1.The roots of US literature
2.The Romanticism
2.1.Washington Irving
2.2.James Fenimore Cooper
2.3.Edgar Allan Poe
2.4.Walt Whitman
3.The Realism
3.1.Harriet Beecher-Stowe
3.2.Mark Twain
3.3.Jack London
4.The 20th century
4.1.After the First World War
4.1.1.John Dos Passos
4.1.2.Ernest Hemingway
4.1.3.Francis Scott Fitzgerald
4.2.Harry Sinclair Lewis
4.3.Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost
4.4.Social motives in literature
4.4.1.Upton Sinclair
4.4.2.William Faulkner
4.4.3.John Steinbeck
4.5.Emotions of war
4.5.1.Norman Mailer
4.5.2.Kurt Vonnegut
4.6.Beat Generation
4.6.1.Jack Kerouac
4.6.2.Allan Ginsberg
4.7.1960s
4.7.1.Joseph Heller
4.7.2.William Styron
4.7.3.Arthur Hailey
4.7.4.Eugene O’Neill

"d) the 20th century
 After the First World War, in 1920s, a group of writers known as the ‘Lost Generation’ entered the literature. The ‘Lost Generation’ is the term for a group of writers, who were influenced by the First World War and who lost their illusions after the war events. The most important representatives of this group were Ernest Hemingway and Francis Scott Fitzgerald and also John Dos Passos (1896 to 1970) with his novels Manhattan Transfer or The 42nd Parallel.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) - was born in Oak Park (a suburb of Chicago) in 1898. During the First World War he served as a voluntary ambulance driver and was seriously injured. Like other writers of the ‘Lost Generation’, he was also deeply affected by the horrors of the war.
He began his career with short stories which he wrote in Paris - his first book of stories In Our Time was published in 1925.
In his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) hero Jake Barnes lives a miserable life and fell in love with an English woman, Brett Ashley. But his injury makes sexual life impossible.
His world-famous novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) is an epic description of the First World War
and it protests against any war. But it is also a moving love story of an American lieutenant in the American Ambulance Service and an English nurse. They go off to Switzerland to avoid the horror of the war but the girl dies during childbirth."

Práce je jen výběrem některých amerických autorů.