The 19th-century saw the spreading and recognition of American writing in Europe with the folk stories of Washington Irving, the frontier adventures of Fenimore Cooper and the moralising verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The founding fathers of the new state included the writers, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Philip Freneau, the first American lyric poet of distinction, the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, later an attacker of conventional religion, and the polemicist Francis Hopkinson, who was also the first American composer. The American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the United States was a time of intellectual activity together with social and economic change. It was followed by passionate histories like Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (1654) and Cotton and Mather’s epic Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Perhaps the first book to be published by in America was the Bay Psalm Book in 1640, produced by thirty ministers, led by Richard Mather and John Cotton. It was in the Puritan colonies that published American literature was born, with writers like Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams producing works to promote their visions of the religious state. Some of those early writings were quite accomplished, such as the account of his adventures by Captain John Smith in Virginia and the journalistic histories of John Winthrop and William Bradford in New England. The American literary tradition began when some of the early English colonists recounted their adventures in the New World for the benefit of readers in their mother country (see our list of the best English authors). American writers’ contribution to English literature is incalculable Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.
Other American writers who were laureates include such household names as T.S.
There have been twelve literature Nobel Prize laureates, beginning with Sinclair Lewis in 1930 to Bob Dylan, in 2016. Novels, plays, and poems pour out of the United States, with increasing numbers of women, African American, Native American and Hispanic writers making a strong contribution. There is a great and proud tradition of American writers, including some of the world’s most famous authors. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order.