Timeline for Great American Authors Since 1650
1607 – Jamestown Colony established
1620 – Plymouth Plantation founded in Massachusetts
• 1650 – Anne Bradstreet’s book of poems The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of
Those Parts is published in London
• 1702 – Cotton Mather publishes Magnalia Christi Americana - The Great Achievement of Christ in America
• 1773 – Black poet Phillis Wheatley publishes her first book of poems
1776 – The Declaration of Independence is signed
• 1783 – Noah Webster releases his Blue-Backed Speller
• 1819 – Washington Irving publishes Rip Van Winkle
• 1826 – James Fenimore Cooper writes The Last of the Mohicans
• 1836 – Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Nature, launching the American Transcendental movement
• 1845 – Edgar Allan Poe writes “The Raven”
• 1849 – Henry David Thoreau releases his essay Civil Disobedience
• 1850 – Nathaniel Hawthorne writes The Scarlet Letter
• 1851 – Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick
• 1852 – Emily Dickinson publishes her first poem
Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, beginning the American tradition of social writing
• 1854 – Thoreau writes Walden
• 1855 – Frederick Douglass Publishes My Bondage and My Freedom
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Writes The Song of Hiawatha
Walt Whitman Publishes Leaves of Grass
1861 - 1864 – The American Civil War is fought
• 1868 – Louisa May Alcott writes Little Women
• 1870 – Mark Twain writes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• 1878 – Henry James writes Daisy Miller
• 1884 – Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• 1895 – Stephen Crane writes The Red Badge of Courage
• 1903 – Jack London writes Call of the Wild
• 1905 – America’s greatest short story writer, O Henry, writes his masterpiece, The Gift of the Magi
• 1906 – Upton Sinclair writes The Jungle and helps launch America’s tradition of investigative journalism
• 1913 – William Carlos Williams releases his first book of poems, The Tempers
1914 - 1918 – The First World War is fought
• 1914 – Carl Sandburg Publishes Chicago
• 1915 – Edgar Lee Masters releases Spoon River Anthology
• 1917 – T. S. Eliot writes The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• 1919 – Sherwood Anderson writes Winesburg, Ohio
• 1920 – Edith Wharton is the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence
• 1922 – T.S. Eliot publishes The Wasteland
• 1923 – E. E. Cummings published his first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys
1923 – Robert Frost Publishes “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
• 1925 - 1940 – Era of the lost generation writers
• 1925 – Theodore Dreiser writes An American Tragedy
• 1925 – F. Scott Fitzgerald Writes The Great Gatsby
• 1926 – Ernest Hemingway writes The Sun Also Rises
• 1927 – Willa Cather writes Death Comes for The Archbishop
• 1929 – Faulkner writes The Sound and the Fury
Thomas Wolfe Writes Look Homeward Angel
• 1930 – Sinclair Lewis becomes the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1931 – Pearl Buck writes The Good Earth
• 1934 – Henry Miller writes Tropic of Capricorn
• 1936 – Playwright Eugene O’Neill wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1938 – Pearl Buck wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1939 – Henry Miller writes Tropic of Capricorn
• 1939 – John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath
1939 - 1945 – The Second World War is fought
• 1940 – Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is Published
• 1941 – James Thurber writes The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
• 1947 – Robert Heinlein launches the golden age of science fiction with his short story “The Green Hills of
Earth” published in The Saturday Evening Post
• 1948 – T.S. Eliot wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
Tennessee Williams Wins His First Pulitzer Prize for A Street Car Named Desire
• 1949 – William Faulkner becomes the fourth American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature
Arthur Miller writes Death of a Salesman
1950 - 1953 – The Korean War is fought
• 1950 – Gwendolyn Brooks Becomes the First Black Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
• 1951 – Isaac Asimov begins his Foundation trilogy with Foundation
J.D. Salinger writes Catcher in the Rye
• 1952 – Ernest Hemingway writes his masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea
John Steinbeck writes East of Eden
Black author Ralph Ellison writes Invisible Man
• 1953 – Ray Bradbury writes Fahrenheit 451
Black author James Baldwin writes Go Tell It on the Mountain
• 1954 – Ernest Hemingway wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1956 – Allan Ginsburg writes Howl
• 1957 – Dr Seuss Writes The Cat in the Hat
Jack Kerouac publishes On the Road
• 1958 – Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes A Coney Island of the Mind
• 1959 – William Burroughs writes The Naked Lunch
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry writes A Raisin in the Sun
• 1960 – John Updike begins his Rabbit Series with Rabbit Run
• 1961 – Joseph Heller writes Catch-22
• 1962 – John Steinbeck wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
• 1963 – Sylvia Plath writes The Bell Jar
• 1964 – Ken Kesey writes Sometimes a Great Notion
1965 - 1973 – The Vietnam War is fought
• 1966 – Truman Capote writes In Cold Blood
• 1968 – Tom Wolfe publishes The Electric Koolaid Acid Test
• 1969 – Kurt Vonnegut writes Slaughterhouse Five
Philip Roth writes Portnoy’s Complaint
• 1976 – Saul Bellow wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
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