After the independence, the U.S. started off a period of literary creation. Short stories written by Edgar Alan Poe joined faith and despair wielded by Melville and Whitman. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Beecher Stowe has a place of its own in American literature as a clear-cut example of a reaction against slavery. In the first half of the 20th Century, writers like Jack London, Thomas S. Elliot, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Steinbeck or Faulkner managed to make scores of worldwide readers turn their eyes on American literature.
