Part 1 The Early American Literature (Before the End of the 18th Century) 1.1 Historical Background 1.2 Literary Characteristics 1.3 Major Writers & Representative Writings 1.3.1 Anne Bradstreet 1.3.2 Edward Taylor 1.3.3 Benjamin Franklin 1.3.4 Thomas Paine 1.3.5 Thomas Jefferson 1.3.6 Philip Freneau Part 2 American Romanticism (End of the 18th Century-1861) 2.1 Historical Background 2.2 Literary Characteristics 2.3 Major Writers & Representative Writings 2.3.1 Washington Irving 2.3.2 James Fenimore Cooper 2.3.3 Edgar Allan Poe 2.3.4 Ralph Waldo Emerson 2.3.5 Henry David Thoreau 2.3.6 Nathaniel Hawthorne 2.3.7 Herman Melville Part 3 American Realism (1865-1914) 3.1 Historical Background 3.2 Literary Characteristics 3.3 Major Writers & Representative Writings 3.3.1 Walt Whitman 3.3.2 Emily Dickinson 3.3.3 Harriet Beecher Stowe 3.3.4 Mark Twain 3.3.5 O. Henry 3.3.6 Henry James 3.3.7 Jack London 3.3.8 Theodore Dreiser Part 4 American Modernism (1914 onward) 4.1 Historical Background 4.2 Literary Characteristics 4.3 Major Writers and Representative Writings 4.3.1 Ezra Pound 4.3.2 Robert Frost 4.3.3 Eugene O'Neill 4.3.4 F.Scott Fitzgerald 4.3.5 Ernest Hemingway 4.3.6 John Steinbeck 4.3.7 William Faulkner References