American literature.

ROLCAM · Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 1:14 pm Post subject: American literature.

American literature cannot be captured in a simple definition. It reflects the many religious, historical, and cultural traditions of the American people, one of the world's most varied populations. It includes poetry, fiction, drama, and other kinds of writing by authors in what is now the United States. It also includes nonwritten material, such as the oral literature of the American Indians and folk tales and legends. In addition, American literature includes accounts of America written by immigrants and visitors from other countries, as well as works by American writers who spent some or all of their lives abroad.

This article discusses the literature of what is now the United States. For information on the literature of Canada and Latin America, see the articles CANADIAN LITERATURE and LATIN-AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Beginnings of American literature

American literature begins with the legends, myths, and poetry of the American Indians, the first people to live in what is now the United States. Indian legends included stories about the origin of the world, the histories of various tribes, and tales of tribal heroes. With rare exceptions, this oral literature was not written down until the 1800's.

The earliest writing in America consisted of the journals and reports of European explorers and missionaries. These early authors left a rich literature describing their encounters with new lands and new civilizations. They publicized their adventures, described the New World, and tried to attract settlers in works that sometimes mixed facts with propaganda.

Colonial literature (1608-1764)

Colonists from England and other European countries began settling along the eastern coast of North America in the early 1600's and created the first American colonial literature. The colonies in Virginia and New England produced the most important writings in the 1600's. In the 1700's, Philadelphia emerged as the literary center of the American Colonies.

Virginia. Captain John Smith wrote what is regarded as the first American book, A True Relation of ... Virginia (1608). It describes how he and other colonists established the first permanent English settlement in America at Jamestown, Va., in 1607. Smith told a version of the famous story of Pocahontas in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). The story claims that Pocahontas, the daughter of an Indian chief, saved Smith's life when her father was about to have him killed.

In The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), historian Robert Beverley wrote about the tragic destruction of the American Indians. To Beverley, the Indians represented possibilities for happiness, innocence, harmony, and freedom. William Byrd II, a Virginia planter, told about a 1728 surveying expedition in The History of the Dividing Line (published in 1841). The "line" divides the orderly society of Virginia from the less polished settlers of North Carolina.

New England. In 1620, the Pilgrims founded Plymouth Colony, the second permanent English settlement in America. Many Pilgrims belonged to a group of English Protestants called Puritans, who were followers of the religious reformer John Calvin. The Puritans faced persecution in England and came to America mainly to seek refuge where they could practice their religion. The Puritans were an intensely intellectual people. Soon after arriving, they began founding schools and colleges and writing and printing books. They wrote histories, sermons and other religious writings, and poetry.

Histories. The Puritans recorded their own history out of a desire to communicate with fellow believers in England, to attract new colonists, and to justify their bold move to a new country. In their histories, the Puritans portrayed their successes as evidence of God's favor and their hardships as signs of God's disapproval.

William Bradford, the second governor of Plymouth Colony, told the story of the colony in Of Plimoth Plantation (written between 1630 and 1651 and published in 1856 as History of Plymouth Plantation).

Cotton Mather was the greatest of the Puritan historians. He wrote more than 400 works on many subjects, including a defense of the witchcraft trials of the 1690's in Salem, Mass. But he poured his heart into Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), a religious history of New England that upholds traditional Puritan beliefs.

Religious writings. The Puritans based their religion on constant study of the Bible. Sermons began with a passage from the Bible, followed by an analysis of its meaning, and then its application to personal and community life. The greatest Puritan preacher and theologian was Jonathan Edwards. He wrote learned essays reformulating traditional Calvinist doctrines, but also defending them. Edwards' most important book is Freedom of Will (1754). In it, he defended the doctrine of predestination, the idea that God has chosen certain souls to be saved.

Poetry. Most critics today rate Edward Taylor as the best of the Puritan poets. A clergyman, Taylor composed a series of meditative poems on Scripture readings. He intended the poems to prepare his mind to preach and to celebrate Communion. His verse followed the learned style of the English metaphysical poets of the 1600's. Like them, he mingled everyday words and incidents with Biblical language and complex metaphors. Taylor's poems were not discovered until 1937 and not published until 1939.

Although life as a settler was hard, Anne Bradstreet found time to write poetry, chiefly for her father and husband. Her brother-in-law had her work printed in London as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), the first volume of American poetry ever published. The resulting publicity made Bradstreet more conscious of her craftsmanship. She began experimenting with meter, imagery, structure, and theme. Several Poems (1678), a revised second edition, was published after her death. It includes her best poem, "Contemplations," a nature poem on the briefness of human life.

Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom (1662) was the most popular poem of colonial times. But the poem's jingling meter and threatening theme--about sinners being sentenced to hell on Judgment Day--seem quaint today.

Philadelphia was the largest city in the American Colonies by 1710. It replaced Virginia and New England as the cultural center of the emerging nation.

During the 1700's, a greater number of people learned to read, and a growing press served new literary tastes. Literature addressed such interests as politics and science. The essay, satire, and novel became important literary forms.

The publisher, statesman, and scientist Benjamin Franklin helped make Philadelphia a center of intellectual life. His Autobiography tells the story of how he ran away from Boston to Philadelphia at the age of 17. His rise from "rags to riches" through hard work and self-improvement became a model for American success. Franklin's writings emphasized practical intelligence and material success, balanced by charity and public service. His worldliness differed greatly from the earnest spirituality of the Puritans. Franklin's witty and often satiric proverbs made Poor Richard's Almanac, published yearly from 1733 to 1758, one of his most popular publications.

The revolutionary period (1765-1787)

During the 1760's, a movement to end British rule in the American Colonies began to gain strength. The United States became an independent nation by winning the Revolutionary War in America (1775-1783). Much of the literature of this period addressed issues relating to American independence.

Thomas Paine, a poor and largely self-taught Englishman, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1774. He soon became famous for his fiery essays in support of the American patriots. His pamphlet Common Sense (1776) called for complete independence from Great Britain. In a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis (1776-1783), he encouraged the rebels to persist during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War.

The French-born essayist Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur, also an immigrant to America, helped the colonists think of themselves as Americans rather than Europeans. One of the letters in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) begins with the question "What is an American?" Crevecoeur saw America as a new land where individuals could throw off old prejudices, suffocating social customs, and tyrannical government.

Like many writers of the 1700's, Franklin, Paine, and Crevecoeur wrote in dignified, but plain and clear, prose. This style reached its peak in the ringing eloquence of the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson. The same type of writing appears in the sober language of the Constitution of the United States, much of which was drafted by Gouverneur Morris. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay used this clear style in The Federalist (1787-1788), a series of public letters that persuaded New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution.

Literature of a young nation (1788-1830)

In the early years of United States independence, many American writers still patterned their writing after Europe's latest literary styles and forms. Gradually, however, American literature began to reflect American experiences.

The most successful American writer of the early 1800's was Washington Irving. He rose to fame with humorous and satiric writing about New York City and its past in the magazine Salmagundi (1807-1808) and in a book, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809). The book is also called Knickerbocker's History of New York because Irving wrote it under the name Diedrich Knickerbocker. In The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), Irving combined the style of the essay and the sketch to create the first short stories in American literature. The book includes "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," two of Irving's most famous tales. In "Rip Van Winkle," the title character awakens from a 20-year sleep to find everything changed by the Revolutionary War. Irving's doubts about American independence, his hostility toward New England culture, and his desire to maintain cultural ties with England run through all his early writing.

The poet William Cullen Bryant adapted the style of English romantic poetry to describe the American landscape and to find moral significance in its beauty. Such poems as "Thanatopsis" (1817), "To a Waterfowl" (1818), and "To the Fringed Gentian" (1832) reflect Bryant's admiration of nature.

The Era of Expansion (1831-1870)

During the mid-1800's, the United States gained control of Texas, California, Oregon, and other Western lands. By the 1850's, the nation stretched from coast to coast. Americans moved westward by the thousands. The Indians who occupied many of these lands were forced to surrender their claims and to resettle on reservations. During this period, many American writers glorified the frontier or praised the beauty of nature. Much American literature reflected the optimism of a rapidly growing nation. But other American literature focused on the country's problems, including slavery. In 1861, the Civil War broke out between the North and South chiefly over this issue. The North won the war in 1865, and slavery was soon outlawed throughout the United States.

Two main forms of fiction were practiced by American writers in the mid-1800's: (1) the sentimental novel and (2) the romance. Other important literary forms included nonfiction prose and poetry.

The sentimental novel, which had been developed by English author Samuel Richardson in the mid-1700's, became immensely popular in the United States in the mid-1800's. This type of novel emphasized feelings and such values as religious faith, moral virtue, and family closeness. Its stress on traditional values appealed to many people during a period of rapid social and political change.

The sentimental novel also urged reform. It became the means for rousing concern about the plight of black slaves, poor people, and other unfortunate members of society. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-1852), a powerful description of the evils of slavery, became a best seller. It combined an exciting plot, memorable characters, stirring appeals to the emotions, and humor. Stage adaptations of the book also drew large audiences.

Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women (1868-1869) was another best-selling sentimental novel. Based loosely on the author's own life, it tells the story of four sisters growing up. The story centers on the girls' home and personal life. Two of the sisters fall in love, while Jo, the heroine, develops a career as a writer.

The romance. Most people use the term novel to refer to any long fictional story in prose. Critics of the 1800's, however, distinguished a novel from a romance. A romance is a long work of fiction that is less realistic than a novel. Instead of everyday events, a romance describes exciting adventures or strange events. Writers often use the romance to explore dark passions or to examine the problem of evil.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote historical romances that explored the moral uncertainties of Americans' push westward. In Cooper's romances, such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841), the beauty and majesty of nature inspire a nearly religious feeling of awe. But civilization intrudes, and settlers turn the wilderness into property that they selfishly or thoughtlessly misuse.

Nathaniel Hawthorne used the romance to study the depths of human nature. Many of his romances show the psychological effects of the Puritan focus on sin and evil. The Scarlet Letter (1850), set in Puritan New England, dramatizes the suffering caused by the concealment of sin.

Most critics consider the greatest American romance to be Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Most of the story is set on a whaling ship. It describes the hunt for Moby Dick, a fierce white whale. Ahab, the ship's captain, has lost his leg in an earlier encounter with Moby Dick and is determined to kill the whale. Ahab eventually loses his life in the pursuit. On a symbolic level, the book describes one man's struggle against fate.

A type of romance called the Gothic novel influenced the American poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe. The Gothic novel featured exotic settings and mysterious or supernatural happenings. These novels were called Gothic because they often took place in gloomy medieval castles. Poe adapted these elements in shortened form in the Gothic horror story. He filled his powerful tales with decaying castles, forbidden passions, and guilt-ridden and insane criminals. With "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Poe invented the modern detective story.

Nonfiction prose. During the 1830's and 1840's, a literary and philosophical movement called transcendentalism developed in New England. The transcendentalists believed that God was present in nature. They also believed that human beings intuitively know what is true, and so they stressed self-reliance and individuality. The transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau; George Ripley; Margaret Fuller; and Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott's father.

Emerson was the leader of the movement. He kept a journal in which he recorded incidents, ideas, and reactions to his wide reading. Emerson drew on his journal in such essays as Nature (1836) and "Self-Reliance" (1841), achieving a prose style that was personal and conversational.

Emerson caught the mood of Americans at the time, a buoyant optimism and sense that the United States was an exciting new beginning in human history. He urged Americans to be independent thinkers and to study life directly. Emerson declared that individuals had access to the eternal and ideal truths of nature. He therefore urged Americans to trust their own creative instincts and not look to Europe for models.

In Walden (1854), Thoreau described his experiences living close to nature. The book tells how he built a cabin in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts and lived there alone. He read, entertained visitors, worked the land for his food, and recorded his observations in journals. Thoreau's style shows his sensitive response to the root meanings, sounds, images, and nuances of words.

In 1838, Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery and fled North. During the early 1840's, he joined the abolitionists. His fiery attacks on slavery made him a famous speaker. In the first edition of his autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Douglass vividly describes his life as a slave.

Poetry. During the 1800's, the most famous American poets were William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They were called the "Fireside Poets" or the "Schoolroom Poets" because their works were most often read "by the fireside" at home or in school in anthologies (collections of literary works). Like the sentimental novelists, these poets concerned themselves with feelings and called for social reform.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote haunting, often mournful poems. "The Raven" (1845) and "Annabel Lee" (1849) express despair over the death of a woman. Poe's poetry did not make an immediate impact on American poets. But he gained a great following in Europe after two important French poets, Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme, praised and translated his work. Influenced by Poe, they in turn inspired several modern American poets, including T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were the two greatest American poets of the 1800's. Whitman took inspiration from Emerson's call for a self-confident American literature. He expressed the variety of American life in long lines that caught the flow of operatic singing. His verse often takes the form of rhythmic lists. It sprawls, seeming improvised. But Whitman also packed his poems with vivid images and memorable phrases. He wrote in free verse, a style of poetry that avoids regular meter and rhyme. Whitman published the first edition of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, in 1855. Five more enlarged and revised editions of the collection appeared between 1856 and 1882. Leaves of Grass describes the best and worst of American life, from exuberant democracy to suffering slaves. The longest poem in the collection, "Song of Myself," glorifies a spiritual life grounded in the body and everyday life.

Dickinson wrote more than 1,700 short, puzzling poems in the mid-1800's. Her subjects were love, death, nature, and immortality. Only 11 of Dickinson's poems were printed in her lifetime. After an accurate, complete edition of her poems appeared in 1955, Dickinson's reputation and influence rapidly grew. Critics admired her precise observations, her complex and unexpected images, and her questioning of established religion and authority.

The Age of Realism (1871-1913)

The Civil War marked a dramatic change in American life. The war ended slavery, but it left the deeper problem of race relations. After the conflict, the United States turned its energies to economic concerns. Machines replaced hand labor as the chief means of manufacturing, and industry grew enormously. The new business activity centered in cities, and people moved to them in huge numbers. While some people made fortunes in business, others lived in poverty.

Realists. Many American writers of the late 1800's were inspired by an international literary movement called realism. Realism was in part a revolt against romanticism and its idealized portrayal of life. The realists sought to show life as it is. Realism encouraged writers to examine the problems and conditions around them and to use the language of ordinary people, including dialects. In this way, it encouraged the emergence of a distinctively American literature.

The realists explored the new economic conditions and often called for social reforms. The American dream of "rags to riches" success was captured in popular novels by Horatio Alger. But the American realists focused on the harsh underside of this dream. They feared that success brought greed, materialism, and corruption.

William Dean Howells, an influential magazine editor, vigorously argued for realism against romanticism and sentimentalism. In such novels as The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), he explored the impact of commercial success and failure.

Many of the realists focused on particular regions of the United States. Bret Harte portrayed the West of the gold rush in such short stories as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869). Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) shows a rural New England left behind by economic development.

Early Southern realists included George Washington Cable and Joel Chandler Harris. Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) portrays the tragic clash of races and cultures in Louisiana. Harris' Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881) and later collections of stories were immensely popular. They retell, in dialect, black folklore and stories. The black writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) is also a collection of folk tales in dialect.

Naturalists were the most extreme and pessimistic realists. Unlike the realists, the naturalists believed that people could not make moral choices. They showed their characters as completely controlled by economic, social, or biological forces.

Hamlin Garland wrote bitterly of the hardships of Midwestern farmers in Main-Travelled Roads (1891). Frank Norris described the struggle of California farmers against the powerful railroads in The Octopus (1901). Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) exposed unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry and helped bring about federal regulation.

In such stories as "The Open Boat" (1897) and "The Blue Hotel" (1898), Stephen Crane stressed the need for courage and generosity in a universe indifferent to human life. His most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), shows a young soldier in the Civil War, wandering in a state of shock and confusion through scenes of battle.

Theodore Dreiser was the leading American naturalist. His Sister Carrie traces a young woman's rise to success and social prominence despite her violation of moral codes. Her fate contrasts with her first lover's decline into poverty and suicide. Although Sister Carrie was printed in 1900, the publisher refused to advertise or distribute the book because his wife thought it lacked a sense of right and wrong. Another publisher issued it in 1912.

Mark Twain and Henry James are considered by critics as the two greatest American novelists of the late 1800's. Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) describes the adventures of a clever and mischievous boy and his friend Huck Finn. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) continues the story. It narrates the adventures of Huck and the runaway slave Jim as they float down the Mississippi River on a raft. In this book, Twain contrasts nature--where a white boy and a black man can become friends--with the hypocrisy of civilization along the shore. Twain also satirized the styles of writing that dominated earlier American literature.

Henry James left the United States in his 30's and settled in England. In his study of Hawthorne (1879), he argued that the lack of a rich cultural tradition made American novels thin and abstract. James wrote novels of manners, which first appeared in England in the late 1700's. Novels of manners depict realistic characters and scenes and describe the customs of a particular social class. In many of James's works, American characters travel to Europe, where their innocence and integrity clash with a culture that is attractive but sometimes corrupt. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), a young American discovers too late the immorality of her husband, an American who has immigrated to Italy. James's style grew more complex in later novels. He traced with increasing detail the psychological and moral problems of his intelligent and self-conscious characters.

Women writers. Kate Chopin powerfully portrayed a woman's psychological and sexual development in The Awakening (1899). However, the hostile reaction to the novel ended Chopin's career.

Edith Wharton was a close friend of James's. Like him, she wrote novels of manners. But many of them have American, instead of European, settings. Wharton became known for her keen moral and psychological examination of characters. The House of Mirth (1905) exposes the selfishness and materialism of upper-class society in New York City.

Nonfiction writers also flourished in the United States after the Civil War. The philosopher William James, brother of Henry James, wrote powerfully on many subjects, including religion and psychology. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James invented the phrase stream-of-consciousness and thus sparked the development of a new fictional technique. In this technique, the writer tracks the shifting feelings and thoughts flowing through the mind of a character.

The economist Thorstein Veblen explored social and economic issues with biting satire in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In The Story of My Life (1903), Helen Keller told how she had been helped to overcome blindness and deafness. Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull House (1912) tells of her work among Chicago's Italian, Greek, Russian, and other immigrants. As settlement in the West became more widespread, many Americans wanted to preserve the unspoiled wilderness. In The Mountains of California (1894) and other books, the naturalist John Muir described the American wilderness as God's temple and attacked threats to its preservation.

One of the most notable nonfiction prose writers of this period was the historian Henry Adams. In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed in 1907, published in 1918), Adams contrasted the power of religion in the Middle Ages with the power of science in the modern world.

Two prominent black leaders disagreed on the best course for black advancement. In his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), educator Booker T. Washington urged blacks to temporarily suspend their demands for equal rights in exchange for vocational education and jobs. He predicted that blacks would achieve equal rights once they gained economic power. But historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois challenged what he regarded as Washington's surrender of rights for economic gain. Du Bois refused all compromises. He insisted that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."

The world wars and depression (1914-1945)

In 1914, World War I broke out in Europe. In 1917, the United States entered the war against Germany, which was defeated in 1918. After the war, the United States economy boomed. But prosperity did not last. A stock market crash in 1929 led to the Great Depression, a deep economic slump in the 1930's.

In 1939, World War II began in Europe. The United States fought in the war from 1941 to 1945 and played an important role in defeating Germany and Japan.

About the time of World War I, an international artistic movement called modernism emerged in Europe. Modernist artists believed that the traditional social, religious, and political order had broken down. They felt that realism could not adequately describe how greatly modern life differed from the past. As a result, they sought stylistic innovations that could better portray new realities.

The American writers who lived in Europe around the time of World War I made important contributions to modernism. Their influence extended to writers in the United States. The Great Depression led some writers of the period to focus on social or economic issues.

Modernist poetry leaves out the explanations and narrative connections that provide unity and clarity in traditional writing. It mixes everyday language with elegant phrases and short quotations from earlier poems. Modernist poets placed contradictory feelings and events side by side to evoke the disconnectedness of modern life.

Modernism was influenced by a poetic movement called imagism, which lasted from 1908 to 1917. Imagist poetry was characterized by precise images and a spareness of expression. The most important imagist poets were Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Hilda Doolittle, who wrote under the initials H. D.

T. S. Eliot, one of the first modernists, moved to London in 1914. There, he became friends with Pound, who had already settled in Europe. Together, Eliot and Pound discovered and absorbed a wide range of poetic traditions. They developed many of the features of modernist poetry and made them well known.

Eliot mastered the modernist style in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). His long poem The Waste Land (1922) created an uproar. This complex, pessimistic reflection on the emptiness of modern life seemed a masterpiece to some but bewildering to others. Eliot gradually gained a widespread influence in modern poetry. In many critical essays, he redefined the way people thought about literature.

Pound's long poem Cantos, published in several installments from 1925 to 1968, reflects on poetry and the course of European and American history. Pound was also important as a critic, vigorously promoting a wide range of ancient and modern poets.

Several important modernist poets emerged in the United States. Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930) weaves American images and themes, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, into a visionary modernist poem. Wallace Stevens's philosophical poems explore the relation of imagination to reality.

A group of Southern poets used the modernist style to encourage the preservation of traditional Southern culture. These poets included Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. They were called the Fugitives because of their contributions to the poetry magazine The Fugitive, published from 1922 to 1925.

William Carlos Williams celebrated everyday objects and experiences in short poems and an epic, Paterson (1946-1958). He favored a clean, direct style that would capture the individuality of the subject matter. E. E. Cummings experimented with the physical form of poems, particularly punctuation, capitalization, and spacing on the page.

Realist poetry. Some poets of the early and mid-1900's practiced realism rather than modernism. Edwin Arlington Robinson's best poems are realist portraits of bleak and wasted lives in a New England village. In Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), the now-dead inhabitants of an imaginary Midwestern town tell their life stories. Vachel Lindsay used strong, chantlike rhythms in such poems as "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" (1913) and "The Congo" (1914). Carl Sandburg was influenced by Whitman in his use of plain, everyday language. He aimed to help readers understand the lives of common people. Robinson Jeffers undertook such themes as human corruption and industrial society's destruction of nature.

The poems of Robert Frost, such as "Mending Wall" (1914) and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1923), are simple and readable on the surface. But they reveal complex feelings, often through subtle irony and dry wit. Frost expressed in ordinary language the puzzling hints of doubt and uncertainty that haunt everyday incidents. These feelings connect him to modernism, despite his traditional meter, rhyme, and verse forms.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was perhaps the first black American to achieve national recognition as a writer of both poetry and fiction. Many of his poems use standard English and traditional meter, but he achieved greater fame for his portraits in dialect of black life in the South.

The Lost Generation. A number of writers joined the flourishing arts community in Paris after World War I. Many of these newcomers to Paris gathered around the novelist and critic Gertrude Stein, who had settled there before the war. She described these disillusioned writers as a "lost generation." Her experiments with prose rhythm, fractured sentence structure, and disconnected narrative were challenging and influential.

Two of the most important writers of the Lost Generation were Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) describes these uprooted Americans in a desperate search for something to believe in after the destruction caused by the war. In short stories that some critics still consider his finest work, Hemingway crafted a bare, blunt prose that sought to clear away the emptiness of old ideas and values. His prose style has inspired many imitators.

Fitzgerald focused on American life in the Roaring Twenties, also called the Jazz Age. In short stories and in such novels as The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), he showed how the values of the American dream had been corrupted by materialism and class divisions. Fitzgerald's strong visual sense and way of composing a story into scenes showed the influence of early motion pictures.

Modernist fiction. Modernism led writers of fiction to reexamine the techniques of storytelling. Writers began to strip away descriptions of scenes and characters, explanations, direct statements of theme, and summaries of the plot. A few writers experimented with prose styles as fragmented and difficult as some modern poetry.

Some critics regard William Faulkner as the greatest American novelist of the 1900's. Faulkner set most of his novels, such as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), in the imaginary Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. He saw slavery and racism as the great sins haunting Southern history. He believed the South fought heroically in the Civil War but for an evil cause. Faulkner's Southerners live with this heritage of guilt and useless, misguided nobility. Faulkner absorbed all the techniques of modernist storytelling. His style is symbolic, lyric, and sometimes eloquent. He evoked the contradictory feelings of his characters through fragmented and difficult plots. Faulkner often employed the stream-of-consciousness technique.

The Harlem Renaissance. During the early 1900's, particularly in the 1920's, black literature began to flourish in Harlem, a district of New York City. This movement became known as the Harlem Renaissance. It was also called the New Negro after the title of an anthology collected by educator and writer Alain Locke. The major writers of the Harlem Renaissance were Sterling A. Brown, Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer.

Johnson's God's Trombones (1927) consists of seven black sermons set in verse. His poetry's dramatic and musical qualities also reflect his experience writing songs for the musical theater. McKay was one of the most powerful black poets. He began with poems in dialect. Later, he wrote highly formal but emotional verse, often on explosive topics. Hughes made a deliberate effort to bring the rhythms of African American music into poetry. Brown used dialect in subtly varied ways both to protest against racial prejudice and to express pride in the distinctive cultural tradition of African Americans. Cullen was mainly a lyric poet, but he sometimes used verse to protest racism.

Black prose writers also flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer's Cane (1923) is a sophisticated mixture of short stories, sketches, poetry, and a play. Hurston collected African American folk tales and became well known as a skilled oral storyteller. Her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), traces a black woman's steady growth in insight and spiritual strength. Her characters are vivid, realistic mixtures of strength and weakness. Locke wrote several nonfiction works on African American culture.

Satirists. Sinclair Lewis' novel Main Street (1920) is a biting satire on small-town life in the early 1900's. Babbitt (1922) mocks the businessmen of such communities, ridiculing their civic boosterism and their equation of "progress" with real estate development. In 1930, Lewis became the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize for literature.

The sometimes savagely critical journalism of H. L. Mencken also satirized American life. Mencken, whose articles were collected in a six-volume series titled Prejudices (1919-1927), voiced his disgust with middle-class life and values. In The American Language (1919, with several later editions), he described and praised the American version of English.

Realist fiction. In O Pioneers! (1913) and My antonia (1918), Willa Cather described frontier life in Nebraska. Each story in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) explores, from a psychological viewpoint, a different personality in a small Ohio town. Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927; published first as two books in 1924 and 1925 in Norway) concerns Norwegian immigrants in the Midwest. William Saroyan's novels portray the Armenian-American community in Fresno, California. Thomas Wolfe studied American morals and values in four huge, poetic novels. Each novel, beginning with Look Homeward, Angel (1929), is based on Wolfe's own life. James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan series (1932-1935) describes the harsh life of working-class people in Chicago. One of the most powerful realist novels is John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which depicts the sufferings of Dust Bowl farmers who migrate from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. The black writer Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) tells the story of a poor young black man driven to brutal violence by the hatred and prejudice he meets in a white world.

During the 1920's and 1930's, many writers and critics debated the relation between literature and social or political change. Particularly because of the depression, many writers felt a responsibility to address economic and social problems. These authors often used journalistic techniques to educate a wide audience about needed reforms. Other writers, such as John Dos Passos, experimented with new forms and styles. In his trilogy The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)--published together as U.S.A. in 1938--Dos Passos aimed to portray American society fully and realistically. His novels include what he called Newsreels, which use newspaper headlines, words from popular songs, and advertisements to surround characters and action.

Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered the "hard-boiled" detective novel during the 1930's. The hard-boiled hero is usually a tough, streetwise private detective who sometimes uses illegal methods to solve crimes.

Drama. Most American plays of the 1700's and 1800's were sentimental comedies or melodramatic tragedies. Eugene O'Neill broke this tradition in the 1920's. Early in his career, he created highly realistic plays. He wrote about the criminals, homeless, alcoholics, laborers, artists, and radicals he had encountered in several years of drifting. These characters spoke in crude, slangy, but lively language. Gradually, O'Neill's plays grew longer, and he experimented more boldly with artistic techniques. He moved toward a more symbolic, stylized theater that could express his characters' inner emotions. He turned toward autobiographical material for his final plays, such as Long Day's Journey into Night (written from 1939 to 1941 and first performed in 1956) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (written from 1941 to 1943 and first performed in 1957).

During the 1930's, vigorous debates took place over the purpose of drama. Some playwrights wanted the theater to be a force for social reform. Others concentrated on experimental technique, and still others aimed at frankly escapist and commercially successful work. Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Awake and Sing! (1935) attack social problems of the time. Lillian Hellman's plays, such as The Children's Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939), explore the destructiveness of greed, materialism, and sexual repression in American life. Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923) is a satire on the growing mechanization of humanity. In Our Town (1938), Thornton Wilder used uncommon staging techniques, such as the absence of scenery or a curtain, to balance a somewhat sentimental picture of small-town New England life.

Literature since 1945

After World War II ended in 1945, the United States underwent many changes. The economy prospered, but the gulf between the rich and the poor widened. The black civil rights movement gathered strength in the 1960's. Other groups, including women, also began to demand fuller rights. The United States remained an important world power but was criticized for its participation in the Vietnam War (1957-1975) and for its influence abroad. Much American literature was concerned with these economic and social changes.

Poetry. By the 1950's, modernism was the dominant form. A generation of poets, including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Theodore Roethke, thoroughly mastered modernist techniques.

Variations on modernist poetry. A number of poets and groups developed poetic styles that were variations on modernism. One group, called the Black Mountain poets, gathered around Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, an experimental arts school in Black Mountain, N.C. Olson sought to give poetry a physical immediacy. In The Maximus Poems (1953-1975), he let the rhythm of his own breathing determine the length of his verse lines. Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov carried forward Olson's style of verse, seeking an "open" form that could admit a range of experiences, feelings, and insights.

A group called the beat poets condemned the failings of American society and turned poetry into a powerful tool of social protest. The beat poets shared a disgust with false values and a desire to achieve spiritual elevation. One of the most important beat poets was Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) describes spiritual ecstasy and the torments of urban life in long lines influenced by Whitman and William Carlos Williams.

Gary Snyder's poetry reflects his interest in Asian culture and in the relation of human beings to their environment. Snyder's poems are collected in Myths and Texts (1960), Turtle Island (1974), and other volumes.

Frank O'Hara led a group of poets centered in New York City. His poems read like improvised and casual records of quickly changing and scattered urban life. John Ashbery, a member of the New York group, wrote poems that reflect the influence of modern art and music. Many of his poems hint at their subject only indirectly and vaguely.

James Merrill began his career with polished formal verse, often autobiographical but highly restrained. The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) is a record of messages from a Ouija board, a device supposedly used to communicate with the dead.

A. R. Ammons experimented with verse form and punctuation, seeking a language to express the interaction between a scene being observed and an observer. W. S. Merwin's haunting phrases express his concern with political and ecological issues.

Elizabeth Bishop's highly regarded poems are formal and self-restrained, but express powerful personal feelings and experiences. Questions of Travel (1965) and Geography III (1976) explore themes of travel, exile, and response to exotic landscapes. Robert Penn Warren gained fame as a novelist but also wrote verse. His poems center on history, memory, and the effort to deal with time's erosive power.

"Confessional" poetry. Some poets began to write poetry, sometimes called "confessional" poetry, that was more personal and emotional. Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) and John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs (1964) speak frankly of their troubled lives. Theodore Roethke explored the themes of growth and childhood in elegantly written poems. Sylvia Plath sometimes used the Holocaust, the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis during World War II, as a metaphor for personal crisis. Anne Sexton wrote about her mental illness in a direct and open style. Adrienne Rich moved from formal verse to steadily deeper probings of her consciousness as a woman.

The black experience became the subject of many poets in the 1950's and 1960's. The early poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks showed her skill in traditional rhyming verse and forms like the sonnet, a 14-line poem with a formal arrangement of rhymes. Yet her words drew on oral black preaching and street talk. She described the ordinary lives of blacks and the injustices they suffered.

In the 1960's, with the rise of the civil rights movement, many African Americans rejected earlier hopes for an integrated society and began to call for a separate black culture. LeRoi Jones's early poems express the personal agonies of living in a prejudiced world. But he increasingly saw the problem as social, not personal. He began to write plays and helped start the Black Arts movement. The movement rejected the literary forms and values of white culture, instead founding magazines and institutions to support writing that reflected black experience. As Jones became more politically active, he changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka, then to Amiri Baraka, to reflect his African heritage.

Fiction and other prose. In the postwar period, many writers continued to create realist fiction. Several authors drew their subjects from World War II, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, and Herman Wouk. Others described regions of the country or the experiences of certain age groups or races. John Cheever and John O'Hara wrote about suburban life in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. J. D. Salinger exposed the shortcomings of the adult world as seen through the eyes of a New York teen-ager in The Catcher in the Rye (1951). James Baldwin wrote about the black experience in such novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962). Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man (1952), provided a haunting picture of African American life in the United States. John Updike examined the materialism of middle-class American life in the four-volume "Rabbit" series, from Rabbit Run (1960) to Rabbit at Rest (1990). Joyce Carol Oates produced a large body of fiction that ranged from realistic stories of urban life to nightmarish novels.

Saul Bellow is one of the most widely respected postwar novelists. His early work, such as Henderson the Rain King (1959), is exuberant and comic. His later novels focus on mature, thoughtful men who experience and reflect on the problems of modern life.

The beat novelist Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) tells of young rebels against the boredom and pointlessness of daily life who wander the United States in a search for meaning. Kerouac's strongly rhythmic flow of words creates an impression of spontaneity and improvisation, like that in jazz.

Southern fiction. A number of Southern writers, influenced by Faulkner, focused on the poor, outcasts, or grotesque characters. Among these writers were Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor. McCullers depicted the pain of loneliness in many of her works, including The Member of the Wedding (1946) and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951). In brilliant short stories and in such novels as Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), O'Connor presented grotesque characters and disturbed behavior in a darkly comic style.

Eudora Welty sets most of her novels and short stories in her native Mississippi. In her works, comic and satiric twists lighten the impact of odd characters or moments of violence. Walker Percy was strongly influenced by European philosophy, especially a movement called existentialism, which stresses that individuals must choose their own way to live and act. His novels, including The Moviegoer (1961) and The Second Coming (1980), humorously take up the existential themes of alienation and the search for self-fulfillment.

Experimental styles. The stylistic experiments of the modernists opened the way for a technique called self-reflexive fiction, an innovative manipulation of language and narrative. Self-reflexive fiction often calls attention to the act of writing itself. For example, it may comment on or even argue with itself and address or even mock the reader. Self-reflexive fiction and other experimental techniques became common among postwar authors. In The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Chimera (1972), and other works, John Barth created wild comedies mingling ancient myth, history, and highly unreliable autobiography.

Thomas Pynchon's massive Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is a fantastic reimagining of World War II filtered through the social concerns of the early 1970's. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) use dark comedy to satirize the self-satisfaction they felt resulted from the war. Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) uses a mental hospital and a con-man hero as symbols of modern American society. The Polish-born Jerzy Kosinski's childhood experiences during World War II inspired the grotesque violence of The Painted Bird (1965). The same memories haunt the dark comedy of his later novels set in the United States, including Being There (1971).

In Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and other works, the black writer Ishmael Reed drew a satiric and disorienting picture of race relations and other aspects of modern life. In Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), and other books, Donald Barthelme aimed to unsettle readers by violating conventions of realistic storytelling.

John Hawkes used experimental and self-reflexive styles in The Lime Twig (1961) and other novels. The Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov won fame for his brilliant language and self-reflexive techniques in such novels as Lolita (1958; published in 1955 in France), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada (1969).

Some postwar writers blend fiction with historic fact. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) employed his powerful narrative skills to tell the story of a brutal multiple murder. Norman Mailer's best work has been journalistic and autobiographical, in particular The Armies of the Night (1968), about a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War. The novelist William Styron gave a fictional version of a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 in The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). E. L. Doctorow used both fictional and real-life characters in his reimaginings of American history.

Works by minority writers. The civil rights movement of the 1960's brought forth a number of popular autobiographies, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965, edited by Alex Haley), Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968). Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) traces his family's history back through American slaves to his African ancestors.

The black novelist Toni Morrison wrote about the lives of black women in the North in such novels as Sula (1973), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987). The black writer Alice Walker won fame with the novel The Color Purple (1982). Walker has presented a range of black characters, some heroic, but others deeply flawed, particularly black men who treat women unfairly. Like Morrison, she has increasingly found an exuberantly creative language and storytelling technique.

N. Scott Momaday, a writer of Kiowa and Cherokee ancestry, used varied modern narrative techniques in House Made of Dawn (1968), the story of an alienated American Indian veteran of World War II. Ceremony (1977), by Pueblo Indian novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, tells about another World War II Indian veteran. This young man, torn by the conflict between ancient Indian ways and modern white ways and shattered by his combat experiences, is gradually healed by an Indian ceremony. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) blends fiction with fact to express the complex experience of growing up as a Chinese-American woman.

Essays. Such critics as Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, and Edmund Wilson played an important role from the 1930's to the 1950's in shaping the public understanding of literature and in popularizing important new intellectual movements. In the 1960's and 1970's, Susan Sontag tried to clarify the leading features of contemporary art.

The journalist Tom Wolfe used an exuberant, inventive style to report on popular culture during the 1960's and 1970's. His writing included cutting satire of those who pursued fashion in politics and modern architecture. Wolfe also wrote fiction, satirizing modern American culture in the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987).

Drama. The leading playwrights after World War II were Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Williams' drama often shows a conflict between sensitive, poetic individuals and the brutality and coarseness of modern life. His plays are basically realistic psychological portraits. The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) are his most famous. His later work explores grotesque and sometimes disturbed behavior. Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) lends tragic dignity to the anguish of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman. Loman is destroyed by accepting popularity and material success as the highest values in life.

In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Edward Albee explored with biting wit and grotesque humor how love and cruelty are entangled within marital relationships and friendships. Albee also adapted the style of the theater of the absurd in plays that probed social and personal problems, such as The Zoo Story (1959). Theater of the absurd was a drama movement of the 1950's and 1960's that stressed the absurdity and lack of meaning the authors saw in modern life.

During the 1950's and 1960's, black theater often took up political themes. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) is a realistic portrait of a black family who move into a white area. They must find the courage to resist white prejudice and claim the right to realize their hopes. James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) traces the racial myths that trap both blacks and whites. The poet Amiri Baraka also wrote plays, promoting black nationalism and expressing anger at whites in such dramas as Dutchman (1964), The Slave (1964), and Slave Ship (1967).

August Wilson has written powerfully on the black experience in America in the 1900's in a cycle of plays. The Piano Lesson (1987) describes the conflict between a brother and sister over whether to sell or keep the family heirloom, a piano.

In Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976), seven women dance, sing, and recite poetry. Their performances create a collage of black women's feelings and experiences.

In plays such as The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1971), David Rabe portrayed the disillusionment of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Sam Shepard's dramas, such as True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983), are bitter explorations of family relationships and the dominant values in American society and politics. David Mamet's plays, including American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), are noted for their vigorous dialogue, often profane and rapidly exploding into arguments.

The study of American literature

During the 1920's, American literature began to become an important field in higher education. Critics and scholars such as Norman Foerster and Bliss Perry played a key role in editing texts and creating anthologies for use in classes. The need to define a curriculum (course of study) led to the designation of some works as "classics" every student should read. Books that did not win this designation were often neglected.

Scholars also began to seek common themes that unified and distinguished American literature. In a series of books during the early 1900's, Van Wyck Brooks stressed the features and outlook that distinguished American from European writing. Historian Perry Miller's two-volume The New England Mind (1939-1953) was influential in studies of literature. In that work, Miller traced American culture to the Puritan tension between commercial and religious values and between individualism and community.

Educators today have sought to broaden the definition and scope of American literature. They believe that the past study of American literature concentrated too heavily on white male writers whose works were considered "classics." Teachers and critics today pay more attention to works by blacks and other minority groups, and women. There is also greater interest in nontraditional forms of literature, including journals and other unpublished writing.
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Roland Camilleri

Moderator

Sydney , Australia.