Our Town is an American Classic
Launched in 2026 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence, HarperCollins American Classics is a curated collection of seminal works published throughout the company’s history. The series celebrates HarperCollins’s enduring legacy at the forefront of American literature since its founding in 1817.
The collection of 35 seminal books includes timeless classic novels; groundbreaking nonfiction; contemporary award-winning works; and exactly one play, Our Town. Together, these titles represent not just HarperCollins’s publishing legacy, but also the collective legacy of American literature.
We are honored to be a part of this seminal group.
The full catalog of American Classics is as follows:
“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850); Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851); Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1854); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884); My Antonia, Willa Cather (1918); Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder (1932); Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (1937); Our Town, Thornton Wilder (1938); Native Son, Richard Wright (1940); A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (1943); The Street, Ann Petry (1946); Charlotte's Web, E. B. White (1952); To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960); Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962); I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963); The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963); Selected Poems, Gwendolyn Brooks (1963); House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday (1968); The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974); Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig (1974); Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin (1978); A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn (1980); The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993); Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende (1998); The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998); All About Love, bell hooks (1999); Bel Canto, Ann Patchett (2001); The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (2003); The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Nikki Giovanni (2003); The Known World, Edward P. Jones (2004); We the Animals, Justin Torres (2011); The Round House, Louise Erdrich (2012); The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas (2017); The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo (2018); South to America, Imani Perry (2022)