Timeline photo

American Literature through the Years

  • First American Settlements

    Jamestown, VA
    Plymouth, MA
  • Period: to

    Colonialism

    Captain John Smith
    Anne Bradstreet
    pamphlets, journals, letters, poetry
  • Period: to

    Enlightenment

    Thomas Paine
    Thomas Jefferson
    Benjamin Franklin
    John Adams
    Samuel Adams
    Patrick Henry
    Phillis Wheatley
    Olaudah Equiano
    Declaration of Independence
    Constitution
    Virginia Declaration of Rights
    The Federalist essays
    "Yankee Doodle"
  • Period: to

    Great Awakening

    Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
    George Whitefield
    sermons
    The Holy Bible
  • First Continental Congress

    Forefathers plan independence.
  • Revolutionary War ends

    War lasts eight years.
    Fought between American colonies and British Empire.
  • Independence

    A new country formed.
  • War of 1812

    War lasts two years.

    Fought between United States and British Empire.
  • Period: to

    Romanticism

    Washington Irving
    James Fenimore Cooper
    Edgar Allan Poe
    Davy Crockett
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    Herman Melville
  • Period: to

    Transcendentalism

    Ralph Waldo Emerson
    Henry David Thoreau
    Louisa May Alcott
    Walt Whitman
    Emily Dickinson
  • Period: to

    Abolitionism

    William Lloyd Garrison
    Harriet Beecher Stowe
    Frederick Douglass
  • Civil War

    War lasts four years.
    Fought between industrialized free states of the North (Union) and the agricultural slave states of the South (Confederacy).
  • Emancipation Proclamation

    Slaves freed.
  • President Lincoln's Assassination

    Lincoln killed at the Ford Theatre by actor John Wilkes Booth.
  • Period: to

    Realism

    Henry James
    Ambrose Bierce
    Anna Sewell
    L. Frank Baum
    Jack London
  • Period: to

    Regionalism

    Robert Frost
    Charles Chesnutt
    Flannery O'Connor
    Mark Twain
    Robert Penn Warren
    John Steinbeck
    Kate Chopin
    Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  • Period: to

    Naturalism

    Edith Wharton
    Stephen Crane
    Theodore Dreiser
    Upton Sinclair
    T. S. Eliot
  • Titanic sinks

    RMS Titanic strikes iceberg on her maiden voyage and sinks after almost 3 hours, causing the deaths of most passengers.
  • World War I

    War lasts four years.
    Fought between Allied and Central Powers.
  • Period: to

    Modernism

    Ezra Pound
    William Carlos Williams
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    Ernest Hemingway
    William Faulkner
    Eugene O'Neill
    Sinclair Lewis
  • Period: to

    Harlem Renaissance

    Langston Hughes
    Zora Neale Hurston
    W. E. B. DuBois
  • Great Depression

    Lasts ten years.
    Period of unemployment, debt, and poverty throughout United States, especially after the Stock Market Crash of October 1929.
  • Dust Bowl

    Lasts two years.
    Severe drought in midwest USA, contributing partly to years of Great Depression.
  • World War II

    War lasts 6 years.
    Fought between Allies and Axis.
  • Period: to

    Postwar

    Harper Lee
    J. D. Salinger
    Sylvia Plath
  • Cold War

    War lasts forty-four years.
    Long running period of wars waged between Communist and Anti-Communist forces.
    Typically seen as fought between USA and USSR (Russia).
  • Period: to

    Beat Generation

    Jack Kerouac
    Allen Ginsberg
    Ken Kesey
  • Korean War

    War lasts three years.
    Fought between South Korea and North Korea.
  • Vietnam War

    War lasts nineteen years.
    Fought between Anti-Communist and Communist forces.
  • Period: to

    Postmodernism

    Joseph Heller
    Kurt Vonnegut
    Margaret Atwood
    Hunter S. Thompson
    Toni Morrison
    Cormac McCarthy
  • President Kennedy's Assassination

    President Kennedy shot on parade in Dallas, TX, by Lee Harvey Oswald.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Assassination

    Reverend King shot in Memphis, TN, by James Earl Ray.
  • Fall of Berlin Wall

    Wall separating East and West Berlin brought down after conclusion of WWII, unifying the two halves into one nation.