8- ] American Literature

8- ] American Literature

 

From The Best American Writers

Notable authors of American literature include: John Smith, who wrote some of its earliest works; Phillis Wheatley, who wrote the first African American book; Edgar Allan Poe, a standout of the Romantic era; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a celebrated poet; Emily Dickinson, a woman who wrote poetry at a time when the field was largely dominated by men; Mark Twain, a master of humour and realism; Ernest Hemingway, a novelist who articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation; and Toni Morrison, a writer who centred her works on the black experience and received a Nobel Prize in 1993.

There is a great and proud tradition of American writers, including some of the world’s most famous authors. Novels, plays, and poems pour out of the United States, with increasing numbers of women, African American, Native American and Hispanic writers making a strong contribution. There have been twelve literature Nobel Prize laureates, beginning with Sinclair Lewis in 1930 to Bob Dylan, in 2016. Other American writers who were laureates include such household names as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. American writers’ contribution to
English literature is incalculable

The American literary tradition began when some of the early English colonists recounted their adventures in the New World for the benefit of readers in their mother country (see our list of the best English authors). Some of those early writings were quite accomplished, such as the account of his adventures by Captain John Smith in Virginia and the journalistic histories of John Winthrop and William Bradford in New England.

It was in the Puritan colonies that published American literature was born, with writers like Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams producing works to promote their visions of the religious state. Perhaps the first book to be published by in America was the Bay Psalm Book in 1640, produced by thirty ministers, led by Richard Mather and John Cotton. It was followed by passionate histories like Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (1654) and Cotton and Mather’s epic Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

The American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the United States was a time of intellectual activity together with social and economic change. The founding fathers of the new state included the writers, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Philip Freneau, the first American lyric poet of distinction, the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, later an attacker of conventional religion, and the polemicist Francis Hopkinson, who was also the first American composer. The 19th-century saw the spreading and recognition of American writing in Europe with the folk stories of Washington Irving, the frontier adventures of Fenimore Cooper and the moralising verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Then came the giants, who took even the old world by storm and are still regarded as being among the greats of Western literature: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and the poet, Walt Whitman.

That romantic trend was interrupted by two of America’s great writers, Henry James, and Mark Twain, who threw the doors open to a new realism and changed American literature, setting it up for the rich literature that followed and which has not diminished. James emigrated to Europe and embraced psychological realism in novels such as Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Twain used national dialects in classics like Huckleberry Finn (1885).

The twentieth century witnessed the flowering of American literature. Confronted by the violence of the 20th century, a sense of despair was reflected in the literature, and the particular conditions of American society with all its diversity found its way into American writing.   In the 1950s, major dramatists, notably Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard,  developed the American theatre. African-American writers, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, dealt with racial inequality and violence in contemporary US society while Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison focused on the 20th-century history of African-American women. In the 1960s, novelists such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Joseph Heller examined the Jewish experience in American society.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. It was a controversial decision. However, it points to a new development in the progress of American literature when a songwriter’s work is regarded as literature. There have been several great American songwriters in the past century and one can find many of the concerns of modern America in the national songbook but this is the first time that American songs have been regarded as “literature.” Over seven decades Dylan has addressed the changes that America has experienced, ranging over war, race, climate change, and many other phenomena, producing a comprehensive commentary on the times in which we live. Some of the lyrics of his songs are regarded as being among the finest poetry of the period.