American

• Raymond Chandler - Farewell My Lovely (Los Angeles: Philip Marlowe searches for missing woman and serves as bodyguard for man looking for a stolen necklace)
• Hamlin Garland - Main-Travelled Roads (stories about Iowa and Dakota farmers, includes Under the Lion's Paw), A Son of the Middle Border (autobiography)
• • Robinson Jeffers - Roan Stallion, Tamar (Monterey coast girl based on King David's daughter), The Tower Beyond Tragedy (based on Agamemnon), Thurso's Landing
• Sylvia Plath - (committed suicide) Ariel (love songs to death; dehumanize people as mannequins and paper figures), The Bell Jar (schoolgirl prodigy Esther Greenwood has mental breakdowns)
• • Anne Sexton - Live or Die, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, The Death Notebooks
• • John Ashbery - Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
• Ellen Glasgow - In This Our Life, Barren Ground, Vein of Iron
• • Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird (autobiographical story of Polish boy in WWII)
• Grace Metalious - Peyton Place (vice and crime in NE town)
• • William Henry Hudson - Green Mansions (Mr. Abel tells of his affair with bird girl Rima, killed by savages, in South America)
• • Gertrude Stein - Three Lives (The Good Anna [kindly German servant], Melanctha [uneducated black girl], The Gentle Lena [dumb German maid]), Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (her secretary), Four Saints in Three Acts (opera by Virgil Thomson with all-black cast), The Making of Americans (autobiographical Martha Hersland)
• • John James O'Hara - Appointment in Samarra
  • Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • Arna Bontemps - God Sends Sundays, Black Thunder
• • Irwin Shaw - The Young Lions
  • Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer (young poet reaches peak of creative powers)
• • Edna Ferber - Show Boat (MS showboat owner Captain Andy Hawks marries NE teacher Parthy Ann; actress daughter Magnolia marries Gaylord Ravenal; daughter Kim becomes Broadway star)
• • Thomas Heggen - Mr. Roberts
• • Joyce Carol Oates - A Garden of Earthly Delights, Bellefleur, Mysteries of Winterthurn
• • Anne Tyler - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
  • Gloria Naylor - The Woman of Brewster Place
  • Harriot Monroe - edited Poetry: A Magazine of Verse
• • Amy Lowell - Men Women and Ghosts, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed
  • Wallace Stevens - Peter Quince at the Clavier (Susanna in the Apocrypha), Sunday Morning, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, The Necessary Angel
• • Robert Lowell - Life Studies (confessional; travel poems, childhood, tributes to Crane Schwartz Sntayana and Ford, family portraits)
  • Leo Rosten - The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n, The Joys of Yiddish
• • Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow (bureaucracies use WWII to gain power), The Crying of Lot 49
• • Charles and Mary Beard - The Rise of American Civilization, America in Midpassage
  • Seymour Hersh - My Lai 4
• • Arthur Schleinger - The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, New Viewpoints in American History, The Rise of the City, Prelude to Independence The Newspaper War in Boston
• Arthur Schleinger Jr - The Age of Jackson, The Age of Roosevelt, A Thousand Days (JFK)
• • Tom Wolfe - Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Our Time
• • Booth Tarkington - Seventeen (William Baxter [Silly Billy] loves Lola Pratt, who talks to dog Flopit), Alice Adams (drug company employee has nagging wife, shiftless son, and dreaming daughter Alice whose hopes are dashed and enters Frincke's Business College), Penrod (Midwest 12-year old Penrod Schofield), The Magnificent Ambersons
• • Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny (officers on WWII minesweeper mutiny against Captain Queeg), War and Remembrances, The Winds of War
• • Henry Roth - Call It Sleep (Jewish boy grows up in Lower East Side)
• Hemingway

  • In Our Time (short stories about Nick Adams, including Indian Camp and Big Two-Hearted River)
  • Men Without Women (short stories including The Killers [Nick Adams warns Ole Andreson that two hired gunmen from city are coming to kill him], The Undefeated, Fifty Grand, Hills Like White Elephants, A Simple Inquiry)
• Hemingway

  • For Whom the Bell Tolls (Spanish Civil War: American professor Robert Jordan assigned by Pablo and Pilar to blow up a bridge; Jordan loves Maria for three days; Jordan carries out mission but is left to die; title from Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)
• Hemingway

  • The Old Man and the Sea (Cuban fisherman Santiago catches marlin on 85th day but it is slowly eaten by sharks on way home)
• Hemingway

  • The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (English guide Wilson saves Macombers from lion on African safari; next day Macomber fights wild buffalo but wife shoots him)
  • The Snows of Kilimanjaro (writer Harry goes on African safari to "work fat off his mind" but gets gangrene, sees vision of a frozen leopard, and dies)
  • To Have and Have Not (Harry Morgan smuggles Chinese and liquor in Key West during Depression and is shot)
• Sinclair Lewis

  • Babbit (Zenith, the Zip City: George F. Babbitt, real estate broker, fears ostracism but encourages son Tom to rebel)
  • Elmer Gantry (Kansas City: ex-football player Elmer Gantry becomes popular but hypocritical minister)
  • It Can't Happen Here (Berzelius Windrip sets up fascist dictatorship in US; Doremus Jessup and Walt Trowbridge in Canada oppose him)