Introduction AMERICAN LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION 
AMERICAN LITERATURE

Washington Irving (1783-1859) has often been called "the Father of American Literature."  He is thought of, for instance, as the first American writer to make his living primarily through his creative work, and he is the first American acclaimed by the English literary establishment as worthy of recognition.  In effect, Irving was seen as our literary declarer of Independence.

"The Father of American Literature" is a curious label for Irving, for he was not all that at "home" with American life.  His very early literary efforts -- The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1802) and Salmagundi (1807) -- are comic glances and satirical thrusts at contemporary New York society.  And almost everybody realizes once they think about it a bit that the "children's story" that is his best known work, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), really bemoans the fact that the Revolution marked the drastic change in America from bucolic paradise to commercial and political Babel.  The birth of America in that story is described as a Fall, and, in fact, Irving seemed more at home in the Old World and spent much of his life there.  American democracy was no unalloyed advance in civilization.  It was mobocracy, and Rip was its victim, an unwilling "drop out."  In ourbeginning, Irving looked back not forward.

The New England colonies were the center of early American literature. The revolutionary period contained political writings by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. In the post-war period, Thomas Jefferson's United States Declaration of Independence solidified his status as a key American writer. It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first novels were published. With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) started a movement known as Transcendentalism. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) wrote Walden, which urges resistance to the dictates of organized society. The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom's Cabin. These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave narrative autobiography, of which the best known example from this period was Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) is notable for his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, a novel about adultery. Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville (1819–1891) who is notable for the books Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. America's two greatest 19th-century poets were Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). American poetry reached a peak in the early-to-mid-20th century, with such noted writers as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and E. E. Cummings. Mark Twain (the pen name used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast. Henry James (1843–1916) was notable for novels like The Turn of the Screw. At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists included Edith Wharton (1862–1937), Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), and Jack London (1876–1916). Experimentation in style and form is seen in the works of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946).

American writers expressed disillusionment following WW I. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) capture the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos Passos wrote about the war. Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) became notable for The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. William Faulkner (1897–1962) is notable for novels like The Sound and the Fury. American drama attained international status only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the works of Eugene O'Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize. In the middle of the 20th century, American drama was dominated by the work of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the American musical.

Depression era writers included John Steinbeck (1902–1968), notable for his novel The Grapes of Wrath. Henry Miller assumed a unique place in American Literature in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels were banned from the US. From the end of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the publication of some of the most popular works in American history such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. America's involvement in World War II influenced the creation of works such as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). John Updike was notable for his novel Rabbit, Run (1960). Philip Roth explores Jewish identity in American society. From the early 1970s to the present day the most important literary movement has been postmodernism and the flowering of literature by ethnic minority writers.