American literature

The first major American novelist was James Fennimore Cooper, with The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie and other works about frontier life.

Romantic period
From about 1830 to 1865, introduced important novelists such as:
Nathaniel Hawthorne – author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, in which he probed New England’s Puritan heritage
Herman Melville – author of Moby Dick, a complex and poetic novel of the sea. Captain Ahab is striving against his own fate and trying to catch Moby Dick, which is an enormous white whale and symbolizes evil. Harriet Beecher Stowe – author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became a bestseller and a vehicle for antislavery sentiments.

Realism
Prominent from the close of the Civil War until about the beginning of the 20th century, included important writers such as:
Mark Twain – author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, his classic tales of boyhood
Henry James – author of The Portrait of the Lady and The Ambassadors, which were landmarks in the development of the American novel.
Theodore Dreiser – author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, describes how spiritually empty industrial America had become.
F. Scott Fitzgerald – author of The Great Gatsby, who was the first Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1930.
Ernest Hemingway – also a Nobel Prize winner in 1954, noted for his terse, carefully crafted prose in such works as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.
William Faulkner – whose innovative techniques and thoughtful characterizations in such novels as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August and Absolom, Absolom! won him the Nobel Prize in 1949.

Hemingway and Faulkner remained leading writers into the 1950s and they were joined by:
John Steinbeck – the author of The Grapes of the Wrath, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Norman Mailer – the author of The Executioner’s Song and The Naked and the Dead.

Novelists of contemporary
They note include Flannery O’Connor and his Wise Blood, Toni Morrison and his Beloved and Alice Walker and her The Color Purple. The most outstanding personalities in the 20th century drama are:
Eugene O’Neil – American dramatist, Nobel laureate, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, who attempted to define fundamental human problems in his works.