6- ] American Literature

6- ] American Literature 

History of American Literature

Periods of American Literature 

20th Century Literature

With World War I and the start of the Great Depression, American literature took a decidedly gloomy turn at the beginning of the 20th century. As Realism and Naturalism transitioned into Modernism, writers began using their texts as social critiques and commentaries.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) spoke of disillusionment with the American Dream, John Steinbeck told the story of the difficulties faced by dust bowl era migrants in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Harlem Renaissance writers including Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) used poetry, essays, novels, and short stories to detail the African American experience in the United States.

Ernest Hemingway, who was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, rose to prominence with the publication of novels such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Other American writers who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature include William Faulkner in 1949, Saul Bellow in 1976, and Toni Morrison in 1993.

The 20th century was also an important period for drama, a form that had previously received little attention in American literature. Famous examples of American drama include Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire which premiered in 1947, closely followed by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1949.

By the mid to late-20th century, American literature had become so varied that it is difficult to discuss as a unified whole. Perhaps, like the United States, American literature can be defined, not by its similarities, but rather by its diversity.

The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Prior to the last decades of the 20th century, American literature was largely the story of dead white men who had created Art and of living white men doing the same. By the turn of the 21st century, American literature had become a much more complex and inclusive story grounded on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and open to more Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. He left the United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he faced as a Black man in America; other Black writers working from the 1950s through the 1970s also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed Black man adrift in, and ignored by, America.

James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first performed in 1959.

Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of Black nationalism and sought to generate a uniquely Black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, is among its most-lasting literary expressions.

American author Toni Morrison, 2009. (Nobel Prize for Literature 1993)

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the lives of Black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.

In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her involvement in the civil rights movement.

The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist, metafictional, postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist, stream of consciousness—these and dozens more labels can be applied to the vast output of American novelists. Little holds them together beyond their chronological proximity and engagement with contemporary American society. Among representative novels are

Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)

Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)

Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)

Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)

Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1983)

Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1984)

Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)

Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)

Ha Jin: Waiting (1999)

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)

Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting influence on American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate American poetry. Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for poetry during the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Among the important poets of this period are

Anne Sexton

Sylvia Plath

John Berryman

Donald Hall

Elizabeth Bishop

James Merrill

Nikki Giovanni

Robert Pinsky

Adrienne Rich

Rita Dove

Yusef Komunyakaa

W.S. Merwin

Tracy K. Smith

In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three men: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main character, while Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered what might have been a benign domestic situation into something vicious and cruel. By the 1970s the face of American drama had begun to change, and it continued to diversify into the 21st century. Notable dramatists include

David Mamet

Amiri Baraka

Sam Shepard

August Wilson

Ntozake Shange

Wendy Wasserstein

Tony Kushner

David Henry Hwang

Richard Greenberg

Suzan-Lori Parks

The following are some examples of important writers in American literature:

American Literature: Novelists

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1906)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Harper Lee (1926-2016)

Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

American Literature: Essayists

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Malcolm X (1925-1965)

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

American Literature: Poets

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Emily Dickenson (1830-1886)

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

American Literature: Dramatists

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Edward Albee (1928-2016).

Some of these writers, such as James Baldwin, could be placed in any of these categories as they wrote novels, essays, poems, and plays!

American Literature: Books

The following are some examples of important books in American literature:

Moby Dick(1851) by Herman Melville

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain

The Great Gatsby(1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sun Also Rises(1926) by Ernest Hemingway

The Grapes of Wrath(1939) by John Steinbeck

Native Son(1940) by Richard Wright

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut

Beloved(1987) by Toni Morrison

American Literature - Key takeaways

Early American literature was often non-fiction, focusing instead on history, and describing the process of colonization.

During the American Revolution and Post-Revolutionary Period, the political essay was the dominant literary format.

The 19th century saw the formation of styles specific to American literature. The novel rose in prominence, and many important poets also became famous.

In the middle of the 19th century, the dominant literary style shifted from Romanticism to Realism.

Many texts from early 20th century American literature explore social commentary, critique, and disillusionment themes.

By the end of the 20th century, American literature had developed into the highly diversified and varied body of work that we see today.