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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.
The New England colonies were the center of early American literature. The revolutionary period contained political writings by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. In the post-war period, Thomas Jefferson 's United States Declaration of Independence solidified his status as a key American writer.athaniel Hawthorne (1804â1864) is notable for his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, a novel about adultery. Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville (1819â1891) who is notable for the books Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. America's two greatest 19th-century poets were Walt Whitman (1819â1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830â1886).