Timeline: American Literature through the Years

Jan 1, 1607

First American Settlements

Jamestown, VA
Plymouth, MA

Period: Jan 1, 1630 to Jan 1, 1730

Colonialism

Captain John Smith
Anne Bradstreet
pamphlets, journals, letters, poetry

Period: Jan 1, 1715 to Jan 1, 1789

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: Jan 1, 1730 to Jan 1, 1740

Great Awakening

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

Sep 5, 1774

First Continental Congress

Forefathers plan independence.

Apr 19, 1775

Revolutionary War ends

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

Jul 4, 1776

Independence

A new country formed.

Jun 18, 1812

War of 1812

War lasts two years.

Fought between United States and British Empire.

Period: Jan 1, 1820 to Jan 1, 1850

Romanticism

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

Period: Jan 1, 1830 to Jan 1, 1840

Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Louisa May Alcott
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson

Period: Jan 1, 1850 to Jan 1, 1865

Abolitionism

William Lloyd Garrison
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Frederick Douglass

Apr 12, 1861

Civil War

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

Jan 1, 1863

Emancipation Proclamation

Slaves freed.

Apr 14, 1865

President Lincoln's Assassination

Lincoln killed at the Ford Theatre by actor John Wilkes Booth.

Period: Jan 1, 1880 to Jan 1, 1920

Realism

Henry James
Ambrose Bierce
Anna Sewell
L. Frank Baum
Jack London

Period: Jan 1, 1880 to Jan 1, 1940

Regionalism

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

Period: Jan 1, 1900 to Jan 1, 1970

Naturalism

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

Apr 14, 1912

Titanic sinks

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

Jul 28, 1914

World War I

War lasts four years.
Fought between Allied and Central Powers.

Period: Jan 1, 1920 to Jan 1, 1940

Modernism

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

Period: Jan 1, 1920 to Jan 1, 1930

Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
W. E. B. DuBois

Aug 1, 1929

Great Depression

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

Jan 1, 1934

Dust Bowl

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

Sep 1, 1939

World War II

War lasts 6 years.
Fought between Allies and Axis.

Period: Jan 1, 1940 to Jan 1, 1970

Postwar

Harper Lee
J. D. Salinger
Sylvia Plath

Jan 1, 1947

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: Jan 1, 1950 to Jan 1, 1960