SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

• Bernal Diaz del Castillo - The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
• John Smith - The General History of Virginia
• William Bradford - Of Plymouth Plantation
• John Winthrop - "A Model of Christian Charity"
• Anne Bradstreet - Selected poems and prose

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

• Jonathan Edwards - "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
• Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography - Parts I and II
• J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur - Letters from an American Farmer

NINETEENTH CENTURY

• Raph Waldo Emerson - "Nature", "The American Scholar", "Thoreau"
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden or Life in the Woods
• Nathaniel Hawthrone - "Rappaccini's Daughter"
• Edgar Allan Poe - "The Fall of the House of Usher"
• Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by Himself
• Herman Melville - Billy Budd, Sailor
• Walt Whitman - "Song of Myself", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
• Emily Dickinson - Selected Poems and Letters (See Table of Contents)