American Literature

Specific Works and Authors

For many literature courses, you will need to find information about a particular author or criticism about a particular work. The following pages contain lists of many notable American authors and works in three specific types of literature - poetry, novels, and plays.  However, the lists are not exhaustive and there are many different ways of searching for information. 

An excellent place to start is searching in Credo Reference - the source of most of the content on these three pages. Their collection of materials on American Literature is extensive. You can use the "Mind Map" that shows up on many of their results pages to explore related topics and subjects. It's a great way to find out what genres or literary movements are associated with a particular author or title

When searching for library resources in OneSearch, if you don't get enough material when you search "CR Books and Videos", try expanding your search to "Everything".  What that will do is tell OneSearch to include resources that may not be in the CR Library, but which you have access to from other collections such as scholarly journals online, open-source materials from reputable online collections, etc.

In the Library of Congress classification system, which is used in most academic libraries, books by a particular author and books about that author and their work (criticism) are shelved together.  However, when you're searching in OneSearch, it can be tricky to know how to focus your search so you get the specific material you want.  That's where using Advanced Search can help.

Click on Advanced Search to open the advanced search box.  At the top, select CR Books and Videos.

Below that are three lines where you can enter filters to control your search. There are several pull-down menus on each line, followed by a line where you enter your search term (in this case, the name of an author).

• Use the pull-down menus on the first line to select "subject" and "contains", then type in the name of the author you're researching.
• On the second line, use the first pull-down to select OR, the second pull-down to select "author/creator", and the third to select "contains", and type in the name of the author a second time.

Now press "search", and you'll pull up a list of books and videos in the CR Library that are either BY your author or ABOUT their works.