U-Z Famous American Literature

Tennessee Williams, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald…

Mar 26, 2009 M.L. Costa

Continuing the guide to often noted novelists, playwrights, and songwriters of the USA...Following the literary influences on the formation of the "American Dream."

Picking up from O-T Famous American Literature, there are some writers and works which have either been historically influential or become embedded into common consciousness. Working through the alphabet from U-Z, these writers or their works have influenced the formation of a nation’s ideals, dreams, and attitudes.

U - Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) depicting the truths of slavery, was intended as a part abolitionist propaganda, accounting for the many didactic passages of the tragic story.

V – The Vengeance of Nitocris by Tennessee Williams

The Vengeance of Nitocris (1928) was a short story which became the first published fiction of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). Born Thomas Lanier Williams, he has become best known as the award-winning playwright of works such as The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). His plays are normally set in the South, and depict desperate characters longing for escape.

W – Edith Wharton

Born into New York Society as Edith Newbold Jones, but writing under her married name, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) often wrote observations of the Gilded Age. Herself feeling stifled by social conformity, the constant theme of her novels is that marriage is a prison. Her most famous works include The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920).

X – Secluded “Poetess X” Emily Dickinson

Living an introverted and reclusive life, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is often thought of as a figure clad in white in the seclusion of her garden. Fewer than a dozen of her mamy hundreds of poems were published in her lifetime. After her death, her mainly unnamed poems were discovered by her sister.

Y - Yankee Doodle Boy by George M. Cohan

George Michael Cohan (1878-1942) is often considered the father of the Braodway Musical. Entertainer, playwright, composer, and lyricist, Cohan wrote many American standards including, You’re A Grand Old Flag, Over There, and Yankee Doodle Boy, often better known as Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Z – Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and his wife Zelda Sayre (1900-1948) were prominent members of the “Lost Generation,” an age of the Roaring twenties, when many had lost their lives or idealism during the preceding First World War. Although F. Scott Fitzgerald finished reasonably few novels, he remains an influential writer with works such as The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is The Night (1934).

Zelda shared in her husband’s celebrity, and she eventually became a published author herself. Her semi-autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz (1932) portrays a contrasting view to her husband’s fictional depiction of their lives.

The copyright of the article U-Z Famous American Literature in American Fiction is owned by M.L. Costa. Permission to republish U-Z Famous American Literature in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Manhattan of Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald

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