American History Through Literature

The U.S. Constitution, and Washington's first term, began in the late 1780s, making the 1790s the first truly American decade. Here is one work of literature for each decade of America:

1790s "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
1800s "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Alan Poe*

1810s "The Devil and Daniel Webster" by Stephen Vincent Benet

1820s Moby Dick by Herman Melville

1830s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

1840s Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

1850s Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

1860s The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

1870s Beloved by Toni Morrison

1880s Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

1890s The Awakening by Kate Chopin

1900s Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

1910s Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

1920s The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

1930s All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

1940s Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

1950s A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

1960s Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

1970s The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

1980s White Noise by Don DeLillo†

1990s The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

2000s Averno by Louise Gluck

2010s Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

*The original story is seemingly set in England, but is often associated with New York. Also this is a really tough decade to find anything, so...

†This is the only one I've not read, and am going on trust. Weirdly I've not really read any good American books set in the 1980s.