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Reading List · American Fiction & NonfictionThe Best American Authors to Read
American writing does not have one centre. It has a novel that argues with the country, an essay that argues with itself, a memoir that puts the writer on the stand, a reporter who spends fifteen years on one book, and a poet who published almost nothing in her lifetime and outlasted everyone.
So this page is built in five parts rather than one ranking. Thirty-one American authors, grouped by what they actually do, each in order of birth, each with a full guide on this site and one book named as the way in. If you want a single starting point rather than a shelf, that is what the “Start with” line under every name is for.
American novelists
Seven novelists, three Nobel laureates between them, and seven Pulitzer Prizes. Where the American novel has been most itself: a large country being argued with at length.
Ernest Hemingway
1899–1961 · Oak Park, Illinois
He learned the style on a newspaper. He was a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star from October 1917 to April 1918, roughly six months on obituaries and crime, and the paper's style sheet — short sentences, short first paragraphs, vigorous English — is visible in everything he wrote afterwards.
In December 1922 his first wife packed nearly everything he had written into a valise to bring to him in Lausanne, and it was stolen at the Gare de Lyon. He started again. The Pulitzer came in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea; the Nobel followed in 1954, and its citation named that book only as the most recent demonstration of a lifetime's work, not as the reason.
Start with The Old Man and the Sea (1952) if you want to know in an afternoon whether he is for you. Then The Sun Also Rises (1926), which is the one that changed how other people wrote.
All Ernest Hemingway books →John Steinbeck
1902–1968 · Salinas, California
The Grapes of Wrath began as journalism. He wrote seven articles about migrant farm labour for the San Francisco News, published 5–12 October 1936, then turned the material into a novel between March and October 1938 — about a hundred working days, holding himself to roughly six pages a day. His wife Carol suggested the title. It was published on 14 April 1939 and banned within months by the Kern County Board of Supervisors, in the county he had written about.
He is also the author of the best excuse in literary history. In a letter of 27 May 1936 he reported that his setter puppy had “made confetti of about half of my book” — the draft of Of Mice and Men — and declined to punish him: “I didn't want to ruin a good dog for a ms. I'm not sure is good at all.”
Start with Of Mice and Men (1937) — a hundred pages, and it does not let go. Then The Grapes of Wrath (1939) for the Pulitzer, or East of Eden (1952) for the one he thought was his best.
All John Steinbeck books →Harper Lee
1926–2016 · Monroeville, Alabama
Born Nelle Harper Lee. She was working as an airline reservations clerk in New York when, at Christmas 1956, friends left an envelope on their tree for her: enough money to stop working for a year, with a note reading “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please.” The book that came out of that year won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.
Two other things are worth knowing before you read her. In 1959 she went to Kansas as Truman Capote's researcher on In Cold Blood — which is the origin of the rumour that he wrote her novel, a rumour a 1959 letter in his own hand disposes of. And Go Set a Watchman (2015) is not a sequel: it is the manuscript she submitted in 1957, the one her editor asked her to rewrite.
Start with To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Then Go Set a Watchman (2015) only if you want the earlier draft, and knowing what it is.
All Harper Lee books →Toni Morrison
1931–2019 · Lorain, Ohio
She wrote her first novels while working a full day as an editor at Random House, where she stayed from 1967 to 1983. It was there, assembling a documentary history called The Black Book in 1974, that she read a newspaper account from 1856 of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in Kentucky and killed her own child rather than see her taken back. That clipping became Beloved.
The book's reception is its own story. On 24 January 1988, forty-eight Black writers and critics published a signed statement in The New York Times objecting that she had never received a major national book award. She won the Pulitzer for Beloved that year, and the Nobel five years later, with a citation that names no single book.
Start with Song of Solomon (1977), the most readable way in and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. Then Beloved (1987), which is the greater book and asks more of you.
All Toni Morrison books →Cormac McCarthy
1933–2023 · Providence, Rhode Island
He wrote almost his entire body of work on one manual typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32 bought second-hand for fifty dollars. When it finally wore out a friend replaced it, and he sent the original to auction at Christie's in December 2009, where it went for $254,500 — against an estimate of fifteen to twenty thousand — with most of the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, where he was a trustee.
He is routinely described as breaking through with All the Pretty Horses in 1992. It was his sixth novel, published twenty-seven years after his first, and it won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. Blood Meridian, now the book his admirers rate highest, won nothing at all.
Start with All the Pretty Horses (1992) or The Road (2006), which won the Pulitzer and is the shortest. Leave Blood Meridian (1985) until you are sure — it is the hardest book on this page.
All Cormac McCarthy books →Barbara Kingsolver
Born 1955 · Annapolis, Maryland; raised in Kentucky
She is a trained biologist — a degree in biology from DePauw in 1977, a master's in ecology and evolutionary biology from Arizona in 1980 — and it shows in how her novels handle systems: a place, an economy and a species are treated as one subject. When she was seven her parents took the family to the Congo to do public-health work, which is where The Poisonwood Bible comes from.
She was the first writer to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice, in 2010 (as the Orange Prize, for The Lacuna) and in 2023 for Demon Copperhead, which also took the Pulitzer that year, shared. In 2000 she founded and paid for a prize of her own, the Bellwether, for unpublished fiction of social change.
Start with Demon Copperhead (2022), a retelling of David Copperfield set in the Appalachian opioid crisis. Then The Poisonwood Bible (1998), a Pulitzer finalist and the one most readers name first.
All Barbara Kingsolver books →Donna Tartt
Born 1963 · Greenwood, Mississippi
Three novels in thirty years, roughly a decade each, and no apparent interest in changing that pace. The Secret History was written at and after Bennington, was called The God of Illusions in draft, and had a first printing of seventy-five thousand copies — a debut novel is more usually given ten.
The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014 and split critics harder than any recent winner. It did not win the Booker, whatever you may have read: the prize opened to American writers only from 2014, and The Goldfinch was not on that year's list.
Start with The Secret History (1992), which is the one people finish in three days. Then The Goldfinch (2013), at nearly eight hundred pages.
All Donna Tartt books →American essayists
The form America does best. It suits a country that argues with itself in public: short enough to be written in anger, long enough to change its own mind halfway through, and answerable to nobody but the person whose name is on it.
Henry David Thoreau
1817–1862 · Concord, Massachusetts
He moved to a hut by Walden Pond in July 1845 and stayed two years, two months and two days, then spent the next seven years turning it into a book. The cabin was a mile from town and he walked in for dinner regularly, which people bring up as though it were a scandal. It was an experiment, not a hermitage.
The other half of his influence is one essay. He refused to pay a poll tax that funded slavery and a war with Mexico, spent a night in jail, and wrote up the reasoning as “Resistance to Civil Government” in 1849 — the title “Civil Disobedience” came later. Gandhi read it in South Africa. Martin Luther King read it as a student. No other American essay has moved as far.
Start with “Civil Disobedience” (1849, as “Resistance to Civil Government”) — twenty pages, and the argument arrives whole. Then Walden (1854), which is better dipped into than read straight through.
All Henry David Thoreau books →James Baldwin
1924–1987 · Harlem, New York
He is filed as a novelist and the essays are the better half. He left for Paris in 1948 at twenty-four, partly to find out what he was outside of America's account of him, and wrote about the country more clearly from a distance than almost anyone managed from inside it.
The Fire Next Time (1963) is two pieces — a letter to his nephew and a long essay — and it does something almost nothing else does: it addresses white readers directly, without pleading and without letting them off. Sentence for sentence he is the best prose writer in this section.
Start with The Fire Next Time (1963). Under a hundred pages. Then Notes of a Native Son (1955), the first collection and still the most quoted.
All James Baldwin books →Susan Sontag
1933–2004 · New York
She wrote to work out what she thought, and published the working out. On Photography (1977) argued that taking a picture of something is a way of refusing to intervene in it, which sounded overstated in 1977 and reads as plain description now. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Illness as Metaphor (1978) was written while she was being treated for cancer, and its argument is that the stories we tell about a disease — that it expresses a personality, that it is deserved — do measurable harm to the people who have it. It is the most useful thing she wrote.
Start with On Photography (1977) if you want the famous one, or Illness as Metaphor (1978) if you want the one that will change how you talk. Then Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which revisits the photography argument and disagrees with her younger self.
All Susan Sontag books →Joan Didion
1934–2021 · Sacramento, California
Nobody has been imitated more badly. The style looks copyable — short declarative sentences, a detail held up without comment, the writer visibly present and visibly not explaining — and it is not, because the effect comes from what she leaves out rather than what she puts in.
The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) was written in the year after her husband died at the dinner table while their daughter lay in intensive care. It won the National Book Award and it is the least stylish thing she wrote, which is why it works.
Start with Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), and read “Goodbye to All That” first. Then The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which you should not read while grieving unless you want to be seen.
All Joan Didion books →Rebecca Solnit
Born 1961 · Bridgeport, Connecticut; raised in California
She writes essays that begin somewhere apparently minor — the history of walking, a shade of blue, a man at a party — and end up somewhere structural, without ever announcing the manoeuvre. River of Shadows won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The essay in Men Explain Things to Me (2014) gave the internet a word she did not coin and does not particularly like. The rest of that collection is better than the title piece, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost is better than either.
Start with A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), which is the one people press on their friends. Then Men Explain Things to Me (2014), or Wanderlust (2000) for the history of walking.
All Rebecca Solnit books →Roxane Gay
Born 1974 · Omaha, Nebraska, to Haitian parents
Bad Feminist (2014) works because of what the title concedes. She likes things she can argue are bad for her, holds positions she cannot fully defend, and writes from inside that contradiction rather than resolving it — which turned out to be what a lot of readers had been waiting to see done in public.
Hunger (2017) is a memoir about her body and about the year that changed her relationship to it. It is the harder book and the better one.
Start with Bad Feminist (2014). Then Hunger (2017), which asks considerably more of you.
All Roxane Gay books →American memoirists
Six writers working from inside a life while it was still being lived. The American memoir is the form with the most to lose: the writer is both the witness and the evidence.
Maya Angelou
1928–2014 · St. Louis, Missouri
Born Marguerite Annie Johnson. She wrote her life in seven volumes over forty-four years, from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969 to Mom & Me & Mom in 2013, and she did it because she was goaded into it: her editor at Random House told her that writing autobiography as literature was “just about impossible”, which is a thing you say to a certain kind of person on purpose. The title came from Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “Sympathy”, suggested to her by the singer Abbey Lincoln.
Before any of that she was hired at fifteen as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco, having told the Market Street Railway Company she was nineteen. She won three Grammy Awards for spoken word, the National Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Start with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), and read it as the first volume of seven rather than a standalone. Then The Heart of a Woman (1981), the volume most readers rate highest after it.
All Maya Angelou books →Mary Karr
Born 1955 · Groves, Texas
She published two books of poems before any prose, and the memoirs read like it — compressed, unsentimental, funny in the same breath as the worst of it. The Liars' Club (1995) is the book usually credited with starting the modern memoir boom, and it won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction the following year.
The east Texas refinery town she grew up in appears in it as “Leechfield”. That place does not exist; the town is Groves, and the renaming is the kind of decision she later spent a whole book explaining.
Start with The Liars' Club (1995). Then The Art of Memoir (2015) if you are writing one yourself — it is a working manual, not a victory lap.
All Mary Karr books →Cheryl Strayed
Born 1968 · Spangler, Pennsylvania
She chose her own surname, at the time of her divorce in the mid-nineties, for what it means. In the summer of 1995, at twenty-six, she walked about eleven hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave north to the Bridge of the Gods on the Columbia River. Not the whole trail — that is about two thousand six hundred and fifty miles — and the book never claims otherwise.
For two years before Wild she wrote the advice column “Dear Sugar” anonymously, and revealed herself at a party in San Francisco in February 2012, five weeks before the memoir came out. It became the first pick of Oprah's relaunched book club that June.
Start with Wild (2012). Then Tiny Beautiful Things (2012), the collected columns, which many readers end up preferring.
All Cheryl Strayed books →Elizabeth Gilbert
Born 1969 · Waterbury, Connecticut
Eat, Pray, Love was her fourth book, not her first, and the three before it are the reason she could write it: a story collection, a novel, and The Last American Man (2002), a work of reported nonfiction that was a National Book Award finalist. She was a magazine journalist first, and one of her GQ pieces — about bartending on the Lower East Side — became the film Coyote Ugly.
In June 2023 she pulled a finished novel, The Snow Forest, weeks before publication, after Ukrainian readers objected to its Russian setting. Whatever you make of the decision, it is an unusual thing for a writer of her sales to do.
Start with Eat, Pray, Love (2006) if you want the one everyone means. Then The Signature of All Things (2013) for the novel, or Big Magic (2015) if you are stuck on your own work.
All Elizabeth Gilbert books →Paul Kalanithi
1977–2015 · New York State; raised in Kingman, Arizona
He took degrees in English literature and human biology at Stanford, a master's in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, and a medical degree at Yale, and was in the sixth year of a neurosurgery residency when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in May 2013. He went back to the operating theatre and finished the residency in 2014. His daughter was born that July. He died in March 2015, at thirty-seven.
When Breath Becomes Air was unfinished. His wife Lucy wrote the epilogue that closes it, and it is the best writing in the book. It spent sixty-eight weeks on the New York Times list and was a Pulitzer finalist in biography in 2017.
Start with When Breath Becomes Air (2016) — it is the only book he wrote, and it takes an evening.
All Paul Kalanithi books →Chanel Miller
Born 1992 · Palo Alto, California
For more than four years she was known only as Emily Doe. The statement she read in court was published in full by BuzzFeed News in June 2016 and read some eleven million times within four days — more than a year before the phrase “Me Too” reached the scale it later did. She gave her name publicly in September 2019, three weeks before Know My Name was published.
The memoir won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also a visual artist: a seventy-five-foot mural of hers was installed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 2020, and in 2025 the children's book she wrote and illustrated was named a Newbery Honor Book.
Start with Know My Name (2019). Then Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All (2024) if you have a reader aged eight to twelve in the house.
All Chanel Miller books →American journalists & nonfiction writers
Seven reporters who wrote books. Between them: three Pulitzer winners, one of them twice, two National Book Awards, an undercover asylum committal, and a biography that has been running since 1982 and is not finished.
Nellie Bly
1864–1922 · Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran; the byline came from a Stephen Foster song, and the misspelling was her editor's. In 1887, for the New York World, she had herself committed to the lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island and stayed ten days. The exposé began running on 9 October, and it is the founding document of undercover reporting.
Two years later she went around the world in seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes, arriving in Jersey City at 3:51 in the afternoon on 25 January 1890. She did not know until she reached Hong Kong that a rival magazine had sent another woman in the opposite direction on the same day. She later held two US patents, one for a milk can and one for a stacking garbage can.
Start with Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) — short, and still shocking. Then Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890).
All Nellie Bly books →Studs Terkel
1912–2008 · born New York City, made in Chicago
Born Louis Terkel; the nickname came from a novel he was reading. He took a law degree at the University of Chicago in 1934 and went into radio instead, spending forty-five years, from 1952 to 1997, presenting a programme on WFMT in Chicago and pointing a microphone at people nobody else was interviewing. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy years and did not retract anything.
His method was one long question — what is it actually like — and the books are the answers, edited but not tidied. The Good War won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1985, though Working is the one people quote.
Start with Working (1974): people describing their own jobs, at length, and you can read it in any order. Then Hard Times (1970) or The Good War (1984).
All Studs Terkel books →Tom Wolfe
1930–2018 · Richmond, Virginia
He took a doctorate in American Studies at Yale in 1957 and had a baseball tryout with the New York Giants in 1952, which lasted three days. Both facts are useful: the reporting has an academic's thoroughness and a competitor's appetite for a scene. The white suit was an accident of 1962 — a summer suit in fabric too heavy for summer, worn in winter instead, and then kept.
The Right Stuff (1979) won the National Book Award for General Nonfiction. He never won a Pulitzer, and he is no relation to the earlier novelist of nearly the same name.
Start with The Right Stuff (1979), the best book about the space programme and about male competence generally. Then The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) for the novel, or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) for the sixties.
All Tom Wolfe books →Robert Caro
Born 1935 · New York City
He was a newspaper reporter at Newsday, and he expected his book about Robert Moses to take about nine months. It took years, ran to more than a thousand pages, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1975 and permanently changed how American cities are written about. His subject is not really any of his subjects: it is what political power does when nobody is watching it accumulate.
Four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson have appeared since 1982, one of which won a second Pulitzer and the National Book Award in the same season. The fifth is unfinished. In a 2026 interview, at ninety, he said he had written nine hundred and eighty-three pages of it and declined to name a date.
Start with The Power Broker (1974) if you have the nerve. Or start with Master of the Senate (2002) — volume three of four, but it reads alone, and it is the best single book on how a legislature actually works.
All Robert Caro books →Michael Lewis
Born 1960 · New Orleans, Louisiana
His Princeton degree is in art and archaeology. The economics came later, at the London School of Economics, and then a job selling bonds — selling, not trading — at Salomon Brothers in the mid-eighties, which he left and wrote up as Liar's Poker.
The method has not changed since: find the person inside a system who noticed something everyone else had agreed not to notice, and tell the story through them. That is Moneyball, and it is The Big Short.
Start with The Big Short (2010), which explains the 2008 crisis through six people and is funnier than it has any right to be. Then Moneyball (2003), or Liar's Poker (1989) for where he began.
All Michael Lewis books →Isabel Wilkerson
Born 1961 · Washington, D.C.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, for a profile of a ten-year-old boy on the South Side and two stories about the Midwestern floods of 1993. She was the first Black woman in American journalism to win a Pulitzer, and the first African American to win one for individual reporting.
Then she spent fifteen years on one book. The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) tells the story of the Great Migration — six million people leaving the American South between 1915 and 1970 — through three lives, chosen from more than twelve hundred people she interviewed. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction.
Start with The Warmth of Other Suns (2010). It is six hundred pages and reads like three novels running in parallel. Then Caste (2020).
All Isabel Wilkerson books →David Grann
Staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003
Two of his books have been filmed and a third is in production, and the reason is structure rather than subject: he withholds like a novelist while sourcing like a historian. The Lost City of Z (2009) follows an explorer who vanished in the Amazon in 1925, and Grann went in after him.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) is the serious one — the murders of Osage people for their oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma, and the founding of the FBI on the back of them. It was a National Book Award finalist. Note the dates: the book is 2017, the film 2023.
Start with Killers of the Flower Moon (2017). Then The Wager (2023), a shipwreck, a mutiny and a court martial, which is the most purely enjoyable of the three.
All David Grann books →American poets
Five poets, four Pulitzers and a Nobel. Poetry is the section people skip, so each entry names the collection to buy rather than the collected works — a selected edition is almost always the wrong place to begin.
Emily Dickinson
1830–1886 · Amherst, Massachusetts
She wrote something in the region of eighteen hundred poems and hand-sewed them into forty small booklets. Ten or eleven appeared in print while she was alive — the museum that holds her papers counts eleven, other scholars ten — all anonymously, all altered by editors, and none with her consent — when one was printed in 1866 she wrote to a correspondent, “I told you I did not print.”
Her sister Lavinia found the manuscripts after her death in 1886, and the first collection came out in 1890. That edition gave the poems titles and regularised the punctuation, and it is not what she wrote. A faithful text did not exist until 1955, which is the single most important thing to know before you buy an edition.
Start with any edition based on the Johnson (1955) or Franklin (1998) texts — the dashes and capitals should look strange on the page. Avoid the free 1890 text that circulates online; it is a Victorian tidy-up.
All Emily Dickinson books →Anne Sexton
1928–1974 · Newton, Massachusetts
She came to poetry as an adult, joining Boston workshops in 1957, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry ten years later for Live or Die. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London in 1965, which for an American poet at that point was unusual.
Transformations (1971) is the surprise in her work: seventeen Grimm fairy tales retold with the enchantment removed and the family politics left in. A composer set ten of them as a chamber opera, which premiered in Minneapolis in May 1973.
Start with Transformations (1971) — the most enjoyable entry point to a poet with a reputation for being difficult. Then Live or Die (1966) for the Pulitzer.
All Anne Sexton books →Sylvia Plath
1932–1963 · Boston, Massachusetts
One collection appeared in her lifetime, The Colossus in 1960. Everything her reputation rests on was published after her death at thirty: Ariel in 1965, assembled and reordered by her husband, and The Collected Poems in 1981, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982 — nineteen years after she died.
The Bell Jar was published in London in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas. It did not appear under her own name until 1966, and American readers could not buy it at all until 1971.
Start with Ariel (1965), and if you can find the restored edition, take that one — it is the sequence as she left it. Then The Bell Jar (1963).
All Sylvia Plath books →Mary Oliver
1935–2019 · Maple Heights, Ohio
At about seventeen she went to Steepletop, the estate of a dead poet in upstate New York, to help the poet's sister sort her papers, and stayed roughly seven years. She met the photographer Molly Malone Cook there; they were together for more than forty years, and Cook was also her literary agent until her death in 2005. Oliver attended two universities and took a degree from neither.
She won the Pulitzer for American Primitive in 1984 and the National Book Award for New & Selected Poems in 1992, and was for years the best-selling poet in the United States — a fact critics used against her and readers did not care about. Her birth year is often given as 1933, including once by the Pulitzer organisation itself; it is 1935.
Start with New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992) — this is the one case on this page where the selected edition is the right first book. Then American Primitive (1983).
All Mary Oliver books →Louise Glück
1943–2023 · New York; later Cambridge, Massachusetts
The most decorated American poet of her generation and the least interested in being liked. She won the Pulitzer in 1993 for The Wild Iris, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, the Bollingen Prize in 2001, the National Book Award in 2014, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, for what its citation called “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
She was United States Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004, the twelfth to hold the post, and taught at Williams from 1984 before joining Yale in 2004. Note the date: The Wild Iris was published in 1992 and won the Pulitzer in 1993, and the two are routinely run together.
Start with The Wild Iris (1992) — a garden speaking, in three voices, and short. Then Averno (2006) or Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).
All Louise Glück books →Which American author should you read, and with which book?
All thirty-one, with the single book each entry above names as the way in. On a phone this table scrolls sideways in its own frame.
| Author | Section | Best for | Start with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ernest Hemingway | Novel | The sentence stripped to the bone | The Old Man and the Sea |
| John Steinbeck | Novel | America during the Depression | Of Mice and Men |
| Harper Lee | Novel | A childhood used as a witness stand | To Kill a Mockingbird |
| Toni Morrison | Novel | The most decorated novelist on this page | Song of Solomon |
| Cormac McCarthy | Novel | Violence, landscape, no comfort | All the Pretty Horses |
| Barbara Kingsolver | Novel | Places and the economies that shape them | Demon Copperhead |
| Donna Tartt | Novel | A long book you will not put down | The Secret History |
| Henry David Thoreau | Essay | The argument for disobeying | “Civil Disobedience” |
| James Baldwin | Essay | America, seen clearly | The Fire Next Time |
| Susan Sontag | Essay | How images and illness get talked about | On Photography |
| Joan Didion | Essay | Reporting, California, grief | Slouching Towards Bethlehem |
| Rebecca Solnit | Essay | Small starting points, large endings | A Field Guide to Getting Lost |
| Roxane Gay | Essay | Contradiction held rather than resolved | Bad Feminist |
| Maya Angelou | Memoir | A life told across seven volumes | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings |
| Mary Karr | Memoir | A hard childhood, told funny | The Liars' Club |
| Cheryl Strayed | Memoir | Grief, walked off | Wild |
| Elizabeth Gilbert | Memoir | Starting over, and creative work | Eat, Pray, Love |
| Paul Kalanithi | Memoir | What medicine owes the dying | When Breath Becomes Air |
| Chanel Miller | Memoir | Taking a name back | Know My Name |
| Nellie Bly | Reporting | Where undercover journalism starts | Ten Days in a Mad-House |
| Studs Terkel | Reporting | Ordinary people, at length | Working |
| Tom Wolfe | Reporting | New Journalism at full volume | The Right Stuff |
| Robert Caro | Reporting | How political power actually works | The Power Broker |
| Michael Lewis | Reporting | Money and systems, made readable | The Big Short |
| Isabel Wilkerson | Reporting | The Great Migration through three lives | The Warmth of Other Suns |
| David Grann | Reporting | True stories built like thrillers | Killers of the Flower Moon |
| Emily Dickinson | Poetry | The strangest voice in American poetry | A Franklin or Johnson edition |
| Anne Sexton | Poetry | Fairy tales with the enchantment removed | Transformations |
| Sylvia Plath | Poetry | The late poems, written fast | Ariel |
| Mary Oliver | Poetry | Attention as a discipline | New and Selected Poems, Volume One |
| Louise Glück | Poetry | Austerity, and the Nobel | The Wild Iris |
If you read only two from this page, take Toni Morrison and James Baldwin — the same country, thirty years apart, and neither one comfortable. If you want to see how far the range goes, put Emily Dickinson, who published almost nothing, next to Michael Lewis, who explains a financial crisis in three hundred pages. Both are recognisably the same tradition: someone looking hard at one thing and refusing to look away.
Nine more American writers worth your time
Names that would fit any of the five sections above, each with a full guide here.
Frequently asked questions about American authors
Which American authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Four of the writers on this page have: Ernest Hemingway in 1954, John Steinbeck in 1962, Toni Morrison in 1993 and Louise Glück in 2020. A common mistake is to attribute Hemingway's Nobel to The Old Man and the Sea and Morrison's to Beloved: Hemingway's citation names that book only as the most recent demonstration of his work, and Morrison's names no book at all.
Which American author should I read first?
It depends on what you want the book to do. For a novel, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison or The Secret History by Donna Tartt. For nonfiction, The Big Short by Michael Lewis or The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. For something short that lands immediately, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, at under a hundred pages. Every entry on this page names one book rather than a shelf, which is what the “Start with” line is for.
Did Truman Capote write To Kill a Mockingbird?
No. Harper Lee wrote it. The rumour exists because the two were childhood neighbours in Monroeville and because Lee worked as Capote's researcher in Kansas in 1959. A letter Capote wrote to his aunt in July 1959, made public in 2006, settles it: he describes being shown as much of the book as Lee had written, in the tone of a reader rather than a collaborator.
Is Go Set a Watchman a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird?
No, it is the earlier draft. Harper Lee submitted it to her publisher in 1957 and her editor asked her to rewrite it from the child's point of view; that rewrite became To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. Go Set a Watchman was published in July 2015, fifty-eight years after it was written and seven months before Lee died. Read it as a draft, or not at all.
Was Isabel Wilkerson the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize?
She was the first in journalism, in 1994, and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She was not the first overall: Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950. The distinction matters and is frequently dropped. Wilkerson won for Feature Writing at The New York Times, where she was Chicago bureau chief, not for either of her books.
Did Cheryl Strayed hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail?
No, and Wild does not claim she did. Strayed walked roughly eleven hundred miles of it in the summer of 1995, from the Mojave Desert north to the Bridge of the Gods on the Oregon–Washington border, skipping sections. The full trail runs about two thousand six hundred and fifty miles from Mexico to Canada. The “whole trail” version comes from summaries of the film, not the book.
How many poems did Emily Dickinson publish in her lifetime?
Ten or eleven, out of roughly eighteen hundred; the Emily Dickinson Museum counts eleven and other scholars count ten. All appeared anonymously, all were altered by editors, and she authorised none of them. Her sister Lavinia found the manuscripts after her death in 1886 and the first collection appeared in 1890. Scholars still differ on the exact totals — the 1955 Johnson edition prints 1,775 poems, the 1998 Franklin edition 1,789 — because the disagreement is about what counts as a finished poem, not about lost material. Full guide to Emily Dickinson here.
How many volumes of Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography are there?
Four are published — 1982, 1990, 2002 and 2012 — and a fifth, covering the presidency from the 1964 election onward, is unfinished. In an interview reported in May 2026, Caro, then ninety, said he had written nine hundred and eighty-three pages of it and would not name a publication date. Volume three, Master of the Senate, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and reads perfectly well on its own.
Which American authors on this list won the Pulitzer Prize?
Fourteen of the thirty-one. In fiction: Steinbeck (1940), Lee (1961), Morrison (1988), McCarthy (2007), Tartt (2014), Kingsolver (2023, shared) and Hemingway (1953). In poetry: Sexton (1967), Plath (1982, posthumously), Oliver (1984) and Glück (1993). In nonfiction and journalism: Terkel (1985), Wilkerson (1994) and Caro, twice, in 1975 and 2003.
Are all of these writers American-born?
Yes, all thirty-one were born in the United States, but several write from more than one place. Paul Kalanithi was Indian-American, born in New York to a family from Tamil Nadu. Roxane Gay was born in Nebraska to Haitian parents. James Baldwin wrote most of his work about America from France. If you are looking for writers from elsewhere, the author index covers more than a hundred and ninety.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
— James Baldwin, interviewed by Jane Howard, LIFE, 24 May 1963
Each of the thirty-one has a full guide here: the complete bibliography, publication order, and an honest answer to which book to open first.
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