William Hickling Prescott follows his great work on Mexico with a 2-volume History of the Conquest of Peru

Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, already serialized in 1847, is published in book form

Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne is forced to wear the letter A for Adultress

US author Nathaniel Hawthorne bases his novel The House of the Seven Gables on a curse invoked against his own family

Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick; or, The Whale, a novel based on his own 18-month experience on a whaler in 1841-2

Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes a massively successful antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that sells 300,000 copies in its first year

Thoreau publishes an account of his two years of self-sufficient transcendentalism in his hut at Walden Pond

The first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is published anonymously, at his own expense, and contains just 12 poems

Longfellow publishes his American Indian epic, The Song of Hiawatha, in an irresistibly catchy metre

Oliver Wendell Holmes' book The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the first in a breakfast-table series

Longfellow uses a romantic story of early New England for his narrative poem The Courtship of Miles Standish

Longfellow's narrative poem Paul Revere's Ride dramatizes a turning point at the start of the American Revolution

Julia Ward Howe publishes The Battle Hymn of the Republic, inspired by a visit to Union troops in the American Civil War

Unpublished American poet Emily Dickinson writes more than 300 poems within the year

Samuel Clemens uses the pseudonym Mark Twain for the first time on an article in Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise

Samuel Clemens, writing under the pseudonym Mark Twain, has immediate success with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Walt Whitman laments the assassinated President Lincoln in his poem 'O Captain! My Captain!', published in Sequel to Drum-Taps

The first collection of 'Negro Spirituals' is published in book form in the US as Slave Songs of the United States

US author Louisa May Alcott begins serial publication of her book for children, Little Women (in book form 1869)

Bret Harte's comic ballad Plain Language from Truthful James acquires a popular alternative title, The Heathen Chinee

Pragmatism emerges as a philosophical approach in meetings of the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Gilded Age, by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain, provides the familiar name for life in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century

In 21 years Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has grown from 12 poems to the two volumes of the sixth edition, published in the USA's centenary year

Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom and his friends find excitement in a small town on the Mississippi

US author Joel Chandler Harris introduces Uncle Remus in a story in the Constitution