Top Ten American Writers

Ernest Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist and short-story writer known for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his widely publicized life. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, and his terse prose style was widely imitated in 20th-century American and British fiction.

Lindsay Parnell looks at the works of Mark Twain, who is considered the father of American literature and an inimitable icon of American culture. Although he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he’ll be forever known as the quintessential American writer Mark Twain.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age.While he achieved limited success in his lifetime, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ ˈ f ɔː k n ər /; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays.

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved.

John Steinbeck An accomplished American writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck wrote profoundly about the economic problems faced by the rural class during the Great Depression.

Edgar Allan Poe (/ p oʊ /; born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre.

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851). His work was almost forgotten during his last 30 years.

Stephen King's memoir 'On Writing' has become a go-to advice book for emerging authors. Receiving an award from the National Book Association was a major moment in King’s career, especially among his peers and being placed among other works deemed “important” in the literary sphere.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, (born July 4, 1804, Salem, Mass., U.S.—died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, N.H.), American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he is best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres. McCarthy's fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), was on Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923.

In 2008, the Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis. The Library of America published a compendium of Vonnegut's compositions between 1963 and 1973 the following April, and another compendium of his earlier works in 2012.

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist. He first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American Jewish life for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Harper Lee, in full Nelle Harper Lee, (born April 28, 1926, Monroeville, Alabama, U.S.—died February 19, 2016, Monroeville), American writer nationally acclaimed for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

Henry James, OM (() 15 April 1843 – () 28 February 1916) was an American author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language.

Without these poems American Literature would have been set back many years. There are many reasons why Emily Dickinson was significant to American Literature. Dickinson paved the way for many of today’s poets. During her lifetime, there was a lack of poetry writers.

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.

Jerome David "J. D." Salinger (/ ˈ s æ l ɪ n dʒ ər /; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer known for his widely read novel The Catcher in the Rye. Following his early success publishing short stories and The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger led a very private life for more than a half-century.

Flannery O’Connor, in full Mary Flannery O’Connor, (born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Georgia, U.S.—died August 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia), American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating of alienation, are concerned with the relationship between the individual and God.

Walter "Walt" Whitman (/ ˈ hw ɪ t m ə n /; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist.A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works.

American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was a New England Transcendentalist and author of the book Walden. Synopsis Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts.

The Nabokovs settled in Manhattan and Vladimir began volunteer work as an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History.. Nabokov joined the staff of Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature.

Edith Wharton (/ ˈ hw ɔːr t ən /; born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Wharton combined an insider's view of American aristocracy with a powerful prose style.

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.

Alice Walker has been defined as one of the key international writers’ of the 20th century. Walker made history as the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature as well as the National Book Award in 1983 for her novel “The Color Purple,” one of the few literary books to capture the popular imagination and leave a permanent imprint.

Although he spent a great deal of his life abroad, James Baldwin always remained a quintessentially American writer. Whether he was working in Paris or Istanbul, he never ceased to reflect on his experience as a black man in white America.

Willa Sibert Cather (/ˈkæðər/;[1] December 7, 1873[2] – April 24, 1947[3]) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918).

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Joseph Heller, (born May 1, 1923, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died December 12, 1999, East Hampton, New York), American writer whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of the most significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The satirical novel was a popular success, and a film version appeared in 1970.

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. He worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction.

James Fenimore Cooper: James Fenimore Cooper, first major American novelist, author of the novels of frontier adventure known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the wilderness scout called Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye.

Jack London (Jan 12, 1876 - Nov 22, 1916) was an American author best known for writing The Call of the Wild. Jack London was his pen name, likely born in San Francisco, California as John Griffith Chaney.

Maya Angelou (/ ˈ æ n dʒ ə l oʊ / ( listen); born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years.

The Zora Neale Hurston Award was established in 2008; it is awarded to an American Library Association member who has "demonstrated leadership in promoting African American literature". She was inducted as a member of the inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2010.

Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. Firstly, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socializing with his peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the ...

Among our major living writers, Norman Mailer is perhaps the most well-known, both in the United States and internationally. No career in our literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, public, prolific and misunderstood.

Through Sylvia Plath's role as a confessional poet, her mostly autobiographical novel, and especially her journals and letters, Sylvia Plath unknowingly created a new style of recording social and cultural history through personal experience and metaphor as a great poet of American history.

Louisa May Alcott (/ ˈ ɔː l k ə t, - k ɒ t /; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

Thomas Pynchon, (born May 8, 1937, Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, U.S.), American novelist and short-story writer whose works combine black humour and fantasy to depict human alienation in the chaos of modern society.

Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American playwright. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe.

When Warhol moved to New York in 1949, he made numerous attempts to meet Capote, and Warhol's fascination with the author led to Warhol's first New York one-man show, Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote at the Hugo Gallery (June 16 – July 3, 1952).

Charles Dickens. Charles John Huffam Dickens (/ˈdɪkᵻnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.

Robert Frost - Poet - One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost was an author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes and a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

Don DeLillo. Donald Richard "Don" DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, playwright and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism.

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and university instructor in the disciplines of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest (1996) was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

His Ph.D. thesis was titled The League of American Writers: ... In 1977, PBS produced Tom Wolfe's Los Angeles, a fictional, satirical TV movie set in Los Angeles.

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression.

Sinclair Lewis at 100: Papers Presented at a Centennial Conference, 1985. Martin Bucco, Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott, 1993. James M. Hutchisson, The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930, 1996.

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and figure in twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956).