United States literature

United States literature, literary works in English beginning in the original 13 English colonies and continuing in the present-day United States. Although the United States is a large continental country with varied influences, several strands or themes characterize its literature. The pioneer heritage of the country left its mark on later writers, primarily in their concern with individual values and liberties and a certain pervasive skepticism toward authority. Perhaps aligned with this, U.S. writers have shown a consistent tendency to break with literary traditions and strike out in new directions.

Colonial literature

The first writings in English in North America were by adventurers and colonists for readers back in England. While few of these could be called literature, some journals and accounts did manifest a lasting quality and interest. Capt. John Smith's vigorous True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents…as Hath Happened in Virginia (published in England in 1608) was the first personal account of life in the colonies. More sober histories of the period included John Winthrop's Journal, which described life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1630 to 1649, and William Bradford's History of Plimoth Plantation. Religious and instructional works, however, dominated colonial writing, with sermons and religious tracts making up most of the colonists' reading matter. The first book published in the Puritan colonies was the Bay Psalm Book (1740). The most important of the early religious writers were Cotton Mather (a 2-volume ecclesiastical history of New England), Jonathan Edwards (sermons and books), and John Woolman (a journal reflecting on his life in the Quaker belief). Poetry in colonial times also largely reflected religious and pious themes. Among the early poets were Michael Wigglesworth, Anne Bradtreet, and Edward Taylor.

Revolutionary period literature

Not surprisingly, writing during the period of the Revolution concentrated on politics and on political philosophy. Benjamin Franklin encouraged writers by acting as a publisher and founder of newspapers. He also wrote political and satirical works, with his witty Poor Richard's Almanac (1733–58), one of the period's most popular publications. Political writing during this time reached new heights as men like Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Madison examined the nature of society. A formidable female writer of the late 18th century, Mercy Otis Warren, wrote not only plays and poetry but a history of the American Revolution—one of two contemporary histories considered significant. At war's end, as the new nation struggled to discover its identity, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay wrote a brilliant series of letters called The Federalist in support of the new constitution. For style and content they are scarcely rivaled in political discourse.

Literature in the New Nation

The first U.S. novel was William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789). Charles Brockten Brown, the first professional U.S. novelist, modeled his work after the English gothic romances, as exemplified in Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799). Fame both in the United States and Europe was gained by Washington Irving with his Sketch-Book (1819–20) and by James Fennimore Cooper with his Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41). The leading poet of this time was William Cullen Bryant, who became known as the American Wordsworth for his deeply felt nature poems. Among his most important lyrics are “Thanatopsis” (1811), “To a Waterfowl” (1818), and “To the Fringed Gentian” (1832). Also notable was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Evangeline, 1847). The nation's attention turned to the problem of slavery in the 1830s with William Lloyd Garrison and his newspaper, The Liberator, leading the antislavery movement. The most influential antislavery work was Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851–52), the best-selling book of the time.

Literature at mid-h century (19t)

By the middle of the 19th century, U.S. literature had come of age. The transcendentalists were a group of New England writers who displayed in their works characteristics thought to be specifically American. They espoused a high moral seriousness and a sense that the individual was superior to tradition and social customs. They also called for a distinctly American literature, quite independent of European models. Chief among them was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who presented the group's theories in Nature (1836) and in his brilliant essays (e.g., “Self-Reliance,” and “The Over-Soul,” both 1841). Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1855) was another transcendentalist who wrote observant, thought-provoking, and beautifully styled prose. Utterly American was the poet Walt Whitman (Leave of Grass, first edition published 1855), writing a free-form verse that broke with European models and celebrated the new country in the New World. Quite different, but equally untraditional, were the compact, emotionally intense lyrics of Emily Dickinson, almost all of which were published after her death in 1886. A darker strand in U.S. literature was evident in the eerie, haunting poetry and short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, for example, in lyrics such as “The Raven” (1845) and the sinister Tales (1840). Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece The Scarlet Letter (1850) probed the psychological aspects of sin in the closed society of early New England Puritanism. In Moby Dick (1852), Herman Melville created an American epic, at once an adventure tale of the sea and a deep, enigmatic allegory.

Literature in the second half of the h century (19t)

After the Civil War, literature in the United States took on a national aspect in that writings of distinct regions gained a nationwide audience. The country eagerly read about the California gold rush and life in the West in the short stories of Bret Harte. Joel Chandler Harris retold the old black tales of the South. The greatest of the regionalist writers, however, Mark Twain, surpassed the genre and in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) wrote two American classics. By century's end, a new realism was taking hold in U.S. literature as was a reaching-out to European models and culture. Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895), set in the Civil War, won acclaim for its realistic portrayal of warfare. Henry James went to Europe where he wrote novels of rare psychological insight about the clash of U.S. and European cultures (The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, and The Golden Bowl, 1904). William Dean Howells set out to depict the lives of average Americans (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885). Other noted realists included Frank Norris, Harold Frederick, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, and James T. Farrell. A group of journalists and writers known as “muckrakers” employed realism to examine corruption and fraud in U.S. society. Among them were Lincoln Steffins, Ida M. Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle (1906) was instrumental in bringing about food and drug laws.

Literature after World War I

Disillusionment with the war stirred a generation of U.S. writers to become expatriates in Europe, in search of something to believe in. Labeled the “lost generation” by Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933), the group included Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, 1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925), and John Dos Passos (U.S.A., 1930–36). One of the most powerful of U.S. novelists was William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, 1929). Social criticism continued with such writers as critic H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson and novelists Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. Other novelists of the period include Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, and Nathanael West. The Great Depression fostered more socially aware writing, as evidenced in the works of John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939). Notable U.S. poets of the 20th century include Edward Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, and, more recently, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and John Ashberry. Among the most important playwrights of this period were Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey Into Night, first produced in 1956), Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, and, in recent years, Edward Albee, David Rabe, Sam Shepard, and Neil Simon. Major novelists include Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Mary McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Toni Morrison, and John Updike.