| Author | Title | Plot |
| Benjamin Franklin | Poor Richard's Almanac(k) | Collection of general info, tide tables, witty sayings |
| Thomas Paine | The Crisis | Revolutionary War pamphlet |
| Edgar Allan Poe | The Raven | Poem's theme - death of a beautiful woman |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nature | Transcendentalist essays |
| Henry David Thoreau | Walden | Diary of two years spent in the woods |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | The Scarlet Letter | Story of adultery in Puritan Boston |
| Herman Melville | Moby Dick | Story of an obsessed whaling captain |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Evangeline | Ill-fated French Canadian lovers are separated |
| Emily Dickinson | Because I Could Not Stop for Death | Author's themes of death & nature showed intensity |
| Walt Whitman | Leaves of Grass | Non-rhyming (free verse) book-length poem; brash |
| Mark Twain | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Boyhood adventures on the Mississippi River |
| Stephen Crane | The Red Badge of Courage | Civil War youth comes of age |
| Jack London | Call of the Wild | Animal survival in the Yukon |
| James Thurber | The Secret Life of Walter Mitty | Story of daydreaming, henpecked man |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby | Disillusioned rich man's story set in 1920's |
| Ernest Hemingway | The Old Man and the Sea | Man accepts his fate; won Nobel Prize |
| John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath | Migrant farmers (Okies) head west |
| Carl Sandburg | Chicago | Poem whose author loved folk songs, wrote on Lincoln |
| Robert Frost | Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening | Famous poem ends "and miles to go before I sleep" |
| Alice Walker | The Color Purple | African American woman Celie triumphs over adversity |
| Langston Hughes | The Negro Speaks of Rivers | Poem of the Harlem Renaissance (1920's) |
| Amy Tan | The Joy Luck Club | Story of four Chinese-American women & their
daughters |