American Literature

American literature is the literature written or produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies.
During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States.
Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature.
Colonial literature
Owing to the large immigration to Boston in the 1630s, the high articulation of Puritan cultural ideals, and the early
establishment of a college and a printing press in Cambridge, the New England colonies have often been regarded as the
center of early American literature.
The dominance of the English language was hardly inevitable.
Back then, some of the American literature were pamphlets and writings extolling the benefits of the colonies to both a
European and colonist audience.
The rise of American drama
Although the United States' theatrical tradition can be traced back to the arrival of Lewis Hallam's troupe in the mid-18th
century and was very active in the 19th century, as seen by the popularity of minstrel shows and of adaptations of Uncle
Tom's Cabin, 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.