American Prose

• Amerigo Vespucci - earliest European descriptions of the American continent in letters
• Martin Waldseemüller – German geographer and cartographer; published Cosmographiae introductio
• Sir Walter Raleigh – founded the

  first English colony in America, the Roanoke Colony, now North Carolina
• Thomas Harriot – wrote A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), to encourage Queen Elizabeth I's continued support of the Roanoke Colony
• Captain John Smith – A Description of New England; pocahontas
• William Bradford – the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, wrote his History of Plymouth Plantation
• John Winthrop – governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote History of New England
• Puritans - protestants in england
• Increase Mather – wrote a history of the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and colonial settlers; wrote A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England
• Cotton Mather – son of Increase; wrote Memorable Providences, a growing interest in the occult on the part of religious leaders; wrote The Wonders of the Invisible World,the events of the witch trials
• Jonathan Edwards – "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"; led the Great Awakening; wrote A Careful and Strict Enquiry into… Notions of… Freedom of Will… (predetermined by God); clergyman and orator
• Cotton Mather – wrote Magnalia Christi Americana, Sentiments on the Small Pox Inoculated; The Negro Christianized, one of the first Americans to address issues of race, Africans should receive Christian education and join the church
• Samuel Sewall – a New England judge who published a strong antislavery tract, wrote The Selling of Joseph
• Sarah Kemble Knight - school teacher; wrote The Journal of Madam Knight
• Boston News-letter - first successful American newspaper; became Boston Gazette
• James Franklin - New-England Courant, the first newspaper to include literary entertainment
• Benjamin Franklin - humorous social commentary; Silence Dogood; Pennsylvania Gazette; printed Pamela
• Junto - men's reading club; Salon - women's counterpart; prototypes of lending library
• Benjamin Franklin - maxims, proverbs, homespun wisdom in Poor Richard's Almanack (Richards Sonders), great statements on the self-made man; wrote Autobiography
• Thomas Paine – a leading figure; wrote Common Sense, six months before the Declaration of Independence
• Declaration of Independence - authored by Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston
• The Federalist - written by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay
• Abigail Adams – wife of John Adams, wrote Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, Abigail, describe in detail everyday life in the young nation
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself – considered a primary African American text; an early example of the autobiographical slave narrative
• William Hill Brown – wrote The Power of Sympathy, a tragic love story, the first American novel
• Charles Brockden Brown – wrote Wieland; or, The Transformation, dark, supernatural visions
• Samuel Miller - A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century; Mercy Otis Warren - History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution
• George Bancroft – the father of American History; wrote History of the United States
• Noah Webster - Dictionary; American Dictionary of the English Language
• Washington Irving – two stories set in rural New York: Rip Van Winkle, in which a man falls asleep in the woods for 20 years, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Zebulon Pike - Account of Expeditions
• Henry Rowe Schoolcraft – an ethnologist and geologist; who preserved NA information in the Great Lakes; wrote the Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States
• Davy Crockett – an expert hunter, scout, and soldier; was a favorite character for biographies written during the late 1700s and early 1800s
• William Apes – the first Native American to produce extensive writings in English; wrote A Son of the Forest
• Frederick Douglass – the most prominent African American orator, journalist, and antislavery leader of the 19th century; an escaped slave; depicted his life as a free black before the Civil War; created a masterpiece of the slave narrative genre with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson – leader of transcendentalism; wrote Nature, the first major document of the transcendental school; wrote other transcendentalist works such as The American Scholar and Self-Reliance
• Henry David Thoreau – protege of Emerson; believed in individualism; one of the leaders of transcendentalism; wrote Walden; or, Life in the Woods; wrote the essay "Civil Disobedience"; jailed for tax noncompliance
• Margaret Fuller – a social reformer; wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century
• Sir Walter Scott - established Historical Fiction Genre
• James Fenimore Cooper – first great American writer of fiction; wrote a series of five novels called the Leather-Stocking Tales in which he developed one of America's first fictional heroes, the white frontiersman Natty Bumppo