Timeline of the Novel

(adapted from A Handbook to Literature, 6^th ed., C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon (NY: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 506-566)

1580 — 1600 — Elizabethan "novels" popular: Lyly, Greene, Sidney, Nash, et al.

1594 — Thomas Nash, The Unfortunate Traveller

*1601 — Shakespeare's Hamlet

1605 — Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I

c. 1650 — Many French romances and novels translated into English

c. 1660 - 1731 — Life of Daniel Defoe

*1667 — John Milton, Paradise Lost

*1682 — William Penn settles Pennsylvania

1719 — Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

1722 — Defoe, Moll Flanders

1726 — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

1742 — Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews

1748 — Samuel Richardson, Clarissa Harlowe

1760-67 — Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy

1771 — Ben Franklin, Autobiography

1811 — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

1817 — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

1819 — Lord Byron, Don Juan I and II

1820 — Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

1836 — Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers

1837 — Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales

1847 — Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

1847-8 — Thackeray, Vanity Fair

1849 — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

1850 — Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter

1851 — Herman Melville, Moby Dick

1852 — Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1860 — George Eliot, Mill on the Floss

1860-61 — Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

1868 — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

1872 — George Eliot, Middlemarch

1874 — Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

1876 — Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

1879 — Henry James, Daisy Miller

1883 — Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

1884 — Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

1891 — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

1894 — Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

1900 — Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

1903 — Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Jack London, The Call of the Wild

1905 — Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

1913 — D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

1921— Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow

1922 — James Joyce, Ulysses

1924 — E.M. Forester, A Passage to India

1925 — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

1926 — T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

1929 — William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

1937 — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men; The Red Pony

1939-1945: The Second World War

1939 — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

1940 — Richard Wright, Native Son

1946 — George Orwell, Animal Farm

1951 — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

1952 — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

1955 — Nabokov, Lolita

1958 — Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

1961 — Iris Murdock, A Severed Head

1969 — Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

1973 — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Toni Morrison, Sula

1981 — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

1983 — Alice Walker, The Color Purple

1985 — Raymond Carver, Cathedral

1987 — Toni Morrison, Beloved

1988 — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

1989 — Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club; Thoman Pynchon, Vineland