Literature Colonial EraEarly National and Antebellum ErasCivil War to World War ISince World War IColonial Era Previously somewhat neglected, the literature of the
Colonial Era was recognized in the later twentieth century as a rich and fascinating part of American literature. In the 1940s and 1950s, scholarship on colonial literature—now usually seen as part of the field of early American literature—was heavily influenced by the work of the Harvard English professor Perry Miller and other intellectual historians. As a result, much attention focused on
Puritanism and on continuities between colonial American literature and the later literature of the United States. Both Miller and the Puritans later came to loom less large, and the study of literature became more independent of historical scholarship, though literary continuities remained important to many specialists.
Scholars and critics of the late twentieth century asked large and serious questions about colonial literature. Is early American literature confined to writings in English by sometime residents of those colonies that later became the United States? Should writings in languages other than English be included in the canon? Are there distinctive qualities that a work of literature must possess to be designated American? Though no definitive answers to these questions emerged, the canon of colonial literature was expanded to include previously unrecognized writers and marginalized groups: women, Native Americans, and
African Americans. Increasingly, colonial writers were viewed in the context of the development of a distinctive American culture, with some writings valued as belles lettres.
The writers of colonial America generally identified as most important to literature are William Bradford (1590–1657), Anne
Bradstreet, Edward Taylor (c. 1644–1729), William
Byrd II, Jonathan
Edwards, Benjamin
Franklin, and J. Hector St. John
Crèvecoeur, with others placed at a somewhat lower level: Cotton
Mather, the African American poet Phillis
Wheatley, and Captain John
Smith, who is now recognized as a credible writer.
Bradford's well‐crafted history of the
Plymouth colony (written c. 1630–1650) enjoys a preeminent place because of its early date and because of the author's efforts to understand what was happening in his tiny settlement; it continues to be read as adumbrating later critiques of the American dream. Bradford addressed the young men of Plymouth Plantation and stressed the virtues of the founders. Anne Bradstreet of Boston, who began a feminist tradition in American
poetry, learned her craft by composing conventional, public verse but later turned to personal themes of family, love, faith, nature, and loss. Fully aware that her society did not expect women to express themselves as she did, she nevertheless, like Bradford, struggled to interpret her experience in the framework of her religious beliefs. In such poems as
Contemplations,
Before the Birth of One of Her Children, and
A Letter to Her Husband, she left an enduring legacy.
Edward Taylor, whose poetry was unknown until the 1930s, has been the beneficiary of excellent editors; his work—prose and verse—fills thirteen published volumes. The founder of a frontier church in Westfield, Massachusetts, and deeply engaged in the liturgical arguments of his day, he struggled with wit and imagination to apply biblical texts to his personal situation in his major work,
Preparatory Meditations before My Approach to the Lords Supper. Once seen as an aberration in
New England Puritanism, Taylor is now acknowledged as an orthodox Calvinist, and his passionate work has led to a new understanding of the role of emotion in New England Puritanism.
Jonathan Edwards, despite his theological preoccupations, also has an important place in colonial literature. His
Personal Narrative is both a work of real literary merit and, with its focus on the subjective—“the sense of the heart”—a precursor of Ralph Waldo
Emerson's early writings. Also notable are his
Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, The Nature of True Virtue, and his sermons, especially the classic “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The customary contrast between Edwards and Benjamin Franklin focuses on their autobiographical writings, but some of Franklin's other writings, such as his satires and bagatelles, are now recognized as comprising a large, impressive body of literature. As a writer, he has been judged the peer of his British contemporary Dr. Samuel Johnson.
Turning from New England southward, perhaps the greatest legacy of the Chesapeake Bay area is William Byrd's
History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, which deals with a quintessential early American concern, bringing order to the wilderness, as recounted by a witty gentleman whose prose features antithesis, analogy, puns, and epigrams, and contrasts industry and idleness as well as the gentlemen of Tidewater, Virginia, and the inhabitants of “Lubberland,” Byrd's term for North Carolina. Byrd obviously wrote to be read, though he had no interest in print publication. Other Chesapeake area writers now admired are the poets Richard Lewis (1700–1734) and Ebenezer Cooke (c. 1667–c. 1732), and Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712–1756), author of the three‐volume
History of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis as well as his
Itinerarium, an account of his journey to Maine.
St. John de Crèvecoeur, who emigrated from France at age twenty, developed a broader knowledge of the American scene than any other colonial writer. His powers of observation and keen insight provide, in
Letters from an American Farmer, the classic statement of the American dream. He originated the melting‐pot metaphor of America as a place where “individuals of all nations are melted into a new one.” In America an oppressed European could become a new man “from the new life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.”
The riches of colonial literature are still being explored. The slave narrative, an important American genre, is well represented in the colonial period by Olaudah Equiano's prototypic
Interesting Narrative (1789). The spiritual autobiography of the Pennsylvania Quaker Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713–1755) complements the many autobiographical accounts by men. Mary White Rowlandson's 1682 account of her three‐month captivity by Indians during
King Philip's War enjoyed immediate success and remains in print. A 1997 anthology introduced attractive new finds: the 1665 account by Pierre‐Esprit Radisson (c. 1636–1710) of his adoption and acculturation by the Iroquois; the loyalist portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Peter Oliver (1731–1791), first published in 1961; and a 1772 sermon by the Mohegan Samson Occom (1723–1792), in which he addresses “the Indians, my brethren and kindred according to the flesh.”
See also
Bible, The;
Feminism;
Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800;
Literary Criticism;
Protestantism;
Religion.
Bibliography
Early American Literature (journal), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1966–.
Everett Emerson, ed., Major Writers of Early American Literature, 1972.
J.A. Leo Lemay , Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland, 1972.
Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States, 1988, pp. 5–135.
Philip F. Gura , The Study of Colonial American Literature, 1966–1987: A Vade Mecum, William and Mary Quarterly 45 (Apr 1988): 305–41.
William C. Spengemann , A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature, 1994.
Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner, eds., The English Literatures of America, 1997.
Everett Emerson
Early National and Antebellum Eras Literature in the early republic was a means to an end, helping to instigate the revolution and to contain it, instructing and disputing as well as entertaining. Copyright law and other economic factors made authorship less a profession than a vocation or occasional practice.
Political Texts, Science and Nature Writing, Biography and Autobiography.
No strict boundaries separated art from moral or political writing. Indeed, political texts and public documents constitute the early national period's most famous literature, from the wartime pamphlets of Thomas
Paine to the
Declaration of Independence, the
Federalist Papers, and the
Constitution. In creating a new nation and outlining the principles of constitutional
republicanism, these texts and others undertook imaginative burdens as great as any fiction or poetry, giving life to theories of natural law and abstractions like
We the People. The same could be said of the antifederalists, women,
African Americans, and others who highlighted the hypocrisies and exclusions of republican principles. Since, as Michael Warner has observed (
The Letters of the Republic, 1990), the print medium carried with it implicit assumptions about authors’ whiteness and masculinity, many of these interventions questioned the very foundations of the early national culture of letters.
Scientific, nature, and travel writing also addressed these political questions, helping shape national debates about
race and ethnicity,
slavery, and expansion. Thomas
Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), while matter‐of‐factly cataloging the state's natural resources, also contains lengthy discourses on African Americans and Native Americans, setting the terms for scientific
racism in the United States. Territorial expansion underlay two of the period's most important travel narratives, William Bartram's
Travels (1792) and the journals of Lewis and Clark (1814).
Biography and autobiography valorized exemplary lives, as in the overt mythmaking of John Filson's life of Daniel
Boone (1784), celebrating the frontiersman as hero, or Mason Weems's moralizing life of George
Washington (1800). Benjamin
Franklin's equally moralizing
Autobiography (written 1771–1790, published 1818) mirrors contemporary novels in its concern with fictions of the self. Olaudah Equiano's autobiography (1789), another exercise in capitalist self‐fashioning, is the best‐known early example of the slave narrative in English. J. Hector St. John
Crèvecoeur's fictional
Letters from an American Farmer (1782) creates an exemplary American in the title figure; yet as the pastoral bliss of the early letters gives way to descriptions of slavery and frontier paranoia, social and political disruptions shatter neoclassical order.
Novels, Poetry, and Literature of Transcendentalism.
A conservative society suspicious of the power of fiction insisted that novels advertise both their foundation in fact and their morally improving nature. Sentimental and often epistolary, many early American novels utilized seduction plots, warning of the dangers awaiting young women outside the bounds of conventional morality and institutions. Although American novels of this era were not usually commercially successful, some achieved wide popularity, including Hannah Foster's
The Coquette (1797), based on an actual scandal, and Susanna Rowson's
Charlotte Temple (1791), a seduction narrative that functioned as an allegory of national identity and retained a devoted readership for more than a century.
The gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) captured the paranoid 1790s of
yellow fever outbreaks, the Reign of Terror, and the
Alien and Sedition Acts, especially
Wieland (1798),
Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), and
Edgar Huntly (1799). Tabitha Tenney's
Female Quixotism (1801) and Hugh Henry Brackenridge's picaresque
Modern Chivalry (1792–1815) satirized changing mores and social practices (including novel‐reading itself), as did the first American play, Royall Tyler's
The Contrast (1787).
Poetry, the most conservative of early national genres, adapted European neoclassical modes to “native” uses, as in Timothy Dwight's pastoral
Greenfield Hill (1794), Joel Barlow's epic,
The Vision of Columbus (1787), and Sarah Wentworth Morton's long poems on Native American and revolutionary subjects. Americans also explored the limits of eighteenth‐century poetic conventions. Philip Freneau's personal, symbolic nature lyrics introduced romanticism to American poetry. The Massachusetts slave Phillis
Wheatley both embraces and subverts conventional religious and Augustan poetry, commenting subtly on slavery, race, and the revolution in
Poems on Various Subjects (1773).
The 1820s saw the emergence of a literary marketplace, authorship as a viable profession, and calls for a “native” literature. Literary careers became possible, not only for such men as Washington Irving (1783–1859) and James Fenimore
Cooper, but also for women like Lydia Maria
Child and Fanny Fern (Sara Parton). Irving's
Sketch‐Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820) exemplified this transition, packaging genteel nostalgia in an elegant prose style for a middle‐class audience.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson's essay
Nature (1836) ushered in the age of
transcendentalism, as the Concord circle—including Henry David
Thoreau, Margaret
Fuller, Theodore
Parker, and Bronson Alcott—produced such classics as Fuller's
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844) and Thoreau's
Walden (1849). Transcendentalism, rooted in the primacy of the individual's unmediated encounter with nature, insisted on the power of the individual to remake the world in his (or her) own image. Despite the transcendentalists’ generally oppositional politics, their idealism and antimaterialism ironically provided the basis for an informal national philosophy not incompatible with a violent, expanding materialistic society.
The Literature of Westward Expansion and Frontier Adventure.
Much antebellum literature addressed westward expansion and relations with Native Americans—issues that came to a head in the 1820s and 1830s. Long narrative poems like James Eastburn's and Robert Sands's
Yamoyden (1820) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's
Hiawatha (1855), as well as John Augustus Stone's popular
Metamora (1829), memorialized Indians, often condemning conquest morally while simultaneously treating it as inevitable. The histories of William Prescott and Francis
Parkman and the ethnographic writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and others justified European imperialism in the Americas and attempted to delineate a distinctive white American identity out of confrontation with, and appropriation of, Indian culture. Drawing on this newer material as well as the long‐standing conventions of captivity and Indian‐fighting narratives, Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales were only the best‐known of the “frontier romances,” which also included Child's
Hobomok (1824), Catherine Sedgwick's
Hope Leslie (1827), and Robert Montgomery Bird's
Nick of the Woods (1837).
The new popular press thrived on frontier adventure, from the Davy
Crockett almanacs and story papers of the thirties and forties to the first dime novel, Ann S. Stephens's
Malaeska (1860). Eastern urban settings proved popular also, as in the best‐sellers of the radical novelist George Lippard, whose
The Quaker City (1843–1844) exposes the corruption of
Philadelphia's elite. Equally sensationalist was Maria Monk's notorious anti‐Catholic captivity narrative,
Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery (1836).
Sentimental Novels and Social Protest Literature.
Sentimental novels such as Susan Warner's
The Wide, Wide World (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), and Maria Cummins's
The Lamplighter (1854) won popularity in the 1850s. As Jane Tompkins has argued (
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860, 1985), sentimental and domestic fiction used the central values of
family and
religion to encourage radical reforms, including
antislavery and women's rights. Of these novels,
Uncle Tom's Cabin enjoyed the greatest impact, selling an unprecedented million copies and, some argue, helping to precipitate the
Civil War.
Social protest also inspired African‐American literature, especially the slave‐narrative genre, which helped animate the abolitionist movement.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass (1845) perfected the form and galvanized both white and black antislavery activity. Harriet Jacobs's
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) addresses a specifically female audience, using novelistic techniques to dramatize the sexual exploitation of slave women. The 1850s also witnessed a brief flowering of African‐American fiction, such as Harriet Wilson's autobiographical
Our Nig (1859), about northern racism. Similarly, Native American writing began to appear in print, notably the “as‐told‐to”
Life of Black Hawk, the Sauk chief (1833), and the radical writings of William Apess, a Pequot preacher, activist, and autobiographer.
The Canonical Writers and Poets.
Social issues figure more obliquely (though still vitally) in the works of three white men who were subsequently canonized as the preeminent antebellum American writers. Edgar Allan
Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Herman
Melville produced ambivalent, at times tortured examinations of social and moral issues, including race and gender. Poe invented the detective genre with his Auguste Dupin stories, while his tales of madness and psychological terror epitomized the American gothic. Hawthorne's romances offered a subtler strain of the gothic, a genre he described and exemplified in
The Scarlet Letter (1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables (1851). His fiction, often set in colonial
New England, also engages with historical memory. Melville, in his speculative, philosophical novels, as in shorter fiction like
Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) and
Benito Cereno (1855), confronts problems of identity, nation, and
capitalism. After his masterpiece
Moby‐Dick (1851), Melville's style grew increasingly experimental, notably in
The Confidence‐Man (1857). All three writers enjoyed moments of market success, but each also contributed to the myth of romantic authorship, the image of the tormented artist pursuing aesthetic and moral concerns rather than pandering to the marketplace.
The so‐called “schoolroom poets”— Longfellow (1794–1878), William Cullen Bryant (1807–1892), and John Greenleaf Whittier—developed romantic styles that made them popular during their lives and after. From a twentieth‐century perspective, however, the era's most significant poets were Walt
Whitman and Emily
Dickinson. Whitman's sexual frankness and willingness to experiment with form and content achieved notoriety, while the intensely private Dickinson's meditations on sex, death, and nature remained almost completely unknown. Although sometimes reduced to stereotype, the contrast between Dickinson's elliptical but tightly wound lyrics and Whitman's expansive, epic experiments in free verse helped define the range of possibilities for later poets. Much of twentieth‐century poetry is implicit in their work.
See also
Antebellum Era;
Anti‐Catholic Movement;
Bartram, John and William;
Early Republic, Era of the;
Expansionism;
Historiography, American;
Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900;
Indian History and Culture: The Indian in Popular Culture;
Lewis and Clark Expedition;
Literature, Popular;
Printing and Publishing;
Romantic Movement.
Bibliography
F.O. Matthiessen , American Renaissance, 1941.
Richard Slotkin , The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890, 1985.
William L. Andrews , To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro‐American Autobiography, 1760–1865, 1986.
Cathy N. Davidson , Revolution and the Word, 1986.
David S. Reynolds , Beneath the American Renaissance, 1988.
Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia Literary History of The United States, Part II (1810–1865), ed. Terence Martin, 1988.
Dana D. Nelson , The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature 1638–1867, 1993.
Eric Sundquist , To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, 1993.
Michael Moon and Cathy Davidson, eds., Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, 1995.
Christopher Newfield , The Emerson Effect, 1996.
Gary Ashwill
Civil War to World War I American literature in the half‐century from 1865 to 1914 matched the radical changes that transformed U.S. society in these years.
Overview.
This era witnessed the progression from romantic to realist conventions and then the advent of modernism. Throughout the period, poets, dramatists, and, most of all, fiction writers increasingly saw themselves as social critics. Although the
Civil War left a legacy of disillusionment, a forceful sentimental tradition arose in response to the felt loss of national innocence. These five decades produced a powerful progressive literature responding to the social upheavals associated with
urbanization and
industrialization. The era also saw the rise of ethnic and African‐American writing, along with an increasingly critical feminist tradition.
Perhaps the period's principal contribution to world literature was the emergence of the American novel and short story. A few masters stand out, notably Henry
James, Samuel L.
Clemens, and William Dean
Howells. The expatriate James was acknowledged as the consummate artist; Clemens the popular favorite; and Howells the craftsman, astute social observer, and highly influential critic who introduced many new writers.
The period's intermingling of romance, realism, and modernism reveals how rich and varied were its energies. Herman
Melville completed his last work,
Billy Budd, just before his death in 1891. The fireside poets William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier wrote into the 1870s and 1880s, while Walt
Whitman revised and reissued
Leaves of Grass (first published in 1855) for more than thirty years. Three volumes of Emily
Dickinson's poems were published in this period. Other significant poets of the time include John Hay, Sidney Lanier, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Trumbull Stickney, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The era also produced such once‐popular poetic voices as Eugene Field, Emma Lazarus, Edwin Markham, and James Whitcomb Riley. Yet by 1914 the
modernist movement was well under way. T.S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, Robinson Jeffers, and Robert Frost had all published their first poems; Willa
Cather, Gertrude Stein, Ellen Glasgow, and Mary Austin had begun their careers; and Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair
Lewis, and Eugene
O'Neill would soon emerge.
Regional, “Local Color,” and Ethnic Literature.
Like the transcontinental railroad, postbellum American literature was engaged in the general project of national unification. Western writers like Clemens and Bret Hart reached a national audience through prestigious eastern magazines like the
Atlantic Monthly. Sarah Orne Jewett in
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) evoked small‐town life in coastal Maine, and Kate Chopin described Cajun culture in
Bayou Folk (1894). Such “local‐color” writing gratified readers’ appetite for information about the nation's varied regions. Sometimes satirical in tone and cast in dialect, local‐color writing refreshingly supplemented the earnest, pious portrayals of character and morality in conventional literature, such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich's popular
Story of a Bad Boy (1870). Local colorists like George Washington Cable, Edward Eggleston, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Charles Chesnutt introduced regional folkways and vernacular expression. Joel Chandler Harris drew upon African American folk culture in a series of popular works extending from
Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) to
Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1906). ( Pauline Hopkins gave a different idea of racial politics in a series of fictions that included
Contending Forces [1900].) Others, like Chopin in
The Awakening (1899) and Abraham Cahan in
Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), went further, skeptically probing prevailing moral codes and customs.
Social Criticism.
Even at its most critical, however, local color did not achieve the ethical intensity of European critical realists who found an audience in America through Howells's support. Ibsen, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Zola exemplified how writers could exert a social and philosophical claim on educated readers’ imagination. The need for such a critique seemed pressing in the
Gilded Age (the title of an 1873 novel by Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner attacking postwar materialism and vulgarity). An incipient protest literature addressing the social effects of industrialism had already emerged, as in Rebecca Harding Davis's
Life in the Iron Mills (1861) and
John Andross (1874), but the most lasting indictments were Howells's
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and
A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and Frank Norris's
The Octopus (1901), probing such by‐products of industrial capitalism as widening class divisions, the erosion of ethics, and the ravaging of natural resources. Henry Blake Fuller's
The Cliff‐Dwellers (1893) addressed another of industrialization's consequences, the rise of a new class of urban office workers. While the nature writers John Burroughs and John
Muir evoked a preindustrial America and promoted wilderness preservation, the Philadelphian Owen Wister in
The Virginian (1902) implicitly contrasted the physical challenges and moral clarity of ranch life in Wyoming with the urbanizing East, creating in the process an enduring American icon, the strong, silent cowboy hero.
Gilded Age and
Progressive Era writers took their obligations as political and social critics with increasing seriousness. Fictions like John William De Forest's
Honest John Vane (1875) and Henry
Adams's
Democracy (1880) examined the debased level of public life, as did some of the later novels of the American writer Winston Churchill. Howells publicly protested the injustices of the
Haymarket affair prosecutions, while Clemens was among those who denounced U.S. imperialist expansion in the 1890s and later. Helen Hunt Jackson documented the mistreatment of Native Americans in
A Century of Dishonor (1881), while Cable and Albion Tourgée, among whites, and Chesnutt, Simon Griggs, and James Weldon
Johnson, among blacks, dramatized the racial oppression of
African Americans. The feminist Charlotte Perkins
Gilman in her short story
The Yellow Wall‐Paper (1892) and her utopian novel
Herland (1915) portrayed the psychologically crippling effects of gender stereotypes and envisioned a world of equality between the sexes. Hamlin Garland's short‐story collection
Main‐Travelled Roads (1891) evoked the loneliness and cultural barrenness of midwestern rural life, while Harold Frederic's
The Damnation of Theron Ware (1891) portrayed the struggles of a small‐town upstate New York minister confronting social changes and new intellectual currents that threaten his provincial worldview.
Following the example of Jacob Riis's investigative report
How the Other Half Lives (1890), American authors also turned their attention to the underside of urban life, as in Stephen Crane's
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893); Cahan's stories from the Jewish ghetto; and David Graham Phillips's
Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (published posthumously in 1917), exposing urban political corruption and the sexual exploitation of young working women. Robert Herrick's
The Common Lot (1904) and
Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905) probed the unscrupulous behavior of industrialists and urban professionals in an age of cutthroat capitalist competition, the theme also of Theodore
Dreiser's
The Financier (1912) and
The Titan (1914). The most influential reform novels of the era included Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward (1888), a utopian fantasy of a harmonious and equitable social order; Charles M. Sheldon's Social Gospel novel
In His Steps (1896), about a minister who tries to follow Jesus's example in addressing contemporary urban conditions; and Upton
Sinclair's
The Jungle (1906), an exposé of the
Chicago stockyards that inspired the
Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
The Naturalist Movement.
Following the critical ascendancy of realism (a vogue to which the book‐buying public remained cool) came its most important permutation, naturalism. If realist novels posited a choice between two worldviews, naturalist fiction presented a world governed by forces outside the self: Blind chance or determinism rules the individual, the social order, and the cosmos. E.W. Howe's
The Story of a Country Town (1883), an early popular version of determinism, was followed by such works as Crane's naturalistic Civil War novel
The Red Badge of Courage (1895); Norris’
McTeague (1899) and
The Octopus; Dreiser's
Sister Carrie (1900), recounting an amoral young woman's career in Chicago and
New York City; and Edith
Wharton's
The House of Mirth (1905),
Ethan Frome (1911), and
The Custom of the Country (1913), in all of which individuals struggle with events and social forces beyond their control.
American naturalist writers were influenced by such authors as Flaubert and Zola; Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution; and the
laissez‐faire ideology of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. In an era of rapid cultural change, some of these novels, including Crane's
Maggie and Dreiser's
Sister Carrie, received a fiercely negative critical reception and even faced
censorship pressures. The novelist and short‐story writer Jack London also presented a naturalistic philosophy and a deterministic world of struggle and conflict in such books as
The Call of the Wild (1903),
The People of the Abyss (1903),
The Sea–Wolf (1904), the semiautobiographical
Martin Eden (1909), and
The Iron Heel (1907). A gifted and prolific storyteller, London won a worldwide following.
Popular Fiction.
Along with the ubiquitous dime novels, the era's popular literature included sentimental romances and historical fiction, especially books about the
Revolutionary War. Louisa May
Alcott's
Little Women (1868–1869) became a beloved favorite, while Horatio
Alger's popular boys’ stories of city street life, starting with
Ragged Dick (1867), offered a formula for rising from poverty to middle‐class respectability. Detective novels were also popular, especially those of Anne Katharine Green. Other formula fiction included Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan novel (1914) and Gilbert Patten's Frank Merriwell tales about a Yale football hero.
Best‐sellers—the term was coined in the 1890s—frequently sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The foremost example is Lew Wallace's
Ben Hur (1880), but other commercial successes included Edward Noyes Westcott's
David Harum (1898), Charles Major's
When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), Elbert Hubbard's inspirational
A Message to Garcia (1899), Paul Leicester Ford's
Janice Meredith (1899), and Churchill's
Richard Carvel (1899). Mary Johnston's novels idealizing the Confederacy,
The Long Roll (1911) and
Cease Firing (1912), enjoyed a great vogue, especially in the
South. Thomas Dixon's
The Clansman (1912), celebrating the
Ku Klux Klan, led to a revival of the Klan and inspired D.W.
Griffith's notoriously racist 1915 movie
Birth of a Nation. Other best‐selling authors included Irving Bacheller, F. Marion Crawford, Robert W. Chambers, Richard Harding Davis, George Barr McCutcheon, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. The early 1900s also brought to the fore novelists whose popularity would extend well into the century, including Emerson Hough, Harold Bell Wright, Henry Van Dyke, Kathleen Norris, the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Zane Grey, who launched his long career as a Western writer with
Spirit of the Border (1905) and
Riders of the Purple Sage (1912).
Drama and Autobiography.
Despite the continuing popularity of melodramas like
Uncle Tom's Cabin and Augustin Daly's
Under the Gaslight (1867), dramatic literature generally moved toward greater realism and more attention to current social issues in these years. Bronson Howard's
Saratoga (1870) and
Young Mrs. Winthrop (1882) focused on contemporary society, and by 1900 David Belasco's productions were synonymous with new levels of realism. Other playwrights included James Herne, who was supported by leading realists like Howells and Garland; the versatile Clyde Fitch, whose dramas ranged from farces to problem plays to psychological studies; and Edward Sheldon, a prolific dramatist and product of George P. Baker's famous playwriting class at Harvard, who wrote nine plays between 1908 and 1914. Rachel Crothers examined gender relations in several noteworthy pre‐1914 plays.
These years also brought renewed interest in autobiography, a literary form pioneered in America by such varied antebellum figures as Benjamin
Franklin, Davy
Crockett, and Henry David
Thoreau. Ulysses S.
Grant's straightforward
Personal Memoirs (2 vols., 1885–1886) later won praise from Gertrude Stein as a masterpiece of American literature. Not only public figures but also less well‐known individuals now offered their life stories. In part, the impetus came from Frederick
Douglass's 1845 autobiography and other antebellum slave narratives. Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala‐Sa) published her memoirs of an Indian girlhood in the
Atlantic Monthly (1900–1902); Henry Adams's classic
The Education of Henry Adams circulated among friends for several years before its publication in 1918; and Mary Antin's
The Promised Land (1912) helped launch a genre of immigrant writing describing the transformation “from alien to citizen.”
Huckleberry Finn.
The most widely studied novel of this remarkably productive era in American literature, Clemens's
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), set forty years earlier, envisions a dream of freedom and autonomy that, paradoxically, was already anachronistic in Gilded Age America. The wilderness for which Huck sets out in 1845 was fast becoming “sivilized” by 1884. Although the Civil War and the
Emancipation Proclamation cast a different light on Clemens's story of a white boy's friendship with an adult black man, so compelling was the novel's ethical expression of love and
pragmatism, and so deeply did it speak to the possibilities of an American literary language, that the novel stands not only as the major literary achievement of these years but as the font of much modern literature.
See also
Drama;
Feminism;
Folklore;
Journalism;
Literary Criticism;
Literature, Popular;
Magazines;
Poetry;
Regionalism;
Romantic Movement;
Social Darwinism.
Bibliography
Henry F. May , The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Time, 1912–1917, 1959.
Warner Berthoff , The Ferment of Realism, 1965.
Larzer Ziff , The American 1890s, 1966.
Jay Martin , Harvest of Change, 1967.
Eric J. Sundquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays, 1982.
June Howard , Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, 1985.
Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States, part 3 (1865–1910), ed. Martha Banta, 1988, pp. 463–689.
Amy Kaplan , The Social Construction of American Realism, 1988.
Dickson D. Bruce , Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915, rpt. ed. 1992.
Gordon Hutner
Since World War I In the twentieth century, American literature came into its own. Still mindful at century's beginning of their cultural roots in British traditions and literature, American writers by midcentury had rediscovered Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Herman
Melville, Emily
Dickinson, and Walt
Whitman, and produced a literature distinctly and powerfully their own.
Overview.
Even before
World War I, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Ezra
Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and Harriet Monroe had created a new
poetry based in American vernacular and speech rhythms. H.L.
Mencken underlined this fact with his scholarly project
The American Language (1919), while the authentically American voices of Whitman and Mark Twain ( Samuel L.
Clemens) were taken up and stylized in the fiction of Stein, Willa
Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway, and William
Faulkner.
Twentieth‐century American literature not only came of age, but also became many‐voiced, as women and ethnic writers gained public stature. As the examples of Stein, H.D., Cather, Monroe, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore testify, women writers took a greater role in literary culture, as did
African Americans. By the century's close, writers from all of America's ethnic cultures were published in the nation's literatures.
The new directions in the arts of the early twentieth century were urban and international developments. Local and rural experience gave way to life in the city. Cather wrote of immigrants on the Great Plains—but from New York. Hemingway in Paris described fishing in northern Michigan; Frost published his first poems about
New England farm life while in London. Crowded with immigrants, New York and
Chicago were the places where identity was the most plastic and the self could be remade, the story told in Theodore
Dreiser's
Sister Carrie (1900).
Modernism and Social Criticism.
American modernism began in a pre–World War I rebellion against the older generation's culture and politics, evident in Randolph
Bourne's
Youth and Life (1913), Van Wyck Brooks's
America's Coming of Age (1915), and “little magazines” like Harriet Monroe's
Poetry (1912) and Margaret Anderson's
The Little Review (1914). Ford Madox Ford's
Transatlantic Review and Robert McAlmon's
Contact would soon follow. Ezra Pound, writing his own pathbreaking
poetry, found publishers and patrons for modernist writers.
American poets created the modernist style. Experimenting in free verse and breaking with British verse forms and iambic rhythms, they sought to make a reality rather than merely describe or reflect it. This took the form of experiments in capturing moments of complex illumination, which Pound first called “images” and then “vortices” to connote a confluence of energies and recognitions. Such experiments were antinarrative, seeking the spatial gestalt of sudden recognition. Originally expressed in short poems, the same techniques underlay such modern epics as T.S. Eliot's
The Wasteland (1922), Pound's
Cantos (1915–1970), William Carlos Williams's
Spring and All (1922) and
Paterson (1946–1958), and H.D.’s
Trilogy (1944–1946) and
Helen in Egypt (1961).
In the novel and short story, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Jean Toomer, and John Dos Passos produced collages featuring multiple points of view from which narrative omniscience is withdrawn or limited. With narrative itself associated with prewar sentimentality, a new effort to present facts shorn of sentiment underlay the best of American writing in the 1920s. Partly the result of war experiences, Dos Passos's
Three Soldiers (1920), e.e. cummings's
The Enormous Room (1920), Pound's poem sequence
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), and Hemingway's
In Our Time (1925) and
A Farewell to Arms (1929) offered bitter antiheroic views of military life and international politics. Responses ranged from Nick Carraway's moral retreat in Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby (1925) to Jake Barnes's stoic resignation in Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Apart from Cather, writers of the 1920s typically attacked small‐town life as narrow and mean‐spirited. Sinclair
Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930), satirized small‐town life and America's crass boosterism in the best‐selling
Main Street (1920),
Babbitt (1922),
Arrowsmith (1925), and
Elmer Gantry (1927). Influenced by Freud, writers portrayed the family as a source of repression and emotional turmoil, as in Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury (1929). The playwright Eugene
O'Neill's first successes—
The Emperor Jones (1921),
The Hairy Ape (1922), and
Desire under the Elms (1924)—addressed taboo subjects of race and sexuality. O'Neill's major tragedies,
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and the autobiographical
Long Day's Journey into Night (1941), treat the family as the source of personal trauma. In much of this literature, freedom and growth come from leaving the family and the small town for the challenge of the city, as Tom Willard does at the end of Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio (1919).
African‐American Literature.
As African Americans migrated to northern cities seeking jobs and greater social freedom,
New York City's Harlem emerged as a vibrant community of intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians. W.E.B.
Du Bois's
Crisis magazine, published by the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Charles Johnson's
Opportunity, founded by the National
Urban League, provided outlets for creative work by African Americans. James Weldon
Johnson, himself best known for
Autobiography of an Ex‐Colored Man (1912), showcased black writers in his 1922 anthology
The Book of American Negro Poetry.The decade of creativity that emerged from this matrix of talent, prosperity, and patronage, represents a landmark in twentieth‐century American literature. Along with Jean Toomer, author of the memorable and idiosyncratic
Cane (1923), notable
Harlem Renaissance writers included the poets Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Langston
Hughes, whose
Weary Blues appeared in 1926, and the novelists Rudolph Fisher and Nella Larsen, author of
Quicksand (1928) and
Passing (1929). Hughes and Zora Neale
Hurston may be taken as representative in their insistence upon the value of black experience and culture, a view Hughes articulated in
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926). While Hurston published short fiction in the 1920s, her major novels and folk‐culture studies appeared in the 1930s, including her most polished novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Alain Locke's
The New Negro (1925), a collection of poetry, prose, art, and essays representing the strength and accomplishments of black culture, remains a significant point of access to this fertile moment in U.S. literary history.
The 1930s.
With the
stock market crash of 1929 followed by a decade of economic hardship, literary culture moved left. Concern with
social class and disparities of wealth and power, never far from the surface of American literature, became overt in this decade. Many writers joined or supported the
Communist party and many more attended the leftist American writers congresses in New York City in 1935 and 1937. Because of these developments and the proliferation of proletarian writing, the 1930s are often labeled the “red decade.”
Amid widespread
unemployment, the tradition of American naturalism developed by Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Jack London reappeared in novels portraying capitalism's victims, such as Anna Yerzierska's
The Breadgivers (1925), Michael Gold's
Jews without Money (1930), James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–1935), and Henry Roth's
Call It Sleep (1934). In drama, Clifford Odets's
Waiting for Lefty and
Awake and Sing (both 1935) explored the plight of workers, while Maxwell Anderson's
Winterset (1935) dealt with the
Sacco and Vanzetti case. Using devices of modernist collage, John Dos Passos's
U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936) provides a historical panorama of twentieth‐century social history, and in the third volume,
The Big Money (1936), indicts the wealthy and powerful for creating “two nations.” John Steinbeck's Dust Bowl epic,
The Grapes of Wrath, and Lillian Hellman's searing
The Little Foxes appeared in 1939. With Richard
Wright's
Native Son (1940), African‐American literature entered the mainstream. Selected by the
Book of the Month Club, this violent novel sold over 200,000 copies in three weeks.
Southern writers, viewing history as more organic and impervious to change than did northern activists, produced poetry, fiction, and essays in the thirties that would dominate midcentury literary culture. Their conservative manifesto
I'll Take My Stand (1930) included essays by Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. Admirers of modernist poetry, especially Eliot's, these three established “the Fugitives” at Vanderbilt University; in 1939, Ransom founded the influential
Kenyon Review. Along with Cleanth Brooks, these writers helped theorize the idea of the “well wrought” poem that underlay the “new criticism.” Warren continued to write novels and poetry into the 1990s, including the great political novel
All the King's Men (1946), based on the life of Huey
Long. The South's legacy of slaveholding is Faulkner's great theme, especially in his epic novels
Light in August (1932),
Absalom! Absalom! (1936), and
Go Down Moses (1942).
The Post–World War II Decades.
The
Cold War profoundly influenced American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Domestically, the United States enjoyed renewed prosperity, but the
civil rights movement, campus unrest, environmental activism, and anti–
Vietnam War protests affected American culture dramatically in the fifties and sixties. Paul Goodman's
Growing up Absurd (1960), Rachel
Carson's
Silent Spring (1962), Michael Harrington's
The Other America (1962), and Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique (1963) helped initiate the new radicalism. From the 1970s to the century's end, American literature became more ethnically diverse and less susceptible to easy characterization.
Postmodernism offers an umbrella term for the breakup of old distinctions and hierarchies between elite and popular literatures and between once dominant white male writers and a rich blooming of writers from diverse backgrounds. The term also signifies a far‐reaching and radically democratic decentering of authority, of aesthetic standards, and of the notion of fixed truth existing outside language.
These developments originated in the postwar culture of
anticommunism, conformity, and middle‐class malaise, in which literature depicted the moral quandaries of alienated loners. American theater witnessed such productions as Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman (1949), Lorraine Hansberry's
A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Edward Albee's
A Zoo Story (1959) and
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). These years saw the publication of J.D. Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Vladimir Nabokov's transgressive novel,
Lolita (1958). Work by “the Beats” included Allen Ginsberg's
Howl and Other Poems (1957), Jack Kerouac's
On the Road (1957), and William Burroughs's
Naked Lunch (1959) as well as the poetry of Diane DiPrima, LeRoi Jones, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. John
Updike published the first of his Rabbit tetrology,
Rabbit, Run (1960), while southerners Truman Capote, William Styron, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy extended the heritage of Faulkner. Jewish writers emerged at the forefront of American writing at this time, as Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Saul
Bellow began their careers. Ralph
Ellison and James
Baldwin were characteristic of the era in presenting portraits of alienated individuals while offering a more psychologically complex portrait of black life than did Wright in
Native Son. Ellison's
Invisible Man (1952), winner of the National Book Award, is often ranked as the most important novel of the post–World War II era.
A new generation of poets that included Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, and Adrienne Rich emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, producing well‐made formal poems indebted to Eliot and the New Criticism. But learned formalism soon gave way to looser, more “confessional” poetry in the work of Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. Acknowledging Bishop's influence in
North and South (1946) and
Poems (1956), Lowell himself developed a more personal style in
Life Studies (1959). New directions could also be found in the poetry of the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley; the San Francisco and Beat poets; and the experiments of the New York poets John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, all represented in Donald Allen's watershed anthology
The New American Poetry (1960). Subsequently, the Language poets Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejinian built on the traditions of Pound and Ashbery while James Merrill displayed brilliant formal artistry in his epic
The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). The influences of Whitman and William Carlos Williams could be seen in the visionary poetry of James Wright and Philip Levine, while the southern poet Charles Wright paid homage to Emily
Dickinson.
The Late Twentieth Century.
The twentieth‐century's concluding decades also saw a remarkable flourishing of fiction—a fiction marked by a paranoid sensibility rooted in the perception that social structures, public policy, and perhaps even history itself are conspiracies against the self. Indebted to
Invisible Man, this line of satire and dissent included Joseph Heller's
Catch‐22 (1960); Kurt Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle (1963) and
Slaughterhouse‐Five (1969); Ken Kesey's
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962); Thomas Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Diane Johnson's
The Shadow Knows (1974); and Don DeLillo's
White Noise (1985),
The Names (1989), and
Libra (1991). The satiric and revisionary impulse extended to the literary medium itself in the novels of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, William Gass, and Robert Coover; and to historical fiction in Pynchon's
V. (1963) and
Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Styron's
Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), E.L. Doctorow's
Book of Daniel (1971), and Robert Coover's
The Public Burning (1977); and the New Journalism of Mailer's
Armies of the Night (1968) and Joan Didion's
Slouching toward Bethlehem (1968) and
The White Album (1979). The compelling novels of Joyce Carol Oates showed the emotional impact on the defenseless of modern culture's violence and lack of center. Ishmael Reed's novels
Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and
Flight to Canada (1976) treat history as an instrument of white oppression. Indeed, in these years history writing became a battleground for identity formation, not only of individuals, but of groups and the nation itself. In stories like
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), Ernest Gaines's
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), and Alice Walker's
Meridian (1976), African Americans wrote their history into literature. Drawing energy from the civil rights and black‐power movements, writers and artists formed the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. Under the leadership of Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), this movement promoted works of political engagement accessible to the black masses. Its influence continued in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove; the plays of Ntozake Shange and August Wilson; and the novels of Charles Johnson, David Bradley, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, and Toni
Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature after publication of her fifth novel,
Beloved (1987).
Influenced by the antiwar and civil rights movements, fiction and poetry by women—already central to American literary history—addressed issues of
gender in society. Adrienne Rich's
Diving into the Wreck (1973), a landmark in feminist poetry, marked a turn from her earlier formalism and paved the way for Jorie Graham, Carolyn Forché, and others. In such novels as Joanna Russ's
The Female Man (1986), Marge Piercy's
Woman on the Edge of Time (1977), and Ursula K. Le Guin's
Left Hand of Darkness (1971), women writers employed science fiction to imagine alternate worlds, while Anne Tyler, Anne Beattie, and Marilynne Robinson created haunting pictures of domestic space. Maxine Hong Kingston's
The Woman Warrior (1976) and
China Men (1980), Fae Myenne Ng's
Bone (1993), and David Hwang's
M. Butterfly (1988), meanwhile, explored
Asian Americans’ experiences.
Carson's
Silent Spring revived environmental writing, as in the work of Gary Snyder, Ernest Callenbach, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez. The consciousness of the natural world at the center of Native American culture found expression in N. Scott Momaday's
House Made of Dawn (1968) and
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Leslie Marmion Silko's
Ceremony (1977), and Louise Erdrich's novel
Love Medicine (1984) and
Jacklight (1984), a book of poems. James Welch's extraordinary
Fool's Crow (1986), narrated from the point of view of Montana's Blackfeet tribe, conveys the coherence of the natural and tribal world.
Attempts to sum up the nation's history as the twentieth century ended included Updike's
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) and
Rabbit at Rest (1994), Steven Milhauser's
Martin Dressler (1996), Paul Auster's
Mr. Vertigo (1994), Roth's
American Pastoral (1997), DeLillo's
Underworld (1997), Pynchon's
Mason and Dixon (1997), and Robert Stone's
Damascus Gate (1998). In the era of the world wide web, writers of hypertext used the new technology to create an interactive literature. Indeed, like the little magazines of Modernism, the
Internet could become the medium of literary culture in the twenty‐first century.
See also
Environmentalism;
Immigration;
Indian History and Culture: From 1900 to 1950;
Indian History and Culture: Since 1950;
Literature, Popular;
Modernist Culture;
New Deal Era, The;
Post–Cold War Era;
Twenties, The;
Urbanization;
World War II.
Bibliography
Hugh Kenner , The Pound Era, 1971.
Tony Tanner , City of Words: American Fiction 1950–70, 1971.
Malcolm Bradbury and Ames McFarlane, eds., Modernism, 1976.
James B. Breslin , From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945–65, 1984.
Linda Hutcheon , A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988.
Thomas H. Schaub , American Fiction in The Cold War, 1991.
Barbara Foley , Radical Representations, 1993.
Jay Parini, ed., The Columbia History of American Poetry, 1993.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1997.
Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds., Postmodern American Fiction, 1998.
Paul Lauter, ed., The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2, 3d ed., 1998.
Thomas H. Schaub
