American literature

American literature English explorers and early colonists produced literary accounts of North America. The first English language work published in New England was the Bay Psalm Book (1640). Early colonial literature was often an expression of Puritan piety, designed as a moral framework for a religious colony. Many of the leading figures in the American Revolution, such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, produced important literary works. Early 19th-century writers, such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were influenced by European romanticism. The preeminent US romantic poet was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Transcendentalism was the first truly distinctive national literary movement. Leading writers included the essayists Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louisa May Alcott. Walt Whitman's free-verse epic Leaves of Grass (1855–92) is perhaps the most fully realized poetic expression of transcendentalism. The 1840s and 1850s produced many American fiction classics, such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery story Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Literature of the immediate post-Civil War period is characterized by parochialism. The two great exceptions to the trend (and precursors of a new realism) were Henry James and Mark Twain. While James emigrated to Europe and embraced psychological realism in novels such as Portrait of a Lady (1881), Twain used distinctive national dialects in humorous classics such as Huckleberry Finn (1885). Realism fed into naturalism, producing writers who either focused on the development of cities ( Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton), or those who concentrated on a hostile wilderness, such as Jack London. Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895) was ground-breaking in its naturalistic treatment of the American Civil War. Emily Dickinson was finally published posthumously in 1890. In the early 20th century many US writers went into exile. In Paris, Gertrude Stein held court over the ‘Lost Generation’, a large group of emigrés that included Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound led the search for experimental poetic forms. Eliot's bleak and fragmentary poem The Wasteland (1922) is often viewed as the archetype of high modernism. Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams developed the new poetry, while William Faulkner is regarded as one of the leading modernist novelists. The Harlem Renaissance witnessed the emergence of African-American writers, such as Langston Hughes. The style and decadence of the ‘jazz age’ in 1920s New York was captured by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925). The 1920s also witnessed the debut of the first great American dramatist, Eugene O'Neill. Writers such as John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty emerged in the 1930s. Confronted by the violence of the 20th century, a sense of despair and the meaningless absurdity of artistic expression characterize post-war literature and drama. In the 1950s, major dramatists such as 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. Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison focused on the 20th century history of African-American women. During the 1960s, novelists such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller examined the Jewish urban intellectual approach to American society, often adopting a deeply ironic tone. Humour was also a major outlet for writers such as John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Norman Mailer used a more muscular, controversialist approach. The beat movement (including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg) urged the rejection of the established order and embraced alternative values. A major trend in American poetry was the ‘confessional’ style of personal revelation by poets such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Post-modernism informed the work of writers such as Kathy Acker and Bret Easton Ellis.