traditional sense; and, for him, women like Daisy represented the deepest seductive power of the Dream as well as its greatest dangers" (eNotes).

In these ways and others, The Great Gatsby is a novel of the American Dream.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis are also works of narrative fiction that relate to the American Dream (one a play and the other a novel, respectively).

Miller's play deals with achievement and ambition and the delusions that can accompany them. With a simplistic but almost ritualistic definition of success, Willy Loman imbues his two sons with the notion that one must be "well liked" to get ahead in the world of business and this narrow presumption keeps Willy's ambition painfully fresh and keeps him from realizing all the things he actually does accomplish in his life.  

Babbitt deals with a specifically corporate/white collar American Dream, placing the generic value system that advises one to always advance into conflict with a wider set of value systems prevalent in America. 

While the works mentioned above deal with a conventional view of the American Dream (linked to ideas of money and social success), there are other ways to define the American Dream and other works of literature that articulate those views. 

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems that passionately rhapsodizes on ideas of individualism, democratic spirit and dynamic intellectual life. For Whitman, these are qualities that define America and its promise. 

Thoreau's work, known sometimes as Walden, explores ideas that are sometimes similar to Whitman's and to those of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

"One reason that Waldenis exemplary as a work of Transcendentalism is that the book makes the idealistic assumption that there is a true self to discover" (eNotes).

What do Transcendentalism and the American Dream have in common? They both see the individual self as a perfect-able, discover-able thing. This view of the self is one of the foundations of the American Dream as it is inflected in The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman. 

Other works that deal with American ambition, social climbing, and/or a Transcendental view of the pursuit of self:

• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

There are indeed several ways to do this. The first step in this task is conceptual clarification. One can either research the history of the term "American Dream" or one can try to define the American Dream as a concept, and then chart a history of its conceptual development independent of the specific uses of the phrase. 

The origin of the phrase is credited to James Truslow Adams' 1931 book Epic of America. One way to use "big data" to look at the frequency of use of the phrase across time is by Google's Ngram viewer. The phrase appears to increase dramatically in frequency of usage starting in 1949, peaks in 1971, declines in the 1980s, has a second peak in 1994, and then tapers off in frequency of appearance. To trace the frequency of use in literary texts, one could do a narrower analysis of digitized texts by separating out ones you consider literary or doing a full text search in the MLA International Bibliography to find its use in literary criticism. 

A conceptual analysis would involve thinking about what American literary works tell a story of "rags to riches" success through hard work. This might include works of Ben Franklin, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and later works which address the issue satirically such as Albee's The American Dream and Miller's Death of a Salesman.