American Literature Home Page

Primarily for Students of EN 209

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The websites listed here contain a variety of material on American literature, including bibliographies, biographies, and critical essays.


General Resources


Voice of the Shuttle: American Literature

An excellent starting point for research on American literature, with links to American writers from Jonathan Edwards and Phillis Wheatley to Philip Roth and Kathy Acker.

Literary Resources -- American (by Jack Lynch, Upenn)

Perspectives in American Literature--A Research and Reference Guide

Paul P. Reuben of California State University Stanislaus provides a massive bibliography on American literature and authors, organized chronologically and including an appendix for special subjects like "Film Criticism and American Literature" and "The Theme of Alienation and Initiation." For an alphabetical list of all the individual authors covered, click here.

The Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Project

Created by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, this site provides information on the archaeological study of the earliest English settlement in America.

American Literature Hypertexts

Library of Southern Literature (UNC)

American Studies, African American History and Literature

Language of the Land

"Using maps and photographs from the collections of the Library of Congress (LOC), this exhibition documents the connections between America's geography and its literature. The exhibit was inspired by LOC's collection of literary maps, and it begins with several of these accompanied by quotations, such as Gertrude Stein's observation, 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The remainder of the exhibition consists of four regional sections, Northeast, South, Midwest (featuring an opening quote from Jack Kerouac and a drawing that looks like Laura from Little House on the Prairie), and West." (Description by Martha Hopkins and Michael Buscher for The Scout Report)

African-American Poetry, 1760-1900, Bibliography

Domestic Goddesses 

A Web Page devoted to several women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote "domestic fiction."  The list includes Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher-Stowe, and Edith Wharton.

Modern American Poetry

An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Oxford University Press's Anthology of Modern American Poetry

Early Twentieth Century American Sonnets

"Perhaps Patrick Cruttwell was correct in blaming Rupert Brooke's 1914 sonnets for disenchantment with the form after the war, at least in England. Most of the noted sonneteers of the early 1900s were Americans. Included here are works by Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and early works of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), Amy Lowell (1874-1925), Robert Frost (1875-1963), Sara Teasdale (1887-1933), Alan Seeger (1888-1916), Claude McKay (1890-1948), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), and others . . . ."

Beat Generation Home Page


Individual Authors


Jonathan Edwards

Hawthorne in Salem Home Page

Melville Home Page

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

The Web of American Transcendentalism

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society

The Thoreau Society

The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau

A web site for the Thoreau Edition, a project "founded in 1966 as an attempt to recover the lost words of one of America's most influential writers and to answer the pressing need for a complete, definitive, annotated, and readily available edition of his writings, including his Journal and correspondence."

The Emily Dickinson International Society

The Dickinson Museum and Homestead

Walt Whitman Birth Place

Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive at UVA

Mark Twain at Large: His Travels Here and Abroad: An exhibition from the University of California, Berkeley

Mark Twain's Mississippi

Mark Twain's House and Museum: Exhibitions

Stephen Crane Home Page

Timeless Hemingway

The Hemingway Resource Center

Both Timeless Hemingway and The Hemingway Resource Center are commercial sites, but both have an abundance of useful research material.

Fitzgerald Centenary (1996) Home Page

Faulkner Home Page

Robert Penn Warren, 1905-1989

The Academy of American Poets: Robert Penn Warren


Citing Electronic Sources

A collection of links to websites with guidelines for citing material from the World Wide Web, CD-ROMs and other electronic sources.  The emphasis is on MLA format, but there is information for APA, Chicago, and Turabian, as well.

Last modified February 28, 2009