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.

5- ] American Literature

5- ] American Literature

History of American Literature

Periods of American Literature

 AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE MODERN ACADEMY: A CULMINATION

The transition of American literature studies into an age of modern sophistication began just after the end of World War I. In April 1921 the final two volumes of The Cambridge History of American Literature appeared, providing American literary studies with its long-sought sense of critical legitimacy. Later that same year scholars of American literature organized themselves and met for the first time as the American Literature Group at the Modern Language Association's annual meeting. Then in 1923 a section devoted exclusively to American literature was added to the Publications of the Modern Language Association Bibliography (previously confined to English, Germanic, and Romantic languages and literatures), with Norman Foerster becoming its first bibliographer. Thereafter activity in the field of academic American literary studies soared. The proliferation
of scholarly attention to American authors consequently demanded that college English departments discuss standards and requirements pertaining to American literature, and by 1927 the American Literature Group was considering the possibility of setting up requirements for a Ph.D. degree in American literature. Finally in March 1929 the first scholarly journal entirely dedicated to American literary studies, American Literature, published its first volume under the editorship of Jay B. Hubbell.

The ferment of American literary scholarship during the 1920s inevitably began to exert influence on the production of American literary anthologies. In fact a clear difference between high school and college literature collections emerges only in the years following the end of World War I. Before then, anthology editors had intended that their textbooks be used as general guides to American literature for students of all levels, but by 1919 scholars were compiling collections specifically for yearlong college courses, interspersing historical background with the poetry and prose together in the now familiar same-volume format. Influenced by recent critical trends, scholar-editors began moving textbooks away from almost total emphasis on the historical backgrounds and biography, bringing about an expanded coverage of literature. In 1919 Fred Lewis Pattee published his first anthology of American literature designed for a yearlong survey. Norman Foerster's American Poetry and Prose: A Book of Readings 1607–1916 (1925) became the first literary anthology designed for the college classroom that divided American literature under the conventional modern headings of "Colonial/Puritan Background," "Romanticism," and "Realism." Shortly afterward several other major literary textbooks appeared, one after another, ushering in the age of the modern anthology of American literature as well as inaugurating the proliferation of academic American literary studies that would by mid-century lead to the recognition of American authors and texts as major contributors to world literature.

The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the 20th century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress. The devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering in Europe and the United States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling within modernism, a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American literature.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change.

F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).

Poet Richard Wright in his study, 1943

Richard Wright

Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).

Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His fragmentary, multi-voiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but his was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.

Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world.

During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century. Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and enduringly American.

Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey into Night (written 1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20 years of creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946).

During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that exposed injustice in America.

Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America in Our Town, first produced in 1938.

4- ] American Literature

4- ] American Literature 

History of American Literature

Periods of American Literature 

THE RISE OF LITERARY REALISM

By 1870 a new generation of American authors, committed to the tenets of literary realism, had begun to emerge. The realist artistic vision, though expressed in a variety of ways by hundreds of writers in the late nineteenth century, was, at least in principle, relatively uncomplicated: portray people, places, and things as they actually appear in everyday life. Realism as an aesthetic movement was in large part a reaction against the idealizing (if universalizing) tendencies of literary romanticism, which had dominated literary expression in the United States since the early decades of the 1800s. The major novelists of the post–Civil War period, Mark Twain (1835–1910), William Dean Howells (1837–1920), and Henry James (1843–1916), self-avowed realists all, emphasized in their writing a fidelity to actual experience, particularly by focusing on the development of "common" characters confronting complex ethical issues.

Although Twain, Howells, and James as well as other American writers produced novels of the highest quality in the final decades of the nineteenth century, none of these works could be said to have truly achieved the status of the Great American Novel insofar as any of them alone represented the fullness of the American cultural experience. In fact, Howells himself famously argued that it would be impossible because of the regional diversity of the country for any one book to capture completely the American experience. American realist writers generally focused on the particular details of the geographical area of the country they knew best, recording the distinctive manners, colloquial speech patterns, and distinguishing traditions of its inhabitants. Of course the ways people talk and behave tend to be sectional in nature. And so the particular brand of realist literature produced by Americans in the late nineteenth century came to be known as regionalism.

Indeed, in many ways the last three decades of the nineteenth century constituted an age of regionalism in American literature. Coinciding with the growing interest among Americans in their country's sectional differences, regionalist writing flourished between 1870 and 1900. As the public appetite for stories with regional qualities increased, the proliferation of magazines following the Civil War provided an outlet particularly for the work of short-fiction writers whose work was distinguished by this quintessentially American brand of late-nineteenth-century literature. In the Far West, authors like Bret Harte and Dan De Quille as well as writers of Nevada's "Sagebrush School," Joseph Goodman and Rollin Daggett, to name just two, wrote accounts of outlaws, roughs, and prospectors. Midwestern writers such as Alice Cary, Joseph Kirkland, and Edward Eggleston chronicled the lives of prairie farmers and small-village folk. George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Grace Elizabeth King depicted the unique complexities of postwar life in the South. In New England, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman recorded the peculiar experiences of Yankees and spinsters. Taken together, these and other writers from the period produced a representation of American cultural experience that in both form and content matched the regional diversity of the United States.

19th Century Realism and Naturalism (1865-1914)

In the second half of the 19th century, Realism took hold in American literature as writers grappled with the aftermath of the Civil War and the ensuing changes to the nation. These authors sought to depict life realistically, telling the stories of real people living real lives in the United States.

Why do you think the Civil War and its aftermath might have inspired American writers to tell more realistic stories?

To achieve this, novels and short stories often focused on showing American life in specific pockets of the country. The authors used colloquial language and regional details to capture a sense of place. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain (1835-1910), was one of the most influential proponents of this local-color fiction. His novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) exemplified American Realism and remain today some of the most indispensable novels in the American literary canon.

Naturalism, a deterministic form of Realism that examines the effects of environment and circumstance on its characters, followed Realism towards the end of the 19th century.

AMERICAN LITERATURE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

During the 1890s a profound and noticeable shift began taking place in American literature. A hallmark feature of post–Civil War American literary realism had been plots that featured characters confronting complex ethical dilemmas. Thus a fundamental assumption that lay behind many realist texts was that the individual possesses the free will to decide between that which is right and wrong, moral and immoral, good and evil. By the end of the century American writers, influenced by the emerging trend in European literature called literary naturalism, were starting to question the broader notion of human freedom as they embraced aspects of scientific determinism, a system of thought that rejected the existence of free will as a way of accounting for everyday human behavior. Conceptions of "determinism" were not completely unknown to Americans of the nineteenth century. For hundreds of years of course numerous interpretations of Christian theology had preached doctrines that denied human agency at most if not all levels of existence. But certain scientific developments in the early and mid-1800s began to assert arguments for more secular varieties of determinism. In 1859 Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his ground-breaking study On the Origin of Species, and its subsequent effect on Western thinking, particularly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, is nearly impossible to overstate. His theories of "natural selection" fundamentally undermined an ennobled vision of human life by intimating that human beings might be directly related to lower forms of animals. In addition to challenging centuries of foundational religious thinking, Darwin's hypotheses suggested that human behavior is largely governed by biologically determined forces that are beyond the individual's control. Darwinian evolutionary theory quickly became the basis for any number of pessimistic late-century scientific hypotheses concerning human conduct. Most famously, perhaps, the Englishman Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) applied Darwin's observations to social models and in the 1870s coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" as he attempted to justify the social and economic inequities of the Gilded Age.

Darwin and Spencer as well as other revolutionary scientific thinkers of the nineteenth century incited a new generation of American writers to portray life as a battle in which human beings struggle against forces seemingly bent on their destruction. Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, to name a few of the most prominent figures, all produced fiction near the turn of the century that emphasized deterministic forces—social, biological, and environmental—exerting control over the lives of their characters. Crane's (1871–1900) Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) is generally considered to be the first significant naturalistic novel by an American, and it showcases many of what would become the movement's hallmark features: a hostile setting, oppressed lower-class characters, images of despair, metaphors drawn from war and savagery, and profoundly tragic themes. The work of American naturalists that followed would likewise depict unflinchingly the bleakness of urban slums, arctic wildernesses, and impoverished rural environments; portray young women driven to prostitution, young men to brutality, and entire families to total annihilation; and explore the complex of overwhelming forces, external and interior, that compelled their characters toward seemingly inevitable fates. In the end, however, the despairing tone of literary naturalism was not without purpose. American naturalist authors generally wrote to transform the world around them, to bring to the attention of readers the effect of deterministic forces in their lives and to propose ways of coping with those forces. By doing so, these writers saw themselves as assisting in the improvement of society as a whole.

As turn-of-the-century American writers embraced literary naturalism, the American publishing scene proudly began to promote past American authors in ways that it had not before. Houghton, Mifflin, for example, introduced its Riverside Literature Series in the early 1890s, which featured the poetry and prose of America's most revered literary artists. Each volume in the series featured the work of a single writer, providing the public with affordable collections of American literature and providing American literary art with its long-deserved sense of cultural legitimacy. Sales were extraordinary right from the start, and second editions followed almost immediately. Also very popular among turn-of-the-century readers were illustrated omnibus collections of American literature. Donald G. Mitchell's American Lands and Letters (1897) is typical of the larger compilations of American writings that appealed to the general reader by providing hundreds of selections by multiple authors and large numbers of portraits and other images in a single volume. Additionally, the Atlantic Monthly and other highly respected magazines ran articles throughout the 1890s touting the merits of indigenous writers of the past while calling for a body of work from writers of the future worthy of the greatness of American culture. All said, as the country moved into the new century American literary art seemed finally to be receiving the kind of backing from the American print trade that had been so conspicuously absent in preceding decades.

Academic interest in American literary studies was also beginning to accelerate rapidly in the early years of the twentieth century. Forty-two doctoral dissertations, for example, were completed on American literary topics between 1900 and 1920 despite few graduate course offerings on exclusively American topics. To meet this expanding interest in American literature within universities, a number of literary histories and collections of poetry and prose virtually free of interpretive explication entered the market after 1900. Nevertheless, the earlier textbooks by Tyler and Richardson, along with Barrett Wendell's (1855–1921) A Literary History of America (1900), continued their hegemony as the trusted authorities until about 1915. Suggesting a more scholarly approach to American letters, Wendell's textbook was fashioned in the style of Tyler's and the first volume of Richardson's set but added to their format an extensive annotated bibliography of primary and secondary works. Neither Wendell's nor subsequent literary histories published during the next few decades advanced literary historiography beyond studies of language patterns and social science. Historical approaches to literature maintained their supremacy both in academic studies of American literature and in American literary textbooks long into the 1920s, as evidenced by the success of a second generation of influential and widely used literary histories, which included W. B. Cairns's A History of American Literature (1912) and The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–1921).

3- ] American Literature

3- ] American Literature

History of American Literature

Periods of American Literature

 The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)

Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of nature over human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849.

Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme.

The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) are gripping tales of horror.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.

James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday life in the Northeast

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the upper-class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through European models and sensibilities.

The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.

Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-enduring works of American literature.

As a young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the Transcendentalists before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Herman Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s early life of traveling and writing.

Walt Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.

During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and about enslaved and free Black people were written.

William Wells Brown published what is often considered the first Black American novel, Clotel, in 1853. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858).

In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first Black women to publish fiction in the United States.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published serially 1851–52, is credited with raising opposition in the North to slavery.

Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886; and she was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a Romantic vision as clearly as Walt Whitman’s or Edgar Allan Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and emotionally intense. Five of her notable poems are

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

“Because I could not stop for Death –”

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”

“A Bird, came down the Walk –”

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the grim realities of a devastating war, they became writers’ primary mode of expression.

Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting on politics in the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. Some of his notable works include

Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)

Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them, particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.

Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism. His Sister Carrie (1900) is the most important American naturalist novel.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane, and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris, are novels that vividly depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in Black dialect—“Possum,” “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and gave them what they believed was reality for Black Americans. Dunbar also wrote poems not in dialect—“We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of racism in America during Reconstruction and afterward.

Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present reality, but his writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic experience, not simply document truth. He was preoccupied with the clash in values between the United States and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable novels are

The American (1877)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

What Maisie Knew (1897)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

The Golden Bowl (1904)

19th Century Romanticism (1830-1865)

During the 19th century, American literature really began to come into its own. For the first time, American authors began to consciously distinguish themselves from their European counterparts and develop a style that was considered uniquely American. Writers like John Neal (1793-1876) spearheaded this initiative by arguing that American authors should forge a new path, not relying on borrowed literary conventions from Great Britain and other European countries.

The American novel began to flourish, and the 19th century saw the emergence of many writers that we continue to read today. By the early 19th century, Romanticism, already well-established in Europe, had arrived in the United States. Although the proliferation of Romanticism could be seen as a further continuation of European literary influence, American Romantics were distinct. They maintained their sense of individualism while invoking the Romanticism of the American landscape and focusing on the novel more than their British counterparts.

Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick (1851), is an example of this American Romanticism as a novel that is filled with emotion, the beauty of nature, and the struggle of the individual. Edger Allen Poe (1809-1849) was also one of American Romanticism’s more important writers. His poetry and short stories, including detective stories and gothic horror stories, influenced writers worldwide.

The works of the poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), sometimes referred to as the father of free verse, was also published during this period, as was the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).

The early- to mid-19th century also saw the emergence of Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that Whitman belonged to, but also included essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a philosophical account of the author’s solitary life on the shore of Walden Pond.

By the middle of the century, during the build-up to the Civil War, more texts were written by and about both free and enslaved African Americans. Perhaps the most important of these was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), an anti-slavery novel written by white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

2- ] American Literature

2- ] American Literature

AMERICAN LITERATURE

History of American Literature

Periods of American Literature

The history of American literature stretches across more than 400 years. It can be divided into five major periods, each of which has unique characteristics, notable authors, and representative works.

The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This was the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and focused on the future.

In its earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction written by British settlers who populated the colonies that would become the United States.

John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the earliest works of American literature.

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.

Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.

A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain.

The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the political direction of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a quintessentially American life story.

Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, was the first Black poet of note in the United States. Her first book was Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau was another notable poet of the era.

The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in 1789.

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the earliest slave narratives and a forceful argument for abolition.

By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

Puritan and Colonial Literature (1472-1775)

American literature began as the first English-speaking colonists settled along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The purpose of these early texts was usually to explain the process of colonization and describe the United States to future immigrants back home in Europe.

British explorer John Smith (1580-1631 — yes, the same one from Pocahontas!) is sometimes credited as the first American author for his publications that include A True Relation of Virginia (1608) and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Like much literature from the colonial period, the format of these texts was non-fiction and utilitarian, focusing on the promotion of European colonization in America.

Revolutionary and Early National Literature (1775-1830)

During the American Revolution and the years of nation-building that followed, fiction writing was still uncommon in American literature. The fiction and poetry that was published remained heavily influenced by literary conventions established in Great Britain. In place of novels geared towards entertainment, writing was commonly used to further political agendas, namely the cause of independence.

Political essays emerged as one of the most important literary forms, and historical figures like Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Samuel Adams (1722-1803), and Thomas Paine (1737-1809) produced some of the most notable texts of the era. Propaganda pamphlets to influence the colonists’ cause also became an essential literary outlet. Poetry was likewise employed in the cause of the revolution. Lyrics of popular songs, such as Yankee Doodle, were often used to convey revolutionary ideas.

Post-independence, Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), and James Madison (1751-1836), continued to use the political essay to convey ideas related to the construction of new government and the future of the country. These include some of the most important texts in American history, for example, the Federalist papers (1787-1788) and, of course, The Declaration of Independence.

The literature of the late 18th and early 19th century was not all political in nature, however. In 1789, William Hill Brown was credited with the publication of the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy. This period also saw some of the first texts published by both freed and enslaved Black authors, including Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

EARLY CULTURAL CONTEXT

The cultural trauma of the Civil War produced a permanently altered sense of national consciousness among Americans who lived through it and beyond it. But the war between the states was only one of many phenomena of the late nineteenth century that transformed the United States from a country fundamentally sectionalist in attitude (e.g., New England, South, Midwest, Far West) into a unified nation of the world that would come to consider its regional diversity a vital if mostly secondary trait.

The technological advances that followed the Civil War, particularly in the areas of American transportation and communication, also contributed mightily to the emergence of this new, more unified cultural awareness. In 1860, for example, fewer than thirty thousand miles of railroad existed in the United States, and major sections of the country remained essentially unconnected to each other. By May 1869, however, less than a decade later, as the last rail spike was being driven into the line linking the East and the West at Promontory Point, Utah, the number of miles of railroad crisscrossing the United States had almost tripled to nearly ninety thousand. The expansion of the railroads into every corner of the Union of course made travel throughout the country much easier (thus removing a major impediment to personal mobility that would tend to promote a regional—as opposed to a national—sensibility), but it also had the equally important effect of opening up commerce and communication between different geographical regions to a much larger degree.

Advances in publishing technology after the Civil War also worked to open contact between sections of the United States. Subscriptions to major newspapers and magazines skyrocketed in the 1870s and 1880s as Americans from all over the country grew hungrier for information from beyond their local borders. Already existing periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly widened their circulations dramatically in the last few decades of the nineteenth century as telegraph and transportation improvements made it possible for them to reach those more distant readers longing for access to these now more broadly focused national publications. Hoping to capitalize on newly opened markets and the increased readership among the American public, hundreds of new magazines appeared for the first time in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, including Galaxy, Overland Monthly, Scribner's Monthly, and Century Magazine, to name a few of the most prominent.

Though late-nineteenth-century improvements in transportation and communication helped to foster a larger, more unified conception of an American culture, these advancements also had a simultaneous and somewhat paradoxical effect on the nation's consciousness. Ironically, as Americans seemed to be dismantling sectional boundaries in the 1870s and 1880s by traveling farther from home and by reading a wider variety of publications from across the United States, they were at the same time made newly aware of regional differences in speech and manners through contact with those people and places beyond their immediate milieus. This rediscovery of regional diversity in the context of a budding national culture would prove to have profound implications for the establishment of an indigenous American voice in literature in the decades following the Civil War.

1- ] American Literature .

1- ] American Literature

AMERICAN LITERATURE

American literature is generally defined as literature from the United States or its earlier colonies that is written in English. American literature, both in the way it was practiced and the way it was perceived, came of age in the period between 1870 and 1920. During these years American writing distinguished itself stylistically and thematically from the European tradition to which it had been dismissively compared for more than a century. American authors also increasingly gained respect as serious artists in the decades following the Civil War as literary critics inside and outside the academy began to appreciate the intrinsic merits of American poetry and prose.

American literature generally refers to literature from the United States that is written in English. It is important to note that some object to the term “American literature” to refer to English-language literature in the United States because the term erases literature from elsewhere in the Americas that is written in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or other languages.

The history of American literature is intertwined with the history of the United States itself, and many of the following facts illustrate that relationship.

Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemmingway, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou; this is just a tiny handful of the great names in American literature. For a relatively young nation, the breadth and diversity of literature written in the United States are remarkable. It is home to some of the most important authors in the world and has spawned literary movements that have since spread around the globe. American literature also served to tell the story of the developing nation, creating a perpetual link between American identity and the country's literature.

Importance of American Literature

American literature has played a significant role in shaping the culture and identity of the United States as well as influencing the development of literature around the world. The novels, poetry, and short stories of writers such as Edger Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain have made an enormous contribution to the existence of literature as we know it today.

Did you know that Edger Allen Poe is credited with the creation of the modern-day horror genre and detective story?

American literature was also important in developing American identity by telling the story of the nation. The literature helped the new country establish itself as independent from past literary traditions hailing from Great Britain and the rest of Europe. Literature also helped to develop the nation by articulating ideas central to national identity.

What are major characteristics of American literature?

The common tendency of American literature is to be focused on politics, economics, and social status. Satire, sarcasm, and cynicism can be also often find their way into the works of American authors. For example, language functions as a vehicle of protest in “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Great Gatsby.”

Some of the characteristics of American literature include an emphasis on the importance of individuality, providing a strongly American sense of place, and embracing a diverse array of authors and styles.

Like many art forms, literature is a way for a culture to define and create its identity. It is at once a reflection of cultural identity and a way of perpetuating that identity. American literature exposes many aspects of American identity, such as an inclination towards independence and individuality. At the same time, it reinforces and constructs these qualities of American identity by solidifying and universalizing them in literature.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876) is a classic example of American literature.

American literature has generated some of the most important and influential authors worldwide who have shaped literature into what we know today. It also played an important role in the development of the United States and American identity.

What is the main theme of American literature?

Self-reliance and imagination were the main themes in literature of this period. Some other themes include nature, romance, and faith.

What are the main genres of American literature?

American literature can be divided into fiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction encompasses historical documents, articles, books, and essays. Fiction in American literature can be divided into poetry, short stories, novels, and dramas.

Features of American Literature

It can be difficult to generalize the features of American literature due to the breadth, variety, and diversity of American authors. However, many of the literature’s identifiable features can be linked and attributed to typical ideas of the American experience and American identity.

Early on, American literature was characterized by its self-conscious effort to break away from literary forms established in Great Britain and other European countries.

American authors, such as John Neal (1793-1876), were inspired to create their own literary style emphasizing the realities of American life, including the use of colloquial language and unmistakably American settings.

A sense of individualism and celebration of the individual experience is one of the central features of American literature.

American literature can also be characterized by its many forms of regional literature. These include Native American literature, African American literature, Chicano literature, and the literature of various diasporas.

The Features of Early American Literature (Colonial American Literature)

Why do you think American literature in the colonial and revolutionary periods was mostly non-fiction?

Early American Literature writing that emerged from the original U.S colonies during the period from 1607 to the late 1700. It was largely influenced by British writers and was created to inform people about colonial life, religious disputes and settlement issues. Many of characteristics of early American literature can be found in the poems, journals, letters, narratives, histories and teaching material written by settlers, religious figures and historical icons of the period. American Literature includes the writings of Marry Rowlandson, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop.

American Literature had been affected from many ways; each way makes a different in America’s literature. The three characteristics of American Literature include – plot of decline, indifferent of nature, 3rd person omniscient reaction to romanticism and surrealism.

Firstly, American Literature reflects beliefs and traditions that come from the nation’s frontier days. The pioneer ideals of self-reliance and independence appear again and again in American writings. American authors have great respect for the value and importance of the individual. They tend to reject authority and to emphasize democracy and the equality of people. They often celebrate nature and a sense of boundless space.

Second, American writers have always had a strong tendency to break with literary tradition and to strike out their own directions. Writers of other countries seem to absorb their national literary traditions. But many American authors have rejected the old in order to create something new.

Thirdly, a lively streak of humor runs thorough American literature from earliest times to present. In many cases a dash of salty humor saves serious theme from becoming too sentimental. American humor tends to be exaggerated rather than subtle. It reflects the people’s ability to laugh at themselves even during the most difficult times.