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PoetryM'FingalJohn Trumbull · 1782New England in revolt, its town meetings and its liberty poles, seen by a Whig satirist who makes a Loyalist his victim.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThe Conquest of CanaanTimothy Dwight · 1785A newly born republic looks for an epic equal to the ancient ones. The biblical subject serves as a detour: the march of a chosen people towards a promised land reads as that of another.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThe Wild Honey SucklePhilip Freneau · 1786A poem of 1786 that looks at a flower of the American woods for its own sake, and not through the flora of English models.Literature
TheatreThe ContrastRoyall Tyler · 1787In the New York of 1787, a comedy of manners sets American virtues against manners imported from England.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelModern ChivalryHugh Henry Brackenridge · 1792A satire of the elections and the crazes of the young republic, which asks who is fit to hold office.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThe Hasty-PuddingJoel Barlow · 1796Cornmeal mush, the everyday fare of New England farms, sung with all the apparatus of the epic by a poet far from home.LiteraturePublic domain
TheatreAndreWilliam Dunlap · 1798The play brings to the stage the execution of Major André, hanged as a spy in 1780, and asks whether the death of a respected enemy was just.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelEdgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-WalkerCharles Brockden Brown · 1799The European Gothic novel houses its terrors in old dungeons. This one moves them to a Pennsylvania forest, among caves, sleepwalking and a frontier still fresh.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThe Culprit FayJoseph Rodman Drake · 1816A court of fairies in the valley of New York's great river: the marvellous of the old ballads transplanted into an American landscape.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThanatopsisWilliam Cullen Bryant · 1817A young New England poet looks on death as a return to the earth and seeks his consolation in nature.LiteraturePublic domain
Short storiesThe Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.Washington Irving · 1819An American looks at old England, and slips two American legends in among his sketches.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryMarco BozzarisFitz-Greene Halleck · 1825The Greek War of Independence seen from New York: an insurgent leader leads his men in an assault on a sleeping Turkish camp.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Last of the MohicansJames Fenimore Cooper · 1826The Seven Years' War in America, where the French and the English each fight with their Indian allies, around the siege of a fort on Lake George.LiteraturePublic domain
EssayNatureRalph Waldo Emerson · 1836An age that looks at the universe through the eyes of the fathers; these pages offer it an original relation to the universe, sought alone, in a field.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThe RavenEdgar Allan Poe · 1845For its author, the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic subject there is; these verses entrust the mourning to a bird that knows only one word.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryEvangeline, A Tale of AcadieHenry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1847A story of Acadian lovers separated by the deportation, which Nathaniel Hawthorne had let slip by; these verses make it a tale that the Acadians will adopt as their own.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryA Fable for CriticsJames Russell Lowell · 1848A young poet, without signing his name, parades before Apollo everyone then writing in the country and delivers a verdict in rhyme on each.Literature
NovelThe Scarlet LetterNathaniel Hawthorne · 1850A Puritan community punishes the offence in public and gives shame a visible form, worn on the body. The novel looks at what it costs the woman who displays it, and the man who hides it.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelMoby-DickHerman Melville · 1851American whalers then set out on voyages of several years to fetch sperm oil from the other side of the world; these pages give the detail of it and use it for something else.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelUncle Tom's CabinHarriet Beecher Stowe · 1852A law of 1850 obliges the inhabitants of free states to help capture those who have fled, on pain of fine and imprisonment. The novel gives faces and names to what the law treats as property.LiteraturePublic domain
NarrativeWaldenHenry David Thoreau · 1854The railway now runs alongside the pond. This text sets against the age a calculation: what it takes to live, and what the rest costs in life.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California BanditJohn Rollin Ridge · 1854Gold has thrown tens of thousands of men of every language onto California, and a tax of 1850 strikes foreign miners. The book turns a dispossessed Mexican into an avenger.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryLeaves of GrassWalt Whitman · 1855This collection arrives without metre or rhyme and without an author's name, preceded by the portrait of a man in shirtsleeves who speaks of his flesh and that of others.LiteraturePublic domain
EssayThe Autocrat of the Breakfast-TableOliver Wendell Holmes · 1857Around a boarding-house table, a talker no one dares interrupt turns conversation into literature; it is there that a fellow diner calls Boston the hub of the solar system.LiteraturePublic domain
Short storiesArtemus Ward, His BookCharles Farrar Browne · 1862A vein of American humour is then written in the form of newspaper letters, signed with pen names and stuffed with deliberate errors; this collection is one of its greatest bookshop successes.Literature
PoetrySnow-Bound: A Winter IdylJohn Greenleaf Whittier · 1866With the war over and slavery abolished, the cause that had occupied its author's verse since 1833 no longer has an object. Here is a farm of former days, and around the hearth faces most of which are dead.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryOde Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C., 1867Henry Timrod · 1866A year after the surrender, the Confederate section of Magnolia Cemetery still has no monument; decorating its graves is an act of mourning, and for one of the speakers of the day a silent protest.LiteraturePublic domain
Short storiesThe Luck of Roaring Camp and Other SketchesBret Harte · 1870Twenty years after the gold rush, the California of the 1850 camps no longer exists; these stories fix its cast of characters, from the gambler to the fallen woman.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Hoosier SchoolmasterThe Hoosier School-MasterEdward Eggleston · 1871In the aftermath of the Civil War, this novel transcribes, even in its spelling, the Hoosier speech of a remote district of Indiana.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Adventures of Tom SawyerMark Twain · 1876The book looks at childhood from the outside, with the complicity of the adult who remembers it and the irony of one who has seen what the small town was worth.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThe Marshes of GlynnSidney Lanier · 1878Far from the sound of the scythe of time and the trowel of commerce, these verses go in search, on the shore of the Atlantic, of a boundless expanse where the soul is set free.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Grandissimes: A Story of Creole LifeGeorge W. Cable · 1880Fifteen years after the Civil War, this novel goes back to the time of the Louisiana Purchase to show a Creole society held together by colour lines.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryLittle Orphant AnnieJames Whitcomb Riley · 1885These verses record the rural speech of Indiana as it is heard, accent and refrain included, in the mouth of a child who tells of the evenings in his home.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Rise of Silas LaphamWilliam Dean Howells · 1885A middle class enriched within a single generation clashes with the old families of Boston. The novel seats them at the same table and listens to what one hears when the other speaks.LiteraturePublic domain
TheatreShenandoahBronson Howard · 1888Twenty-five years after the war, this play turns reconciliation into a theatrical device, between officers of both sides and former comrades from West Point.LiteraturePublic domain
Short storiesAn Occurrence at Owl Creek BridgeAmbrose Bierce · 1890A former Union soldier, the author takes as his hero a Southern planter about to be hanged by the soldiers of his own side.LiteraturePublic domain
TheatreMargaret FlemingJames A. Herne · 1890American theatre then lives on melodrama. This play shows the infidelity of a respectable husband and leaves his wife the choice of what to do about it.LiteraturePublic domain
Short storiesA New England Nun and Other StoriesMary E. Wilkins Freeman · 1891The villages of New England see many of their men leave, for the West or for the cities, and the women who remain run the house alone. These stories take them up when habit becomes a choice.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Red Badge of CourageStephen Crane · 1895Thirty years after the war, the veterans are publishing their memories. This book tells of a battle without naming it, from the point of view of a man who understands nothing of it and who is afraid.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Country of the Pointed FirsSarah Orne Jewett · 1896The ports of Maine are emptying, the merchant marine is in decline and the young are leaving for the cities. The book arrives in one of these towns just as its society finishes coming apart, and listens to it rather than recounting it.Literature
PoetryLyrics of Lowly LifePaul Laurence Dunbar · 1896Thirty years after abolition, the white public expects touching plantation scenes from a Black poet. This collection gives both registers side by side.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelRed RockThomas Nelson Page · 1898A generation after Reconstruction, the white South imposes on the rest of the country its version of those years, that of a dispossession suffered. This novel is one of its pieces.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Turn of the ScrewHenry James · 1898The narrator is the only one who says she sees the apparitions, and her manuscript passes through two hands before reaching the reader, so that nothing guarantees what she reports.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe AwakeningKate Chopin · 1899In late nineteenth-century Louisiana, the law gives a husband control of his wife's property. This novel follows a wife from Creole high society who wants to live for herself.Literature
TaleOld Indian LegendsZitkála-Šá · 1901These legends, heard in her childhood, are written down in English by a Dakota woman who went through an Indian boarding school.Literature
TheatreThe Great DivideWilliam Vaughn Moody · 1906Two Americas look at each other at the turn of the century, Puritan New England and the West where one makes oneself. The play puts them in the same household.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelWhite FangJack London · 1906This novel is a companion to a book by the same author in which a dog went back to the wild, and it follows the opposite path.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe JungleUpton Sinclair · 1906Chicago was then slaughtering millions of animals a year. The novel shows the other side of it, seen through a family of immigrants who came looking for work.Literature
PoetryRenascenceEdna St. Vincent Millay · 1912This poem comes from Camden, a small town on the coast of Maine, written by a girl of twenty, and runs to more than two hundred lines rhymed in couplets.Literature
PoetryGeneral William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other PoemsVachel Lindsay · 1913Chicago has just given itself a poetry magazine. These verses are written to be spoken and sung before an audience, to the tune of a hymn.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetrySword Blades and Poppy SeedAmy Lowell · 1914In London, a small group of poets has just asked verse for the clear image and the free rhythm. This book is the first by its author to bear the mark of these ideas.Literature
PoetryNorth of BostonRobert Frost · 1914American publishers shun a poetry that offends the taste of the time, and the author is forty when this book appears, in London. It makes farmers speak as they speak.Literature
PoetrySpoon River AnthologyEdgar Lee Masters · 1915The small towns of the Midwest are then regarded as the home of American virtues, and literature treats them with tenderness. This book makes their dead speak.LiteraturePublic domain
CinemaThe ItalianReginald Barker and Thomas H. Ince · 1915The film takes an Italian immigrant as its hero and follows him from a Venice canal to the slums of New York; the New York scenes were shot in San Francisco.Cinema
PoetrySea GardenHilda Doolittle · 1916Four years earlier, in London, the author, Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington had agreed: to treat the thing directly, to use no unnecessary word, to follow the musical phrase and not the metronome.Literature
PoetryGoblins and PagodasJohn Gould Fletcher · 1916The Imagists learned to make a poem fit into a single image. This book seeks to compose like music and painting, placing each piece under a colour.Literature
NovelYou Know Me AlRing Lardner · 1916These letters are written in the spelling and syntax of a half-illiterate player, which their author rendered, according to Mencken, with the greatest exactness.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryChicago PoemsCarl Sandburg · 1916A city slaughters the animals of the continent and sorts its wheat. These verses take it as their interlocutor and speak to it in the language spoken there.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryThe Man Against the SkyEdwin Arlington Robinson · 1916Most of these pieces keep metre and rhyme, in the age of free verse, and bring into the poem ordinary people, caught at the moment when their lives turned.Literature
CinemaIntoleranceD. W. Griffith · 1916The film runs four stories separated by nearly two thousand five hundred years side by side, linked by no common plot, only by the editing and a recurring shot.Cinema
PoetryLove SongsSara Teasdale · 1917Regular metre, rhyme, short sentences: a simplicity that critics have called classical.Literature
NovelThe Rise of David LevinskyAbraham Cahan · 1917More than two million Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1924, and the Lower East Side lived off garment workshops. This novel follows one of them to the top.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelJurgenJames Branch Cabell · 1919A New York society for the suppression of vice can then have seized the books it judges obscene. This novel, a medieval farce full of innuendo, was one of those that went as far as a trial.LiteraturePublic domain
Short storiesWinesburg, OhioSherwood Anderson · 1919These stories make a Middle Western town into a collection of solitudes, in which each person stays shut up inside the truth he has chosen.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Age of InnocenceEdith Wharton · 1920Old New York lived by a code that no one spelled out and everyone applied. This novel describes it from within, through someone who had grown up in it.Literature
PoetryNets to Catch the WindElinor Wylie · 1921American poetry is at the time divided between free verse and inherited forms. These pieces side with closed forms.Literature
NovelBabbittSinclair Lewis · 1922The America of the twenties celebrates itself through its service clubs, its banquet speeches and its automobiles. This novel draws up the record of it, in the very language of those who speak it.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelOne of OursWilla Cather · 1922This 1922 novel shows a young man for whom the war of 1914 was a deliverance, which led to its author being attacked.Literature
PoetryThe Waste LandT. S. Eliot · 1922This poem assembles fragments, quotations in several languages, songs and anonymous voices, without linking them by a narrative.Literature
PoetryTulips and ChimneysE. E. Cummings · 1923This collection puts typographical layout on the same level as the word and makes it carry part of the meaning.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetryHarmoniumWallace Stevens · 1923This collection, in a sumptuous and rare language, makes imagination the very subject of poetry.LiteraturePublic domain
PoetrySpring and AllWilliam Carlos Williams · 1923Written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's long poem published the previous year, this book answers it, and mixes manifesto prose with the poems.Literature
CinemaGreedErich von Stroheim · 1924Adapted from a novel by Frank Norris, the film was shot entirely on real locations, in the streets of San Francisco and then in Death Valley, in July and August 1923, in heat of nearly fifty degrees.Cinema
PoetryThe CantosEzra Pound · 1925The title of the first volume announces it as the beginning of a poem of some length. Its author worked on it until the sixties without finishing it.Literature
NovelAn American TragedyTheodore Dreiser · 1925The country tells itself at this time that any man can rise if he wants to. This novel takes a boy who has been given nothing, puts that promise into his head, and follows what it makes of him.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Great GatsbyFrancis Scott Fitzgerald · 1925The post-war years see a new fortune settle beside an old fortune that despises it. This novel watches a man who made the first in order to approach the second.Literature
PoetryColorCountee Cullen · 1925Harlem is then debating the form to give its poetry. This collection takes the metres and rhymes of the English tradition and puts into them what that tradition had never had to say.Literature
PoetryThe Weary BluesLangston Hughes · 1926Harlem is then giving itself a literature and debating the image of itself that it wants to show. This collection brings the clubs, the blues and the language spoken there into poetry.LiteraturePublic domain
CinemaThe GeneralBuster Keaton · 1926The film retells a real episode of the Civil War, the theft of a locomotive in Georgia by Union soldiers, and was shot on location, in Oregon.Cinema
PoetryGod's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in VerseJames Weldon Johnson · 1927The convention of the time rendered Black speech through distorted spelling, which left it only pathos and comedy. These sermons keep the breath and the repetitions of the preachers, without writing out the accent.LiteraturePublic domain
CinemaThe Jazz SingerAlan Crosland · 1927American cinema has been silent for more than thirty years. This film carries six songs and about two minutes of synchronised speech; two years later, Hollywood was hardly making silent films any more.Cinema
CinemaSunriseF. W. Murnau · 1927Intertitles are rare in it and gradually disappear in the second half, and no character in it has a name.Cinema
NovelHome to HarlemClaude McKay · 1928Harlem is then written under scrutiny: part of the Black elite wants respectable characters. This novel shows the cabarets and the dockers, tidying nothing up.LiteraturePublic domain
CinemaThe CrowdKing Vidor · 1928The film takes as its hero an ordinary clerk, one among the crowd of New York, and gives the part to an almost unknown extra from the studio.Cinema
TheatreStreet SceneElmer Rice · 1929This play puts dozens of characters in front of a single tenement façade and makes the street itself its subject.Literature
NovelA Farewell to ArmsErnest Hemingway · 1929War is still written in the language of proclamations, with its sacred and glorious words. This novel holds that abstract words are obscene beside the names of villages.Literature
NovelLook Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried LifeThomas Wolfe · 1929This coming-of-age novel takes a mountain town as its subject and writes it in a language that overflows on every side.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelRed HarvestDashiell Hammett · 1929The detective novel is then a drawing-room puzzle. This book takes a nameless agency employee and lets him loose in a city in the hands of gangsters.LiteraturePublic domain
NovelThe Sound and the FuryWilliam Faulkner · 1929This novel tells the story of a single Mississippi family through four voices, out of chronological order, and leaves the reader to piece it together.Literature
NovelThe 42nd ParallelJohn Dos Passos · 1930This novel builds its country by accumulation, mixing fiction, documents and popular song.Literature
NovelThe Good EarthPearl Buck · 1931This novel places the American reader in a Chinese peasant family, with its harvests and famines; Westerners are only glimpsed in it.Literature
CinemaDraculaTod Browning · 1931Before this film, talking horror explained the supernatural by a trick; this one accepts it, and its success saved Universal and opened the studio's series of monster films.Cinema
NovelMutiny on the BountyCharles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall · 1932The mutiny of 1789 in the Pacific, told by a young officer who stayed on board without taking the side of the rebels.Literature
NovelYoung LoniganJames T. Farrell · 1932This novel takes a boy from an Irish neighbourhood of Chicago and follows what the street makes of him.Literature
Short storiesSilent Snow, Secret SnowConrad Aiken · 1932This story, told at the closest range to a child, never says what is happening to him and leaves the reader alone before the snow.Literature
CinemaShanghai ExpressJosef von Sternberg · 1932Shot on the Paramount lot and, for the exteriors, in California railway stations with a thousand extras, the film takes place for the most part on board the train.Cinema
CinemaTrouble in ParadiseErnst Lubitsch · 1932The film came out before the strict enforcement of the censorship code: its thieves are not punished, and in 1935 the administration of the code refused to authorise its re-release.Cinema
NarrativeThe Autobiography of Alice B. ToklasGertrude Stein · 1933Known for a prose based on repetition that few read, Gertrude Stein here writes in the simplest language, and under the voice of another.Literature
NarrativeMy Life and Hard TimesJames Thurber · 1933These stories of domestic catastrophes open with a preface in which the author refuses to be called a humorist.Literature
CinemaDuck SoupLeo McCarey · 1933The last of the five Marx Brothers films for Paramount, it is also the only one in which neither Harpo's harp nor Chico's piano is used.Cinema
NovelTropic of CancerHenry Miller · 1934This book recounts the misery of an American in Paris without making a misfortune of it, and without restraint in its words.Literature
TheatreWintersetMaxwell Anderson · 1935The execution of two Italian anarchists in 1927, seven years after their arrest, had gripped the country. This play takes up the subject and writes it in verse, when the theatre was almost entirely in prose.Literature
CinemaTop HatMark Sandrich · 1935Astaire demanded that his dances be filmed as far as possible in a single take, and framed full-length; the film shows them that way, give or take a few cuts.Cinema
CinemaModern TimesCharlie Chaplin · 1936Regarded as the last great silent film, it was released in 1936 without synchronized dialogue: its author feared that the tramp, if he spoke, would lose the audience in non-English-speaking countries.Cinema
NovelOf Mice and MenJohn Steinbeck · 1937Tens of thousands of men then follow the harvests in California, sleeping in the ranch bunkhouses and moving on with the season. This book takes two who, unusually, travel together.Literature
TheatreGolden BoyClifford Odets · 1937This play puts the question of money into a single body: two trades, the violin and boxing, and hands that cannot serve both.Literature
NovelTheir Eyes Were Watching GodZora Neale Hurston · 1937Black criticism of those years expects novels of social protest. This novel is set among Black people and follows a woman who looks for what she wants.Literature
CinemaSnow White and the Seven DwarfsWilliam Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce and Ben Sharpsteen · 1937The studio, which until then had made only short films, devoted three years and more than seven hundred artists to this first American animated feature film, in colour and with sound.Cinema
TheatreOur TownThornton Wilder · 1938This play is staged almost without scenery: two ladders, a few chairs, and actors who mime the doors they open.Literature
CinemaBringing Up BabyHoward Hawks · 1938Released in 1938, the film disappointed and lost money; its reputation grew with its television screenings in the 1950s, then among the critics of the following decade.Cinema
TheatreThe Philadelphia StoryPhilip Barry · 1939The theatre of the Depression had roughed up the rich. This comedy, written for an actress whom cinema owners had just declared box-office poison, takes their side instead.Literature
NovelThe Day of the LocustNathanael West · 1939Los Angeles then attracts people who arrive full of hope and are quickly disillusioned. This novel takes them when boredom has replaced hope, and looks at what that produces.Literature
Short storiesPale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short NovelsKatherine Anne Porter · 1939The epidemic of 1918 killed ten times more people in the United States than the war did, and few writers have told of it. The last story takes it from the inside, from a sick woman's bed.Literature
CinemaStagecoachJohn Ford · 1939Big-budget westerns had gone out of fashion since the end of the silent era, and the genre lived mostly on cheap B films; the producer hesitated to make an A-category one.Cinema
CinemaThe Wizard of OzVictor Fleming · 1939The success of Blanche-Neige two years earlier had shown that a children's tale could succeed in the cinema; the film passes from sepia to colour when Dorothy opens the door.Cinema
CinemaMr. Smith Goes to WashingtonFrank Capra · 1939The script, which shows a Senate subject to a political machine, worried the censorship office, and the film provoked the anger of legislators, some of whom called for it to be banned.Cinema
NovelThe Heart Is a Lonely HunterCarson McCullers · 1940The novel brings together five inhabitants of a mill town who have nothing in common, except that each talks to a man who cannot answer them.Literature
TheatreLong Day's Journey into NightEugene O'Neill · 1941A family of four spends a day in the living room of a seaside house, the play's only setting.Literature
Short storiesA Curtain of GreenEudora Welty · 1941From 1933 to 1936, the author travels all over Mississippi, camera in hand, for the federal public works agency; one of these stories starts from an old woman glimpsed on a road.Literature
CinemaThe Lady EvePreston Sturges · 1941The third film of its author as director, it received from Paramount a much larger budget than the first two, and Barbara Stanwyck was imposed on it against the advice of the executives.Cinema
CinemaCitizen KaneOrson Welles · 1941The film tells the life of its hero through several successive points of view, out of chronological order; Gregg Toland uses great depth of field, visible ceilings and low-angle shots.Cinema
CinemaThe Maltese FalconJohn Huston · 1941The third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel by the same studio, after a film of 1931 and another of 1936, it is the first film of its director, until then a screenwriter.Cinema
CinemaCat PeopleJacques Tourneur · 1942Produced by Val Lewton in RKO's low-budget horror unit, the film suggests more than it shows; according to the director, the studio management had him add a cat in one scene.Cinema
CinemaCasablancaMichael Curtiz · 1942Adapted from a play written in 1940, when the United States was still neutral, the film was shot from 25 May to 3 August 1942, after their entry into the war, entirely in the studio.Cinema
NovelA Tree Grows in BrooklynBetty Smith · 1943Published during the war, the novel returns to the poor Brooklyn of the beginning of the century and shows how a family holds together there, down to the last penny.Literature
CinemaMeshes of the AfternoonMaya Deren and Alexander Hammid · 1943The first film of its director, it was shot without dialogue in the couple's bungalow, in the Hollywood hills, with her husband, a cameraman and documentary maker by trade.Cinema
CinemaMeet Me in St. LouisVincente Minnelli · 1944The film tells a year in the life of a family in seasonal vignettes, each opened by an illustration in the form of a greetings card, forty years before its release.Cinema
NarrativeBlack BoyRichard Wright · 1945An account of a Black childhood in the segregated South, by a man who went hungry there. It was first read as an indictment of the South, then as the formation of a writer.Literature
NovelIf He Hollers Let Him GoChester Himes · 1945The West Coast war shipyards draw Black workers in great numbers, whom employers are willing to hire but not willing to welcome.Literature
CinemaDetourEdgar G. Ulmer · 1945The film was produced by PRC, one of the small Hollywood studios that shot quickly and cheaply, with B-movie actors and a few sets drowned in mist.Cinema
Short storyThe Interior CastleJean Stafford · 1946From the common ward to the operating theatre, the story makes physical pain an object of precise observation.Literature
CinemaThe Best Years of Our LivesWilliam Wyler · 1946The film came out a year after the war and shows the return of the soldiers: the lost job, drink, couples to be rebuilt, and a bank wary of unsecured loans to veterans.Cinema
TheatreA Streetcar Named DesireTennessee Williams · 1947Directed by Elia Kazan, the play revealed Marlon Brando and a style of acting born of the actor's inner work, which the cinema would confirm four years later.Literature
Short storiesTales of the South PacificJames Michener · 1947These stories approach the war through waiting, boredom and repetition, between two battles.Literature
NovelThe Naked and the DeadNorman Mailer · 1948The novel follows a patrol and shows that hierarchy, fear and class contempt weigh there as heavily as the enemy.Literature
NovelThe City and the PillarGore Vidal · 1948The first postwar American novel whose homosexual hero, presented with sympathy, is not killed; a publisher predicted to the author that it would never be forgiven him.Literature
CinemaLetter from an Unknown WomanMax Ophüls · 1948The story passes almost entirely through the letter the hero reads, in a present-tense frame, on the night before the duel.Cinema
TheatreDeath of a SalesmanArthur Miller · 1949The play takes a man who believed all his life that being well regarded and well liked is enough to succeed, and looks at what is left to him when he is no longer liked.Literature
NovelThe Man with the Golden ArmNelson Algren · 1949The novel goes down into a neighbourhood of gambling dens, bars and furnished rooms, among gamblers, petty thieves and addicts.Literature
CinemaNight and the CityJules Dassin · 1950A Soho tout has always been looking for the deal that will get him out of the night.Cinema
Short storiesI, RobotIsaac Asimov · 1950These stories break with the robot that turns against its creator: they set out three laws and look for where they contradict one another.Literature
CinemaSunset BoulevardBilly Wilder · 1950Former stars of the silent era appear in it: Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson at a bridge table; Cecil B. DeMille and Hedda Hopper play themselves.Cinema
CinemaHarveyHenry Koster · 1950The film adapts a play by Mary Chase, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which ran on Broadway for more than four years, where James Stewart had taken over the lead role.Cinema
NovelThe Catcher in the RyeJ. D. Salinger · 1951The novel is written in the spoken language of the schoolboys of the time, rendered with an exactness that critics praised as early as 1951.Literature
NovelFrom Here to EternityJames Jones · 1951The novel follows a garrison of the pre-war army from February to December 1941, and was written by an enlisted man who had served there.Literature
Short storiesIn the Absence of AngelsHortense Calisher · 1951The collection that launched its author: her stories, in a polished prose, had first appeared in the major New York magazines.Literature
NovelInvisible ManRalph Ellison · 1952The novel breaks with the protest novel: it borrows from the picaresque and from dream to speak of a man whom no one sees.Literature
NovelWise BloodFlannery O'Connor · 1952An atheist preaches against Christ without managing to be rid of him; the novel is part farce and part allegory.Literature
CinemaHigh NoonFred Zinnemann · 1952The story unfolds at roughly the pace of the screening, from about 10.35 until noon, and clocks keep coming back in it.Cinema
CinemaSingin' in the RainStanley Donen and Gene Kelly · 1952The producer Arthur Freed had the story built around the songs he had written with Nacio Herb Brown for MGM between 1929 and 1939; only two were composed for the film.Cinema
NovelThe Adventures of Augie MarchSaul Bellow · 1953After two restrained, sober novels, the author lets go: a long, free-flowing sentence, and a hero who passes through trades without settling anywhere.Literature
TheatrePicnicWilliam Inge · 1953Everything takes place in a yard shared between two houses; its author said it was made from the memory of the women he had known.Literature
NovelFahrenheit 451Ray Bradbury · 1953America in the early fifties is filling up with television sets. In this novel, the fire captain explains that censorship did not come from above.Literature
CinemaShaneGeorge Stevens · 1953Adapted from a novel by Jack Schaefer, this western shot in Technicolor at Jackson Hole stages the quarrel between ranchers and farmers over the land.Cinema
CinemaOn the WaterfrontElia Kazan · 1954The film was shot in thirty-six days, in the middle of winter, almost entirely on the waterfront of Hoboken, with many dockers among the extras.Cinema
PoetryPoems: North & South — A Cold SpringElizabeth Bishop · 1955These poems describe and leave the feeling to things, apart from the confessional poetry then practised by the author's friends.Literature
CinemaRebel Without a CauseNicholas Ray · 1955The film takes its teenagers from the middle class and not from the poor neighbourhoods, at a time when American cinema was multiplying films about juvenile delinquency.Cinema
CinemaThe Night of the HunterCharles Laughton · 1955The only film directed by its maker, an actor by trade, it borrows its lighting and its cut-out shadows from German Expressionism.Cinema
NovelGiovanni's RoomJames Baldwin · 1956A Black novelist was expected to write a Harlem novel; this one is set in Paris, features only white characters, and follows two men.Literature
PoetryHowl and Other PoemsAllen Ginsberg · 1956The poem was read in public, in a San Francisco gallery, before it was printed, and the collection was tried for obscenity.Literature
CinemaThe Ten CommandmentsCecil B. DeMille · 1956The studios were then betting on widescreen and big spectacles to fight television; this VistaVision film runs close to four hours and brings together thousands of extras.Cinema
NovelOn the RoadJack Kerouac · 1957A barely fictionalised account of real journeys, the novel made its author the voice of a generation that he himself had named Beat.Literature
NovelThe Wapshot ChronicleJohn Cheever · 1957The novel begins in an old New England port that prosperity has left behind, and sends its sons out into the new world.Literature
PoetryGasolineGregory Corso · 1958The collection is dedicated to the angels of Clinton, the state prison where its author had served a sentence in his youth.Literature
PoetryA Coney Island of the MindLawrence Ferlinghetti · 1958Part of the collection was written for the stage: its author read his poems with jazz musicians in a San Francisco club.Literature
CinemaBell, Book and CandleRichard Quine · 1958A fantasy comedy based on a Broadway play, the film transports witchcraft to the New York of nightclubs and art galleries.Cinema
CinemaVertigoAlfred Hitchcock · 1958Adapted from a French novel by Boileau and Narcejac, the film transposes a story of shadowing to California.Cinema
PoetryLife StudiesRobert Lowell · 1959The poem was then expected to keep a mask on. This one speaks with its face uncovered and names its own people, the hospital and the shame.Literature
NovelNaked LunchWilliam S. Burroughs · 1959The book was assembled in haste, in the order in which its sections had been found and typed, and can be read from any page.Literature
NovelThe Magician of LublinDer Kuntsnmakher fun LublinIsaac Bashevis Singer · 1959The novel departs from the familiar literature of Eastern European Jews: its hero, without faith, tries every possible life to see which one will hold him.Literature
CinemaAnatomy of a MurderOtto Preminger · 1959The film uses words in the courtroom that the cinema then avoided; it nevertheless obtained the production code's seal of approval, but Chicago banned it for a time.Cinema
CinemaImitation of LifeDouglas Sirk · 1959A melodrama in colour, the film places at its centre two mothers, one white, one black, who raise their daughters together under one roof.Cinema
PoetryComplete PoemsEmily Dickinson · 1960Short poems, sent by the hundred to those close to her but almost never printed, whose punctuation and concision baffled the first editors.Literature
PoetryThe Opening of the FieldRobert Duncan · 1960The book comes from Black Mountain, a college in North Carolina where its author had just been teaching and where it was held that form is only the extension of content.Literature
TheatreToys in the AtticLillian Hellman · 1960An old-fashioned play, in three acts and a single set, about what two women lose on the day the brother they supported no longer needs them.Literature
NovelRabbit, RunJohn Updike · 1960First volume of a cycle, written in the present tense, about a former athlete whose glory remained at high school and who flees his family life.Literature
NovelTo Kill a MockingbirdHarper Lee · 1960The trial is told there by a child who does not understand everything she sees, and the reader understands before she does.Literature
PoetryThe Maximus PoemsCharles Olson · 1960To carry history, the poem takes a single place, a town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, and fits geology and trade into it.Literature
NovelThe MoviegoerWalker Percy · 1961The novel carries as its epigraph a sentence by Kierkegaard on the despair that does not know itself, and turns a broker's boredom into a philosophical question.Literature
NovelCatch-22Joseph Heller · 1961The danger in this novel comes less from the enemy than from the hierarchy and an absurd regulation; it ranks among the great books of protest.Literature
CinemaWest Side StoryRobert Wise and Jerome Robbins · 1961Largely shot in a studio in Hollywood, the film opens with a danced prologue in the streets of New York, in Super Panavision 70.Cinema
CinemaBreakfast at Tiffany'sBlake Edwards · 1961Adapted from a short novel by Truman Capote, the film got the censors to accept a heroine who is kept by the men she sees.Cinema
TheatreWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Edward Albee · 1962Four people shut in a living room for one night: the play's crude language and sexual themes caused a scandal.Literature
PoetryFor Love: Poems 1950-1960Robert Creeley · 1962These poems break with the learned manner of the university as with confession: they are held in a few words, and their form is made of what is missing.Literature
CinemaThe Manchurian CandidateJohn Frankenheimer · 1962Adapted from a novel by Richard Condon translated in France the same year, the film moves from the Korean front to American political life.Cinema
CinemaBlood FeastHerschell Gordon Lewis · 1963Made for drive-in theatres on a minimal budget, the film shows the mutilations of its victims in colour, and was banned outright in France.Cinema
TheatreDutchmanAmiri Baraka · 1964A chamber piece set in a subway car, between a young Black man and a white woman who confronts him.Literature
CinemaMy Fair LadyGeorge Cukor · 1964Adapted from the Broadway musical based on a play by George Bernard Shaw, the film was shot entirely in the studio, in Burbank.Cinema
NovelThe Painted BirdJerzy Kosinski · 1965The book names neither the country nor the child, and was read as a testimony although it is not one; its author had let this be understood.Literature
PoetryArielSylvia Plath · 1965So-called confessional poetry, opened in 1959 by Robert Lowell, names the family and the hospital; these poems, written by a former student of his seminar, go further and faster.Literature
NovelThe FixerBernard Malamud · 1966A ritual murder accusation cost Menahem Mendel Beilis more than two years in prison before his acquittal, in Kiev, in 1913. The novel draws from it a freethinker who believed in nothing.Literature
PoetryLive or DieAnne Sexton · 1966So-called confessional poetry puts into verse what had been left unsaid, the family and the hospital; this collection adds the bodies of women.Literature
NovelIn Cold BloodTruman Capote · 1966Starting from a short item in the New York Times, the author devoted nearly six years of inquiry to it, and maintained that everything in it was accurate.Literature
CinemaThe GraduateMike Nichols · 1967Adapted from a novel by Charles Webb, the film comments on its story with songs by Simon and Garfunkel, which was unusual at the time.Cinema
CinemaPoint BlankJohn Boorman · 1967The first American film by its director, it was also the first shot in Alcatraz prison, closed four years earlier.Cinema
Short storiesUnspeakable Practices, Unnatural ActsDonald Barthelme · 1968These stories proceed by collage: lists, fragments and juxtaposed voices stand in for plot.Literature
Cinema2001: A Space OdysseyStanley Kubrick · 1968Conceived to escape the monster films of the time, with the help of experts from the American space agency, the film has no spoken word for about twenty minutes.Cinema
CinemaBullittPeter Yates · 1968The first American film of its British director, who was hired after an English heist film; it was shot in the streets of San Francisco.Cinema
CinemaNight of the Living DeadGeorge A. Romero · 1968Shot in Evans City, Pennsylvania, for a little over a hundred thousand dollars, the film is the work of a Pittsburgh advertising company.Cinema
NovelSlaughterhouse-FiveKurt Vonnegut · 1969After the war, when the author asked the American air force for details about the raid, he was told that the information was still classified. He had witnessed it, as a prisoner.Literature
NovelthemJoyce Carol Oates · 1969Thirty years of poor life in Detroit, told through a family that never had anything to choose from.Literature
PoetryThe Dream SongsJohn Berryman · 1969Critics placed these poems in so-called confessional poetry; their author angrily rejected the term.Literature
NovelUbikPhilip K. Dick · 1969The novel builds a world that comes apart beneath its characters' feet, without the reader knowing for long what he is standing on.Literature
NovelPortnoy's ComplaintPhilip Roth · 1969An unrestrained monologue that says aloud, about the Jewish family and desire, everything that was still left unsaid.Literature
CinemaEasy RiderDennis Hopper · 1969Shot over the course of a motorcycle trip for less than four hundred thousand dollars, the film replaces original music with existing songs.Cinema
CinemaThe Wild BunchSam Peckinpah · 1969The film shows its shootouts in slow motion, filmed with up to six cameras running at different speeds, from twenty-four to one hundred and twenty frames per second.Cinema
NovelDeliveranceJames Dickey · 1970Four city men on a river that no one watches over: the novel looks at what they discover they are capable of doing.Literature
CinemaThe GodfatherFrancis Ford Coppola · 1972Adapted from a novel by Mario Puzo, co-author of the screenplay, the film follows a New York Mafia family, its alliances and its succession.Cinema
NovelGravity's RainbowThomas Pynchon · 1973More than four hundred characters, ballistics, cartels, and a paranoia that links everything: the novel turns war into a system.Literature
PoetryDiving into the WreckAdrienne Rich · 1973Written in 1971 and 1972, in the time of Vietnam and militant feminism, the collection makes the poem an instrument for going down to see what has been damaged.Literature
CinemaA Woman Under the InfluenceJohn Cassavetes · 1974Financed by the director and by the actor Peter Falk, the film follows, from a fully written script, a working-class couple and those close to them.Cinema
CinemaChinatownRoman Polański · 1974Robert Towne's screenplay draws on the water wars that allowed the city to expand at the beginning of the century.Cinema
CinemaNashvilleRobert Altman · 1975Written by Joan Tewkesbury, the film follows twenty-four main characters and records their voices on an eight-track system.Cinema
CinemaOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's NestMiloš Forman · 1975Adapted from Ken Kesey's novel, the film was shot in a real psychiatric hospital, in Salem, with real patients among the extras.Cinema
CinemaTaxi DriverMartin Scorsese · 1976Written by Paul Schrader in less than two weeks, the film follows a lonely taxi driver through the streets of Manhattan.Cinema
CinemaNetworkSidney Lumet · 1976Written by Paddy Chayefsky, the film takes place almost entirely within the premises of a New York television network.Cinema
PoetryA Part of SpeechЧасть речиJoseph Brodsky · 1977In his own country, the author's poetry circulated only in samizdat; this volume appeared in Russian in Michigan, five years after his expulsion.Literature
CinemaStar WarsGeorge Lucas · 1977The film borrows from the western, from a period film by Akira Kurosawa and from the Flash Gordon serials of the late thirties.Cinema
CinemaAnnie HallWoody Allen · 1977The film starts from the breakup, works its way back in fragments, and interrupts the narrative with addresses to the audience and an animated sequence.Cinema
NovelSophie's ChoiceWilliam Styron · 1979The novel takes a Polish Catholic survivor as its heroine, and makes her successive lies and confessions the subject of the book.Literature
CinemaThe ThingJohn Carpenter · 1982Adapted from a story by John W. Campbell, the film shuts a team of men in an isolated camp where anyone may be the imitation of another.Cinema
Short storiesCathedralRaymond Carver · 1983Unlike the previous one, this collection was not trimmed by the editor, and the stories in it are fuller and gentler.Literature
CinemaA Room with a ViewJames Ivory · 1985Adapted from E. M. Forster's novel, the film was shot on real locations, in Italy and England, for about three million dollars.Cinema
NovelBlood MeridianCormac McCarthy · 1985The novel follows a band of killers paid by the scalp, on the border between Texas and Mexico, around 1850.Literature
CinemaBlue VelvetDavid Lynch · 1986Beneath the lawns of a small American town, a young man discovers violence and desire.Cinema
CinemaLittle Shop of HorrorsFrank Oz · 1986Adapted from a musical staged off Broadway, the film is sung almost from start to finish, with three backing singers commenting on the action like an ancient chorus.Cinema
CinemaAn American TailDon Bluth · 1986Produced by Steven Spielberg, this animated film tells of the emigration of a Jewish family from the Russian Empire to America, in the guise of mice fleeing cats.Cinema
NovelBelovedToni Morrison · 1987The novel starts from a news item of 1856 and sets its narrative eighteen years after its heroine's flight; it is dedicated to the “sixty million and more”.Literature
CinemaThe UntouchablesBrian De Palma · 1987Written by David Mamet from the memoirs of Eliot Ness, the film follows four men who come to use a killer's methods against Capone.Cinema
CinemaThe Naked GunDavid Zucker · 1988Drawn from a television series that was quickly cancelled, the film parodies American police series of the fifties to the seventies, in a deadpan tone.Cinema
CinemaDo the Right ThingSpike Lee · 1989Shot on a single street in Brooklyn and compressed into one day, the film names neither hero nor villain among its characters.Cinema
CinemaMiller's CrossingJoel Coen and Ethan Coen · 1990The film draws on Dashiell Hammett's novels and on the underworld slang of the late twenties.Cinema
CinemaEdward ScissorhandsTim Burton · 1990The film places its creature in a suburb of pastel houses, and takes the curiosity of its inhabitants as its driving force.Cinema
CinemaThelma & LouiseRidley Scott · 1991The story follows two friends on the run, pursued from one state to another by a detective from Arkansas.Cinema
CinemaUnforgivenClint Eastwood · 1992Written by David Webb Peoples, the film follows an ageing former gunman, while a writer of pulp novels embellishes the exploits of the men of the West.Cinema
CinemaSchindler's ListSteven Spielberg · 1993The story follows the occupation of Kraków from the office of a German industrialist, between his business affairs and his workers.Cinema
CinemaPulp FictionQuentin Tarantino · 1994The narrative cuts its stories into pieces redistributed out of chronological order, and gives a large place to conversations.Cinema
CinemaForrest GumpRobert Zemeckis · 1994The story takes its character through thirty years of American history, and divides those who love it from those who find it artificial.Cinema
CinemaRiver of GrassKelly Reichardt · 1994The title takes up the nickname of the Everglades, the river of grass, on the edge of which the story is set.Cinema
CinemaHeatMichael Mann · 1995The narrative divides its time between the hunt and the private lives of the two men, the policeman and the robber alike.Cinema
CinemaToy StoryJohn Lasseter · 1995The first feature film made entirely by computer, it takes toys as its heroes, plastic objects whose materials the machine rendered well.Cinema
CinemaSafeTodd Haynes · 1995The story follows a woman whose illness remains unexplained, and never settles on its cause.Cinema
CinemaRushmoreWes Anderson · 1998The story pits a high-school student against a mature man, friends turned rivals over the same woman.Cinema
CinemaThe Thin Red LineTerrence Malick · 1998The narrative weaves the inner voices of eight characters into the battle.Cinema
CinemaMagnoliaPaul Thomas Anderson · 1999The story interweaves several tales of fathers and children over the course of a single day.Cinema
CinemaBeing John MalkovichSpike Jonze · 1999The story starts from a fantastic premise and treats it in the ordinary setting of an office.Cinema
CinemaGhost Dog: The Way of the SamuraiJim Jarmusch · 1999The story applies the code of the ancient Japanese warriors to a present-day hired killer.Cinema
CinemaThe Iron GiantBrad Bird · 1999The story settles a robot from elsewhere in an American town gripped by atomic fear, without a single song.Cinema
CinemaFight ClubDavid Fincher · 1999The story sets a clandestine fight club against its narrator's life as a consumer.Cinema
CinemaMementoChristopher Nolan · 2000The narrative alternates colour scenes edited in reverse order with black-and-white scenes that move forward in sequence.Cinema