19th and early 20th century

Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was an American novelist, editor, and pamphleteer of Philadelphia, commonly called America's first professional novelist; his Gothic novels include Wieland and Edgar Huntly.

Charles W. Chesnutt

Charles W. Chesnutt (Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 1858–1932) was an American author, lawyer, and civil-rights activist, the first African American fiction writer to win wide literary recognition.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), American feminist writer and sociologist, author of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Women and Economics (1898), and Herland; rediscovered by 1970s feminist critics.

DuBose Heyward

DuBose Heyward (Edwin DuBose Heyward, 1885-1940), Charleston novelist, poet, and playwright, author of the 1925 novel Porgy, source of the play Porgy (1927) and Gershwin's folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935); also wrote Mamba's Daughters and co-founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina.

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937), born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist of Gilded Age New York society; author of The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Novel Prize (1921).

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, 1896–1940), American novelist of the Jazz Age, author of This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night; married to Zelda Sayre; died obscure, canonized posthumously.

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), American modernist writer, poet, and art collector; Paris salon host at 27 rue de Fleurus with Alice B. Toklas; author of Three Lives, Tender Buttons, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; patron of Picasso and Matisse; Vichy-era politics remain debated.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), American abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the anti-slavery novel serialized in The National Era and best-selling after the Bible.

Henry James

Henry James (1843–1916), American-born British novelist and realist, author of The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl; master of the international theme, limited point of view, and the New York Edition prefaces.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819–1891), American novelist of Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, and Billy Budd; whaling sailor turned author whose work sold poorly in life and was revived after 1919.

Ingersoll Lockwood

Ingersoll Lockwood (1841-1918), American lawyer and author of the Baron Trump children's novels and the 1896 satire 1900: or, The Last President; also consul to Hanover under Lincoln, pseudonym Irwin Longman, later subject of Trump prophecy theories.

John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos (1896-1970), American modernist novelist of Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy (1930-1936), known for Newsreel, Camera Eye, and biography collage techniques.

John Rollin Ridge

John Rollin Ridge, who wrote as Yellow Bird, was a Cherokee writer and editor whose 1854 Joaquín Murieta novel was the first by a Native American author.

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (1850–1904), was an American writer of novels and short stories set mostly in Louisiana, best known for The Awakening (1899).

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), American author born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, raised in Concord, Massachusetts, best known for Little Women (1868-69) and also wrote sensation fiction under pseudonyms A. M. Barnard and Flora Fairfield; Civil War nurse whose Hospital Sketches (1863) made her famous.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), American humorist and novelist born in Florida, Missouri; author of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884), licensed Mississippi riverboat pilot, Hartford resident 1874–1891, bankrupt investor.

Molly Elliot Seawell

Molly Elliot Seawell (1853–1916) was an American novelist and essayist from Gloucester County, Virginia, who published almost forty volumes of fiction and nautical books and was a leading opponent of woman suffrage.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), American novelist and short-story writer born in Salem, Massachusetts; author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables; descendant of a Salem witch-trial judge.

Ole Edvart Rølvaag

Ole Edvart Rølvaag (1876–1931), born Ole Edvart Pedersen, was a Norwegian-American novelist and St. Olaf professor whose Giants in the Earth (1927) became a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.

Ring Lardner

Ring Lardner (Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, 1885-1933), American sportswriter, columnist, and satirical short-story writer, author of You Know Me Al and the Jack Keefe baseball letters, famed for his ear for American vernacular speech.

Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young

Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young (1882–1954) was an American novelist, poet, and playwright of Los Gatos, California, best known for Of Human Kindness (1940), her answer to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

S. Alice Callahan

S. Alice Callahan (1868–1894), born Sophia Alice Callahan, was a Muscogee writer and teacher credited as the first Native American woman to write a novel, Wynema (1891).

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was an American writer of fiction about coastal and rural New England, best known for "A White Heron" and The Country of the Pointed Firs.

Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), American writer of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), also businessman, advertiser, and Virginia newspaper editor who influenced Faulkner and Hemingway.

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), American novelist, poet, and war correspondent; author of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, The Open Boat, and The Black Riders; pioneer of American literary naturalism who died of tuberculosis at 28.

Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), American novelist born in Terre Haute, Indiana; founder of American literary naturalism, author of Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), censorship battles, late Communist Party membership.

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900-1938), Asheville, North Carolina novelist, author of Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935), edited by Maxwell Perkins; distinct from Tom Wolfe the New Journalist.

Washington Irving

Washington Irving (1783–1859), American author and diplomat, pseudonyms Diedrich Knickerbocker and Geoffrey Crayon; author of The Sketch Book, 'Rip Van Winkle,' 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' and the 175-edition Columbus biography; first American to live by authorship.

Willa Cather

Willa Cather (Wilella Sibert Cather, 1873–1947), American novelist and McClure's editor from Red Cloud, Nebraska; wrote O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop; won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours.