The first literary works of the English-speaking peoples of North America were sermons, journals, and histories - concerns reflected in the work of the early poets Ann Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. In the Revolutionary period the most important work was practical or political, eg Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (173258). Franklin's Autobiography (1781) is a memorable testament to a Puritan sensibility. The African-born poet, Phillis Wheatley, a Boston servant before her release from slavery, was the first black African to receive considerable critical acclaim with her collection Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral (1773, London). After the international impact of Washington Irving's The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (181920), Fenimore Cooper likewise became a celebrity in the USA and Europe with his Leatherstocking Tales (182341), which introduced the theme of the problematic relationship between the wilderness and encroaching American civilization. The novelist and playwright William Wells Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834, wrote the first novel by a black American, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853, London). Transcendentalism was enunciated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature (1836) and by H D Thoreau in Walden (1855). Walt Whitman's free-form Leaves of Grass (appearing 185592) is the most sustained and successful response to Emerson's call for a literature free from European influence. By contrast, the poetry of Emily Dickinson offers unique concentration and intensity. Another group that spoke for the darker side of existence in the USA included Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Poe's sinister Tales (1840, 1845) continue to fascinate; while Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Melville's epic Moby-Dick (1852), are central works of the American imagination. But Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was the best-selling novel of the 20th-c.
Henry James and W D Howells (18371920) reacted against the parochialism of American literature, James going to Europe and producing a definitive series of novels on the clash of the two cultures, and Howells editing literary journals that published work by the European realists, James, and himself. Howells also published Mark Twain, whose Huckleberry Finn (1885) is one of the few humorous books of the 19th-c whose humour remains uncorroded. Kate O'Flaherty Chopin's brilliant short novel, The Awakening (1899), went unregarded for 60 years, while Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) was accepted as a classic. Naturalism was the dominant mode of American fiction until after World War 1, whether in stories like those by Jack London of life in hostile environments, or in the depiction by Theodore Dreiser of the developing industrial centres. The novels of Edith Wharton took New York society as their subject.
T S Eliot and Ezra Pound came to Europe after the war, using experimental verse to express their dismay at the decline of European civilization. Wallace Stevens too adopted the modernist faith in aesthetic values in a world where moral certainties seemed no longer tenable. In the novel, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald represented The Lost Generation, while another important innovator, William Faulkner, wrote a series of novels about the South. Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930), brilliantly satirized the business culture of the age, while Thornton Wilder, author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), produced urbane comments on human existence. The rigours of the Great Depression were reflected in the novels of John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939) and John Dos Passos (U.S.A., 19306) among others. American drama made its appearance with the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, which rework autobiographical material with classical and expressionist techniques, and Arthur Miller (eg Death of a Salesman, 1949). Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov emerged as one of the greatest masters of English prose style with novels such as Lolita (1955), while J D Salinger (The Catcher in The Rye, 1951) reflects both the purity of human nature and the hypocritical conformity of his age.
Passionate indignation about the black experience was voiced by, among others, James Baldwin in his novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1954). The novels of Jewish writers Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow invoked urban life with subtlety and humour, while Norman Mailer (like Hemingway) saw his writing as a form of action. The enduring popularity of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) have ensured international recognition for both authors. The most significant post-war poets were Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, who dealt harrowingly with the anguish and madness of the contemporary world, and John Ashbery, who imported the postmodern condition into poetry. Among the outstanding black writers of the latter part of the 20th-c were the poet and novelist Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982), Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987), and Maya Angelou (Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Die, 1971). Novels tended to polarize between the new journalism represented by Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe, and the postmodern experimentalism of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon; but meanwhile, writers such as Gore Vidal, John Updike, and Philip Roth continued the history of America in fiction. More recently, the novels and dramas of writers such as Don DeLillo, whose epic Underworld (1997) offers a spiritual odyssey in the last decades of the 20th-c, continue to make a potent contribution to world literature.
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American literature refers to written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and Colonial America.
Overview
During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States.
Colonial literature
Some of the earliest American literature were pamphlets and writings extolling the benefits of the colonies to both a European and colonist audience. Other writers of this manner included Daniel Denton, Thomas Ashe, William Penn, George Percy, William Strachey, John Hammond, Daniel Coxe, Gabriel Thomas, and John Lawson.
The religious disputes that prompted settlement in America were also topics of early writing. A journal written by John Winthrop discussed the religious foundations of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Other religiously influenced writers included Increase Mather and William Bradford, author of the journal published as a History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–47.
Some poetry also existed. Michael Wigglesworth wrote a best-selling poem, The Day of Doom, describing the time of judgement.
Other early writings described conflicts and interaction with the Indians, as seen in writings by Daniel Gookin, Alexander Whitaker, John Mason, Benjamin Church, and Mary Rowlandson.
Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather represented the Great Awakening, a religious revival in the early 18th century that asserted strict Calvinism. Other Puritan and religious writers include Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Uriah Oakes, John Wise, and Samuel Willard. Less strict and serious writers included Samuel Sewall, Sarah Kemble Knight, and William Byrd.
The revolutionary period also contained political writings, including those by colonists Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, John Dickinson, and Joseph Galloway, a loyalist to the crown. Paine's pamphlet Common Sense and The American Crisis writings are seen as playing a key role in influencing the political tone of the period.
During the revolution itself, poems and songs such as "Yankee Doodle" and "Nathan Hale" were popular. Philip Morin Freneau also wrote important poems about the war's course.
Early U.S. literature
In the post-war period, The Federalist essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay represent an important and historical discussion of government organization and republican values. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, his influence on the Constitution, his autobiography, and the mass of his letters have led to him being considered one of the most talented early American writers.
The first American novel is sometimes considered to be William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789). For example, Wieland and other novels by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) are often seen as imitations of the Gothic novels then being written in England.
Unique American style
With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American work, a number of key new literary figures appeared, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving, often considered the first writer to develop a unique American style (although this is debated) wrote humorous works in Salmagundi and the well-known satire A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). Bryant wrote early romantic and nature-inspired poetry, which evolved away from their European origins. In 1835, Poe began writing short stories -- including The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue -- that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy.
Humorous writers were also popular and included Seba Smith and Benjamin P. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris writing about the American frontier.
The New England Brahmins were a group of writers connected to Harvard University and its seat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called Nature, in which he claimed it was possible to dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced not only the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism, but also the public, who heard him lecture.
Emerson's most gifted fellow-thinker was perhaps Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), a resolute nonconformist. After living mostly by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote Walden, a book-length memoir that urges resistance to the meddlesome dictates of organized society. Other writers influenced by Transcendentalism were Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Jones Very.
The political conflict surrounding Abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and his paper The Liberator, along with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom's Cabin.
In 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances," quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England.
Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic novels. Inspired
by Hawthorne's example, Melville went on to write novels rich in philosophical speculation.
American lyric
America's two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me...."
Whitman was also a poet of the body -- "the body electric," as he called it. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something `superior' and `above' the flesh."
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Amherst, Massachusetts.
Many of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist.
Realism, Twain, and James
Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast -- in the border state of Missouri. Twain's style -- influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny -- changed the way Americans write their language.
William Dean Howells also represented the realist tradition through his novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham and his work as editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
Henry James (1843-1916) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it.
Turn of the century
At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life and sometimes connected to the naturalist school of realism. Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris wrote about the problems of American farmers and other social issues from a naturalist perspective.
More directly political writings discussed social issues and power of corporations. Other political writers of the period included Edwin Markham, William Vaughn Moody.
Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter.
The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols.
American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson also wrote novels with critical depictions of American life. John Dos Passos wrote about the war and also the U.S.A.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the senseless carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions.
Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962).
Depression era literature was blunt and direct in its social criticism. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life; Other writers, sometimes considered of the proliterian school, were Nathanael West, Fielding Burke, Jack Conroy, Tom Kromer, Robert Cantwell, Albert Halper, and Edward Anderson.
Theater
In addition to fiction, the 1920s and 1930s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began to write his plays.
Another strikingly original American playwright was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment.
Post-World War II
There were a number of major American war novels written in the wake of World War II.
In the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the "Beat Generation," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism.
Gore Vidal also rose to prominence as a writer during this period.
Postmodernism
From the early 1960s through the late 1980s, an important literary movement was postmodernism. Important writers, here, are Thomas Pynchon, author of V. and Gravity's Rainbow, among other things, and Don Delillo, who wrote White Noise. Postmodern writers dealt directly with the way that popular culture and mass media influence the average American's perception and experience of the world. But simultaneously, writers in this school take a knowing, self-conscious, sarcastic, and (some critics would say) condescending attitude towards their subjects.
Post-Postmodernism and other recent movements
Since 1970, rising along with a literary trend in literature focusing on the minorities, has been a new semi-populist literary trend which has taken hints in terms of some approaches of stylization with postmodernism but that is much more accessible. Post-Postmodernism, a rather heavy title for an ongoing movement that started in the 1990s, includes younger writers like David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, James Robert Baker and Audrey Niffenegger. These authors typically employ a mix of soulful plots with some ideological context, stylistic maximalism on top of the substance allowing the substance to be "turned and pinched" many ways (including an almost endless array of storyline-bending and repositioning effects), an almost pop-culture level of enhanced imagery and scene structure influenced by film and television, and a symbolism that includes images from contemporary American culture.
Modern humorist literature
From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form.
Southern literature
Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Another practitioner of the "nonfiction novel," Tom Wolfe (1931- ) was one of the founders of "New Journalism," who honed his art in such essays as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and Radical Chic before he moved on to book-length efforts, such as his history of the American manned space program The Right Stuff and probably his best-known novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Other writers steeped in the Southern tradition include John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969) and Tom Robbins (1936- ).
Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic, and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. See also: Southern Gothic
African American literature
African American literature is literature written by, about, and sometimes specifically for African-Americans. The genre began during the 18th and 19th centuries with writers such as poet Phillis Wheatley and orator Frederick Douglass. Among the themes and issues explored in African American literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and equality.
Before the American Civil War, African American literature primarily focused on the issue of slavery, as indicated by the popular subgenre of slave narratives.
African American literature saw a surge during the 1920s with the rise of an artistic Black community in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition.
After World War II, a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature.
Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books in the genre, such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley and The Color Purple by Alice Walker, achieving both best-selling and award-winning status. In addition, African American authors such as Toni Morrison are ranked among the top writers in the United States.
Jewish American literature
The United States has had a community and tradition of writing by Jewish immigrants and their descendants for a long time, although many writers have objected to being reduced to "Jewish" writers alone. Key modern writers with Jewish origins are Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Potok, Isaac Asimov, and Woody Allen, among others. The New Yorker has been especially instrumental in exposing many Jewish-American writers to a wider reading public.
Other ethnic, minority, and immigrant literatures
See also: Gay literature, List of Native American writers, Hispanic-American literature, List of Asian American WritersNative American writer Leslie Marmon Silko (1948- ) uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems such as In Cold Storm Light.
Other genres
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered gritty detective fiction that has had great influence on other genres and in other countries.
Stephen King has been especially successful internationally with his horror fiction.
The United States has also played a key role in the development of science fiction with authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robert A.
See the article on digital poetry for links to contemporary American work of the avant garde.
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