till 11 p.m.
 there is no national radio station, but many independent stations
 all large American cities has at least one radio
 Hollywood cinema from the 1910s through today

LITERATURE
THE ECONOMIC PERIOD (1609 - 1763)
Capt. John Smith – Description of New England (1616)

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD (1763 – 1810)
 patriotic feeling, sentiment
Benjamin Franklin – at 42 commercial printer, politician, scientist, inventor, diplomat, expert, musician, famous for yearly book (Poor Richard's Almanac)
Samuel Adams – the most effective radical leader, in Dec. 1773 Adams organized a group of colonists in a late night raid against British tea ships in Boston Harbour as Mohawk Indians, they threw cargoes over-board in protest of a tea tax (Boston Tea Party)

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (1810 – 1865)
Edgar Alan Poe – short stories and poetry, modern detective story, human psychology (the best poem: Raven, The Golden Bug, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue)
Walt Whitman – poetry, freedom of form (collection: Leaves of Grass, poem: Song of Myself)
- celebration of democracy and individualism

THE BEGGINING OF REALISM (1865 – 1914)
Mark Twain – travel books based on his own experience along the Mississippi (novels: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi), he makes fun of the old world, Europe and culture
Jack London – famous outstanding self-made man, social essays (The Call of the Wild)
Theodore Dreiser – 'American Balzac' for the power of details of urban life (Sister Carrie – his own Life, An American Tragedy – experiences)

SINCE WWI-PERIOD (1914 - )
Ernest Hemingway - was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945 (The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tools - during the Spanish Civil War, The Sun also Rises, Farewell to Arms - love story about American and English nurse in the WWI.)
Jerome David Salinger - expressed the feelings of the post-war generation (The Catcher in the Rye)
Joseph Heller (Catch-22), John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Jack Kerouac, etc.