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Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first novels were published. With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803â1882) started a movement known as Transcendentalism.illiam Faulkner (1897â1962) is notable for novels like The Sound and the Fury. American drama attained international status only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the works of Eugene O'Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize.