Edit: thank you for all suggestions! I’ll try to get back to more comments but I’m checking out all of these. Thank you!

I put together a list of what I think are the most important works to understanding the conversation of American literature. My goal was to create the most concise list that achieved that goal, pulling from a variety of sources including this video by Dr. Adam Walker. For prose, the work is listed first and the author’s name is in parentheses, and for poetry it’s the opposite. I’m looking for feedback regarding glaring omissions, unnecessary additions, and the effectiveness of the list as a whole.

The American Renaissance 1800-1865

Transcendentalists
* Nature and Selected Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
* Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
* Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)

Dark Romantics
* The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
* Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, Annabel Lee)
* Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)

Literature of Witness & Abolition
* Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Frederick Douglass)
* Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs)
* Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

American Realism 1865-1914

Late Romantic Individualism
* The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Regionalism
* The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
* The Awakening/Desiree’s Baby (Kate Chopin)

Psychological & Social Realism
* The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
* The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)

American Modernism 1914-1945

High Moderns
* The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
* The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
* In Our Time (Ernest Hemingway)
* Manhattan Transfer (John Doe Passos)

Modernist Poetry
* T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)
* Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods…, Mending Wall, Birches, Fire and Ice)
* Ezra Pound (In a Station of the Metro & Hugh Selwyn Mauberley)
* William Carlos Williams (Spring and All)

Southern Gothic
* The Sound and the Fury (Williams Faulkner)

The Harlem Renaissance 1919-1940

Black Intellectualism
* The Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. Dubois)
* Criteria of Negro Art (W.E.B. Dubois)
* The New Negro (Alain Locke)

Vernacular Poetics
* Claude McKay (If We Must Die/Harlem Shadows)
* Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues)
* James Weldon Johnson (God's Trombones)

Anthropological Realism
* Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
* The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (James Weldon Johnson)

The Beats 1950s-1960s

Beat Poetry
* Howl and Other Poems (Allen Ginsberg)
* A Coney Island of the Mind (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
* Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (Gary Snyder)

Beat Prose
* On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
* Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)

Post-War African American Lit. 1950s-Present

* Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
* Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin)
* The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
* Beloved (Toni Morrison)
* The Color Purple (Alice Walker)

Postmodernism 1960s-Present

Postmodern Poetry
* Sylvia Plath (Ariel)
* John Ashbery (Self-Portrait In a Convex Mirror)
* Adrienne Rich (Diving into the Wreck)

Postmodern Prose
* Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
* Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
* White Noise (Don DeLillo)
* Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

I do like the cover just never read any classical books. Kinda scared...

This bookstore’s classic shelf was mostly this “Wordsworth Classics” series and they all had covers like this. Funnily enough, titles like this Verne one had the original typeset and illustrations inside which many updated copies don’t include.

A little digging found this video detailing the history of the publisher and more covers.

Mrs. Dalloway is my favorite novel of all time. I try to read it once every 2-3 years and it always feels like I'm waking up to my own life at the same time as I'm connecting to something timeless and endless.

Anyway, I recently discovered this song that is based on one of the dramatic memories in the novel, and I thought I'd share it here. Cheers and happy reading/listening.