Due to the variety and large number of writers, this chapter will necessarily be limited and incomplete. Instead, it will provide a selection of influential authors. 

CORMAC MCCARTHY was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. His first novel was The Orchard Keeper (1965). McCarthy presents the rural south as a land of myth His novel is set in an eastern Tennessee town called Red Branch, whose name recalls the great Red Branch Cycle of Celtic mythology.

In All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy opens his Border Trilogy with a coming-of-age story. Similarly to his novel Blood Meridian, this novel follows a young man's journey. John Grady Cole confronts evil that grows out of his own ignorance and pride. His last most successful novel was The Road which was adapted into a film. 

ERNEST J. GAINES (b. January 15, 1933) is a prominent African-American fiction writer. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In 2004, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gaines was the eldest of 12 children, raised by his aunt, who was crippled and had to crawl to get around the house. Although born generations after the end of slavery, Gaines grew up impoverished, in old slave quarters on the plantation. 

Gaines's first six years of school took place in the plantation church. A visiting teacher would teach him and the other children for five to six months each year, depending on when the children were not picking cotton in the fields. Gaines's then spent three years at St. Augustine School, a Catholic school for African Americans in New Roads. 

When he was fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California to join his mother and stepfather, who had left Louisiana during World War II. His first novel was written at age 17 while babysitting his youngest brother. According to one account, he wrapped it in brown paper, tied it with string, and sent it to a New York publisher, who rejected it. Gaines burned the manuscript but later rewrote it to become his first published novel, Catherine Carmier. 

Other works: Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays (2005), A Lesson Before Dying (1993), A Gathering of Old Men (1984) The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) Bloodline (1968) Of Love and Dust (1967) 

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER (1977-) comes from a Jewish background. He wrote his thesis about his maternal grandfather; Louis Safran who was a Holocaust survivor. He went to Ukraine to do research for his thesis which eventually turned into his first novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002). His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) tells the story of a nine-year-old boy who lost his father in the 11th September attacks on the World Trade Centre. His third book and first non-fiction work, Eating Animals was published in 2009. 

ART SPIGELMAN (1948-) is an author and illustrator who became mainly famous for his Holocaust graphic novel Maus, where he retold the wartime experience of his parents Vladek and Anja, survivors of Auschwitz. In 1980 he cofounded Raw, an underground comic anthology. He wanted to present graphic novels and “comix” (comics written for a mature audience) to a wider public. Spiegelman is a part of the story as the adult Artie Spiegelman, who tries to understand and reconstruct his parents’ past while coping with his mother’s suicide, his ageing and often difficult father, and his own sense of guilt. The two Maus volumes were translated into more than 20 languages, and they were published together as The Complete Maus in 1996.

In 2000 Spiegelman started Little Lit, a comics anthology for children that includes comics creators Chris Ware, Neil Gaiman, and Daniel Clowes, and Lemony Snicket. He was inspired by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to return to the comix format and published In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), broadsheet-sized meditations on mortality and the social and political consequences of that day. In 2008 he released Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, his graphic memoir.

SHERMAN ALEXIE (1966-) was born in Wellpinit, Spokane Indian Reservation. He left the reservation to attend an all-white high school and captured his experience in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). He also wrote poetry The Summer of Black Widows, and the thriller Indian Killer. His stories are collected in The Toughest Indian in the World (2000). Blasphemy (2012) collected new and previously published short stories. In 2017 Alexie published a memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, in which he chronicled his complex relationship with his mother. 

JHUMPA LAHIRI (1967-) was born in London but her Bengali parents soon moved to Rhode Island. Her first collection of stories was Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Lahiri’s characters are often immigrants from India or children of immigrants who deal with issues of cultural displacement, marital troubles and issues of identity. Most of these stories are set in the United States. Her first novel The Namesake was published in 2003. Her characters deal mainly with cultural and generational gaps. Gogol Ganguli, the novel’s protagonist, is a young man negotiating the divide between his parents’ traditional Indian roots and his own American identity.