The American canon: literary genius from Emerson to Pynchon

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Nathanial Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Henry James (1843-1916)

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Nathanael West (1903-1940)

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

Ralph Ellison (1913-1994)

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

James Merrill (1926-1995)

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001), John Ashbery (1927-2017), W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)

Edward Albee (1928-2016)

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933)

Jay Wright (b. 1934)

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937).