Walt Whitman
Civil conflict and reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln ; Jefferson Davis ; Henry Timrod ; Henry W. Grady
Sidney Lanier
The persistence of tradition. Bayard Taylor ; Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Folk literature. The cowboy ; The bad man ; The homesteader ; The lumberjack ; The mountaineer ; The railroad man ; The slums ; The Negro
Frontier humor. Tall tales ; John Phoenix (George Horatio Derby) ; Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) ; Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) ; Petroleum v. Nasby (David Ross Locke) ; Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye)
The development of local color. Bret Harte ; Joaquin Miller (Cincinnatus Hiner Miller) ; Edward Eggleston ; John Hay ; Irwin Russell ; George Washington Cable ; Lafcadio Hearn ; Joel Chandler Harris ; Sarah Orne Jewett
The advance of science. John Fiske ; John Muir ; Clarence King
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
William Dean Howells
Henry James, Jr.
Emily Dickinson. The world about us ; Life and love ; Death and eternity ; Letters
Countercurrent : romance. Bliss Carman ; Richard Hovey
Utopia and social reform. Henry George ; Edward Bellamy ; William Graham Sumner ; William Jennings Bryan ; Edwin Markham ; William Allen White
The triumph of realism and naturalism. Edgar Watson Howe ; Hamlin Garland ; Frederick Jackson Turner ; Ambrose Bierce ; Harold Frederic ; Stephen Crane ; Frank Norris.