The American Canon
The American Canon
The American Canon
(Note: This is a rolling canon, which is to say that it is not fixed. Although this canon does not claim to be comprehensive, it does aim to provide a foundation for anyone looking for the very best books of American literature. For more information about this canon, see this primer. When we recommend specific editions of works, we have hyperlinked them by publisher in parentheses next to the title. When we have found no extant editions sufficient, we have created our own, which we have hyperlinked on the name of the work itself.)
Edward Albee
Three Tall Women
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A.R. Ammons
Selected Poems
Sherwood Anderson
Winesburg, Ohio
Joel Barlow
Selected Poems
John Berryman
The Dream Songs
Robert Montgomery Bird
The Gladiator
Elizabeth Bishop
Complete Poems
Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451
Anne Bradstreet
Selected Poems (Dover)
Gwendolyn Brooks
Selected Poems
William Cullen Bryant
Complete Poems
Truman Capote
Selected Stories (Knopf)
Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Charles W. Chestnutt
Kate Chopin
The Awakening
Adelaide Crapsey
Complete Poems
Hart Crane
Complete Poems
Stephen Crane
The Black Riders and Other Lines
The Red Badge of Courage
Robert Creeley
For Love
E.E. Cummings
Selected Poems (Grove)
Countee Cullen
Color
Carl Dennis
Practical Gods
Mark Z. Danielewski
Only Revolutions
Lydia Davis
Varieties of Disturbance
Don DeLillo
Mao II
James Dickey
Deliverance
Selected Poems: 1957-1967
Emily Dickinson
Complete Poems (Belknap)
Russell Edson
The Tunnel
T.S. Eliot
Collected Poems
Murder in the Cathedral
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
Juneteenth
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
The Virgin Suicides
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
The Sound and the Fury
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Selected Stories (Rupa)
Hannah Webster Foster
The Coquette
Robert Frost
Selected Poems (St. Martin's)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper
Allen Ginsberg
Howl and Other Poems
Louise Gluck
Collected Poems
Faithful and Virtuous Night
John Guare
The House of Blue Leaves
Fitz-Greene Halleck
Fanny
Lorraine Hansberry
A Raisin in the Sun
Paul Harding
Tinkers
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Selected Stories (Norton)
Lyn Hejinian
My Life
Joseph Heller
Catch-22
Lillian Hellman
The Children's Hour
Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
Selected Stories (Scribner)
James A. Herne
Margaret Fleming
Langston Hughes
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Washington Irving
The Sketch Book
Shirley Jackson
The Haunting of Hill House
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Henry James
Daisy Miller
The Golden Bowl
The Portrait of a Lady
The Turn of the Screw
A. Van Jordan
M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A
June Jordan
Selected Poems (Copper Canyon)
Stephen King
Carrie
Gerald's Game
Jack Kerouac
On the Road
Nella Larsen
Complete Fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
Tracy Letts
August: Osage County
Jack London
The Call of the Wild
White Fang
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Selected Poems (Library of America)
Audre Lorde
Coal
H.P. Lovecraft
Complete Fiction
Robert Lowell
The Dolphin
For the Union Dead
History
Life Studies
Lois Lowry
The Giver
Archibald MacLeish
J.B.
Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
Martyna Majok
Cost of Living
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
Carson McCullers
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Selected Stories (Signet)
James Merrill
The Changing Light at Sandover
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Collected Poems
Arthur Miller
The Crucible
Death of a Salesman
N. Scott Momaday
House Made of Dawn
Toni Morrison
Beloved
The Bluest Eye
Lynn Nottage
Sweat
Flannery O'Connor
Complete Stories
The Violent Bear It Away
Wise Blood
Dorothy Parker
Complete Poems
Morgan Parker
Magical Negro
Walker Percy
The Moviegoer
Sylvia Plath
Ariel: The Restored Edition
The Bell Jar
Collected Poems
Edgar Allan Poe
Complete Stories and Poems (Doubleday)
Katherine Anne Porter
Collected Stories
Adrienne Rich
Selected Poems (Norton)
Marilynne Robinson
Gilead
Theodore Roethke
Collected Poems
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Anne Sexton
To Bedlam and Part Way Back
The Awful Rowing Toward God
Transformations
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
Wallace Stevens
Collected Poems
Sara Teasdale
Selected Poems
Jean Toomer
Cane
Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch
The Secret History
Edward Taylor
Preparatory Meditations, Second Series
Melvin B. Tolson
Harlem Gallery and Other Poems
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte
Royall Tyler
The Contrast
Hannah Weiner
The Fast
Spoke
Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence
Ethan Frome
The House of Mirth
Phillis Wheatley
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass, 1855
Leaves of Grass, 1892
Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
William Carlos Williams
Collected Poems
Paterson
Spring and All
August Wilson
Fences
Franz Wright
Walking to Martha's Vineyard
Richard Wright
Native Son
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five
Welcome to the Monkey House
Louis Zukofsky
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