I personally liked the Transcendentalist-pessimists, like Hawthorne and Poe.
And if you ever get to the earlier American writers, I personally believe that John Smith's journals were greatly exaggerated and that James Fennimore Cooper's stories stunk.
You'll grow out of it, if you haven't already.
Mark Twain wrote something called The Literary Offences of James Fennimore Cooper. I've never read it, though.