matthiessen
• The Unusable Past - Russell Reising
• Revolution and the Word - Cathy Davidson
• Beneath the American Renaissance - David Reynolds
• Virgin Land - Henry Nash Smith
• Beyond Ethnicity - Werner Sollors
• Sensational Designs - Jane Tompkins

Optional/Highly Recommended

• The Imperial Self - Quentin Anderson
• Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature
• America - Jean Baudrillard
• The Return of the Vanishing American - Leslie Fiedler
• American Incarnation - Myra Jehlen
• A History of the American People - Paul Johnson
• The Land Before Her - Annette Kolodny
• The Lay of the Land - Annette Kolodny
• The American Adam - R.W.B. Lewis
• The Gold Standard and the Logical of Naturalism - Walter Benn Michaels
• Playing in the Dark - Toni Morrison
• A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn