1.	Počátky USA

2.	Romantismus: Cooper, Longfellow

3.	Transcendentalismus:Emerson,Thoreau

4.	Realismus: Twain, Whitman, Poe

5.	"The Muckrakers": Jack London, Theodor Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis

6.	Ztracená generace: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway

7.	Hospodářská krize: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Jerome David Salinger

8.	Beatnici: Jack Kerouac

9.	Americké divadlo: Albee, Miller

"2) Trancendentalists
The transcendentalist movement was inspirated by Imanuel Kant. His philosophy is rather complicated to explain. Moreover I can´t understand it very much. Trancendentalists wanted to be independent of the society, they were interested in the nature and the inside world of people. They said that every truth is relative and can be understood in any way. They wanted to find the truth by being true to themselves. The main representatives were:
RALPH WALDO EMERSON wrote an essay called The nature.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU went deeper into the secrets of nature. He withdrew from society and lived alone. He revolted against the conventions of the society. He wanted to have more time for his studies, meditation and observation of nature. His radical ideas can be found in his essay Cicil Disobedience. He refused to pay taxes.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE achieved succes with his book The Scarlet Letter. It tells of the passionate, forbidden love affair. For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring book. The story was set in the time of early Puritan colonization. He criticized the obsession with morality and sexual repression.

3) Realism
In the second half of the 19th century great changes took place in people lifes. Trade and manufactures grew rapidly and writers moved from romanticism towards realism.

MARK TWAIN - spent his childhood near the Mississippi River. Later he worked on a steamboat as a pilot. He took part in the Civil War, too. Then he worked as a miner and a reporter. He wrote many humorous sketches and tales. He is one of the greates representatives of the period known as the Gilded Age. This term was taken from the title of his book called The Gilded Age. This book describes and criticizes the development of capitalism in the USA, especially people who get rich very quickly. His the best know books are The adventure of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. All the characters are based on real people. He depicts temporary problems as slavery or freedom throught the eyes of a small boy.
Mark Twain invented a new type of story called hoax, in which ordinary people trict experts."