We all need sources of motivation and inspiration for writing excellent custom college essays. And there is nothing more inspiring than people who made a significant impact on society and the world we live in. We offer you a list of great American writers whose lives and mindsets can definitely encourage any student to create a marvelous essay. You can not only learn new stylistic devices in their works but also find some facts from their biographies that can become powerful evidence and arguments in your piece of writing. After all, thorough research is, perhaps, an essential part of working on any essay.

Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s literary legacy is extensive (he wrote from his early youth to his death) and quite diverse. It covers almost all genres of secular literature from the colonial era, the period of the American Revolution, and the young republic while demonstrating a confident and easy mastery of the pen that remained unsurpassed by none of his American contemporaries.

He led extensive correspondence, both diplomatic and personal, and was a perfect master of the epistolary genre, leaving a remarkable autobiography, the most famous and widely read in the world. Franklin willingly parodied popular genres of colonial fiction. A simple enumeration of all Franklin’s works would take more than one page, especially considering not only his literary works but also his literary criticism and numerous philosophical and scientific tracts, technical invention projects, and political projects.

Franklin’s technical inventions and social innovations include the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, the first public library, the arrangement of street pavements, their sweeping and illumination, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, the City Hospital and a new type of clock. Isn’t he an inspiring model for your essay?

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Just as war was a constant theme of Hemingway, F. Fitzgerald wrote about the American dream and its collapse. This theme connects his personal life, his career, and his books as a whole. Fitzgerald remains the most prominent chronicler of the destructive power of wealth and glory. No other American writer has been able to look so deep into the American psyche and its dangerous nooks and explore them so thoroughly.

The absolute classic of American and world literature of the twentieth century, one of the leading representatives of the “lost generation”, as well as a voice, singer, and in many ways the creator of such a unique phenomenon of American culture as the “Jazz age“.

In just 44 years of his life, Fitzgerald created the most important works of his time, in which he best reflected America of the 20s. Fitzgerald was a symbol of that era, more than just a writer. However, despite his deep and strong connection to that epoch, Fitzgerald also outgrew that era, and so today, almost 80 years after his death, people all over the world continue to read, discuss and love him.

Stephen King

Stephen King firmly won a leading position in the horror genre. The seventies passed as if in the shadow of the writer’s work. He not only legitimised horror literature, but he also made it one of the most popular and profitable genres. Stephen King, with his clear focus on Protestantism in the field of religious outlook and romanticism in the field of aesthetic preferences as no other representative of modern “mass fiction”, continues the tradition of the English Gothic novel.

Building his novels on seemingly banal fantastic assumptions, he manages to create books that are at least outstanding over and over again. A flying saucer that fell in an American countryside; a man who is losing weight because gypsies cursed him; vampires in a simple American town… King takes the most established topics in the mass consciousness and takes them to the extreme, escalating conflicts, shows in each – as in a drop of water – the whole world of a modern man, with its joys and sorrows, psychoses, complexes, hopes, and everyday heroism. His best things relate to psychological prose rather than traditional horror stories: neither “The Green Mile”, nor “The Dead Zone”, nor “Hearts in Atlantis” do not scare us with bloodthirsty monsters or zombies. His statements, just like his books, can be cut into quotations and used in our essays.

Ray Bradbury

Young Ray made up his mind about who he wanted to be when he was 12. Stubbornly, step by step, he was mastering the problematic profession of a writer, despite the Great Depression that reigned in America. When you take his novel or story in your hands, you are surprised at the unconventionality of the writing. His characters are like a travel machine that can take you to the distant past, step into another world, to defeat the forces of evil and fight with enemies. Ray Bradbury wrote more than 800 different works during his lifetime. The writer does not accept the “consumer society”, he is frightened by the scale of the spiritual poverty of people, and he warns his contemporaries of the danger hidden in the depths of society.

The central theme of Ray Bradbury’s work is the responsibility of man for everything he does, the danger of “consumerism” in life, and other people. The writer hated war and the tools of destruction. The author reminds humankind of the glorious discoveries of the past, admires the naive immediacy of children, capable of marveling at the beauty of the world around, and bitterly tells about the moral and cultural degeneration of man in the “age of television and the atom bomb”. Ray Bradbury believes that “fiction is our reality, brought to the point of absurdity”. With his works, he tries to point out the dangerous trends that threaten humanity. Soullessness is one of Ray Bradbury’s most important themes. Bradbury is convinced that culture is inextricably linked to classical literary heritage.

Tony Morrison

Morrison is not just the author of eleven novels, short stories, fairy tales, plays and nonfiction, a teacher at Princeton University, and the latest American, who won a Nobel Prize. During her long career, she has become the voice of the will of “black America”: Morrison as a political figure and as an image of the transformation of American literature of the twentieth century is now more influential than Morrison as a writer. Over the years, social and political roles have become more important to her than literature. It is impossible not to compare this woman with one of her favorite authors, Leo Tolstoy. Both of them were continually trying to find the best way to carry knowledge and kindness to people because, for Morrison, the idea of good is crucial.

Morrison shows the world why she wants to write books: to tell a story that is continuously silenced and, worse, just not interesting enough for the oppressed minority. For decades now, Morrison’s words have been important to millions of people, not only in fiction texts: her political comments are interpreted and quoted more often than the lines of pop stars.

If you think we missed someone that should have been in this list or shouldn’t have been in, do tell us your thoughts in the comments below.