This unit familiarizes students with major American writers and works of those writers from the Civil War to the present. It provides a variety of learning and teaching activities, links American literature and American history, and offers an opportunity for students to explore American values. The four sections in this curriculum unit present a generally chronological approach to this expanding literary story, emphasizing major writers and literary styles.

Part 1 includes postwar protest, Mark Twain, local colorists and regionalists, and new styles of writing, such as early surrealism. Part 2 features great writers of the 1920s: Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot. Part 3 centers on the next generation, among them John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, E. E. Cummings, and Arthur Miller. In Part 4, students consider diverse authors from James Baldwin, John Updike, and Garrison Keillor to Hispanic-American and Jewish-American writers.

Many reading selections are included within the text of the unit. Also featured in this unit is an appendix of useful Internet sites.

Use Center for Learning novel/drama units to enhance your approach to literature by including great American novels and plays.

• Death of a Salesman
• The Great Gatsby
• The Things They Carried
• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• To Kill a Mockingbird

See our Novel/Drama section for additional titles.

Students read and respond to literary selections, research, make presentations, journal, chart, role-play, analyze literary elements, study language, explore the humanities, and brainstorm.