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The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Novel, 1939
Dust Bowl Oklahoma families travel Route 66 to California's farm valleys during the Great Depression.
Books by country North America
Books set in the United States
Ten books that put you in the United States. Eight are by writers from the United States and set there, starting with The Grapes of Wrath and Their Eyes Were Watching God. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
About the literature of the United States
American literature includes Nobel laureates from Toni Morrison in 1993 to the poet Louise Glück, the most recent, in 2020. Its voice was shaped in the nineteenth century by Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, and by Mark Twain, whose The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn sends a raft down the Mississippi past slavery and river-town violence. Morrison's Beloved is set in Ohio after the Civil War, where slavery's legacy haunts a formerly enslaved woman.
Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in the vernacular speech of Black communities in Florida, taking Janie Crawford through all-Black towns and the Everglades. Visitors have written about the country too: Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York, written in Spanish, gives a surreal view of Harlem and Wall Street in 1929.
By writers from the United States
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Novel, 1937
Follows Janie Crawford through all-Black towns and the Everglades muck of early twentieth-century Florida, in rich vernacular voice.
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Novel, 1987
Ohio after the Civil War, where the legacy of slavery haunts a formerly enslaved woman and her family.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Novel, 1884
A raft journey down the Mississippi exposes slavery, small-town violence and river life in the antebellum South.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Novel, 1960
Racial injustice and social hierarchy in a 1930s small town in Alabama, seen through a child's eyes.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Novel, 1925
Long Island and New York in the 1920s, exploring wealth, class and the hollowness of the American Dream.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Novel, 1952
A young Black man moves from the Jim Crow South to Harlem, confronting racism and politics in mid-century America.
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Novel, 2004
An elderly Iowa minister's letter to his son conveys small-town Midwestern faith, history and family across generations.
Wider picks
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for the United States.
America Is in the Heart
Carlos Bulosan
Memoir, 1946
Wider pick: By a Filipino migrant writer
Filipino migrant workers in the fields and canneries of 1930s California and Washington, facing racism and hardship.
Poet in New York
Federico García Lorca
Poetry, 1940. Translated from Spanish by Greg Simon and Steven F. White
Wider pick: By a Spanish poet who lived there in 1929–30
Harlem, Wall Street and the Crash-era city seen through a Spanish poet's shocked, surreal eyes in 1929.
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