Aa, History of American Literature (Whole), Encarta

Encarta’s History of American Literature
Poetry
I INTRODUCTION
American Literature: Poetry, verse in English that originates from the territory now known as the United States. American poetry
differs from British or English poetry chiefly because America’s culturally diverse traditions exerted pressure on the English
language, altering its tones, diction, forms, and rhythms until something identifiable as American English emerged. American
poetry is verse written in this altered form of English.
The term American poetry is in some ways a contradiction. America represents a break with tradition and the invention of a new
culture separate from the European past. Poetry, on the other hand, represents tradition itself, a long history of expression carried
to America from a European past. American poetry thus embodies a clearly identifiable tension between tradition and innovation,
past and future, and old forms and new forms. American poetry remains a hybrid, a literature that tries to separate itself from the
tradition of English literature even as it adds to and alters that tradition.
American poetry could be defined differently, however, especially if it is not limited to poetry in English. Without that qualifying
term, American poetry has its origins in the rich oral traditions of Native American cultures. Each of these cultures developed
complex symbolic tales of the origins and history of its people, akin to epic poems in the European tradition. These tales were
performed as part of rituals and passed on through memorization from one generation to the next. Some of them have been
translated into English. Yet these works tend to vanish from most histories of American poetry because they were part of ongoing
performances based in spoken rather than written language. Moreover, their rhythms and sounds are bound to the native languages
in which they evolved. Similarly, there is a rich heritage of Spanish-language poetry written in America from the time of the
earliest Spanish explorers to current Hispanic and Chicano and Chicana poetry. American poetry traditions also have thrived in
many other languages, from Chinese to Yiddish, as the result of centuries of immigration to the United States.
But most people mean by American poetry those rhythmic, memorable, and significant verse forms composed in English in the
United States or in lands that became the United States. This overview of more than 300 years of American poetry tracks the
creation of a national literature identifiably different from that of any other nation. In the 1600s colonial poets responded to the
challenges of their new world and expressed the hopes and fears of Europeans who settled there. In the years following the
Declaration of Independence (1776) American poets created a patriotic poetry as a defining literature for the new nation. A
powerful new kind of poetry flowered in the mid- and late 19th century among the first poets to be born and raised as actual
citizens of the United States. American modernist poetry emerged in the first half of the 20th century, as many writers sought to
subdue nationalist impulses in their poetry and define themselves as part of an international advance in the arts. Finally, in the
second half of the 20th century a multiplicity of diverse voices redefined American poetry. For information on American prose or
drama, see American Literature: Prose; American Literature: Drama.
II BEGINNINGS: 1600S THROUGH THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783)

Encarta, complete history of American literature
From the beginning until well into the 19th century, widespread agreement existed that American poetry would be judged by British
standards, and that poetry written in America was simply British poetry composed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet in
responding to British styles, American poetry took inspiration from the new physical environment and the evolving culture of the
colonies. In the process it recorded a subtle shift from poets who were dependent imitators to poets who spoke for and in the language of
the new nation.
A New England Puritan Poetry
Puritans who had settled in New England were the first poets of the American colonies. Most Puritan poets saw the purpose of
poetry as careful Christian examination of their lives; and private poems, like Puritan diaries, served as a forum where the self
could be measured daily against devout expectations. Puritan leaders deemed poetry a safe and inspiriting genre, since they
considered the Bible itself to be God’s poetry. Thus poetry became the literary form that allowed devout believers to express, with
God’s help, divine lessons. Other genres, such as drama and fiction, were considered dangerous, capable of generating lies and
leading to idle entertainment instead of moral uplift.
Puritan poets had grown up in England during a period when Christian epic poetry—culminating in Paradise Lost (1667) by John
Milton—was considered the highest literary accomplishment. When they came to America they maintained their cultural
allegiances to Britain. Anne Bradstreet looked to British poets Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser; Edward Taylor looked to
poets George Herbert and John Donne.
Bradstreet was the first poet in America to publish a volume of poetry. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was
published in England in 1650. Bradstreet had lived in England until 1630, when at the age of 18 she arrived in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, where she spent the rest of her life. Although Bradstreet wrote many poems on familiar British themes and produced
skilled imitations of British forms, her most remarkable works responded directly to her experiences in colonial New England.
They reveal her attraction to her new world, even as the discomforts of life in the wilderness sickened her. Her poetry contains a
muted declaration of independence from the past and a challenge to authority. A lthough Bradstreet’s verses on the burning of her
house in 1666 and poems on the death of three grandchildren end by reaffirming the God-fearing Puritan belief system, along the
way they also question the harsh Puritan God. Further, Bradstreet’s work records early stirrings of female resistance to a social
and religious system in which women are subservient to men. In “The Prologue” (1650), Bradstreet writes, “I am obnoxious to
each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits, / [than] A poet’s pen.…” Bradstreet’s instincts were to love this
world more than the promised next world of Puritan theology, and her struggle to overcome her love for the world of nature
energizes her poetry.
Taylor, a poet of great technical skill, wrote powerful meditative poems in which he tested himself morally and sought to identify
and root out sinful tendencies. In “God's Determinations Touching His Elect” (written 1680?), one of Taylor’s most important
works, he celebrates God's power in the triumph of good over evil in the human soul. All of Taylor’s poetry and much of
Bradstreet’s served generally personal ends, and their audience often consisted of themselves and their family and closest friends.
This tradition of private poetry, kept in manuscript and circulated among a small and intimate circle, continued throughout the
colonial period, and numerous poets of the 17th and 18th centuries remained unknown to the general public until long after their
deaths. For them, poetry was a kind of heightened letter writing that reaffirmed the ties of family and friends. Taylor’s poems
remained unpublished until 1939, when The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor appeared. Many of Bradstreet’s most personal
poems also remained unpublished during her lifetime.
Public poetry for the Puritans was more didactic or instructive in nature and often involved the transformation into verse of
important biblical lessons that guided Puritan belief. Poet and minister Michael Wigglesworth wrote theological verse in ballad
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meter, such as The Day of Doom (1662), which turned the Book of Revelation into an easily memorized sing-song epic. Puritan
poetry also included elaborate elegies, or poems honoring a person who had recently died. Puritans used these poems to explore the
nature of the self, reading the character of the dead person as a text and seeing the life as a collection of hidden meanings.
B Southern Satire
Colonial poets of the 18th century still looked to British poets of their time, such as Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips. Both
were masters of pastoral verse—poetry that celebrated an idealized English countryside and rural life—and of satirical verse.
Initially, this satiric tone was more prevalent in the southern colonies than in New England.
Two poets from the Maryland Colony, Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis, wrote accomplished satirical poems based on British
pastoral models. But their poems cleverly undermine those models by poking fun at the British. Cook’s The Sot-Weed Factor
(1708) is a long narrative poem written in rhyming couplets that mocks Americans as a backward people but aims its satire most
effectively at the poem’s narrator, who is a British snob. Americans may be laughable, Cook suggests, but they are not as ridiculous as
the British with their ignorance and prejudice about Americans.
C Revolutionary Era Patriotic Poetry
A penchant for satire continued in the American Revolutionary era, when American poetry was centered on Connecticut and a
group of poets known as the Connecticut Wits (or Hartford Wits). This group, most of whose members were associated with Yale
University, included David Humphreys, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow. Along with other writers they produced The Anarchiad
(1786-1787), a mock epic poem warning against the chaos that would ensue if a strong central government, as advocated by the
Federalists, was not implemented in the United States. American poets used the British literary model of the mock epic as a tool
to satirize and criticize British culture. Trumbull’s mock epic M’Fingal (1775-1782) lampooned the British Loyalists during the
Revolution.
Revolutionary-era poets composed more than satire, however. They felt an urgency to produce a serious—even monumental—
national poetry that would celebrate the country’s new democratic ideals. Epic poems, they believed, would confer importance
and significance on the new nation’s culture. Educated in the classics, these poets were also lawyers, ministers, and busy citizens
of the new republic. They did not bother with the question whether a new nation required new forms of poetry, but were content to
use traditional forms to write about new subjects in order to create the first truly American poetry. Whereas traditional epics
celebrated past accomplishments of a civilization, American epics by necessity celebrated the future. Examples of such epics
include Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus (1787), later revised as The Columbiad (1807); Greenfield Hill (1794) by clergyman
Timothy Dwight; and The Rising Glory of America (1772) by Philip Freneau. All offered the prospect of America as the future
culmination of civilization.
Freneau, the most accomplished patriot poet, was not associated with Connecticut. He was born in New York City and later lived in a
variety of places. His range of experience and clarity of expression made him a very popular poet, widely regarded as the first poet who
spoke for the entire country. Much of his poetry focused on America’s future greatness, but he also wrote on other subjects, including the
beauties of the natural world. Such lyric poems as “The Wild Honey Suckle” (1786) and “On a Honey Bee” (1809), can be seen as the
first expressions in American poetry of a deep spiritual engagement with nature.
D Early Black Voices
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Slavery was the great contradiction in the new nation that had affirmed in its Declaration of Independence a basic belief that “all
men are created equal” and have “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Many of the country’s early
leaders believed that African slaves were intellectually inferior to whites. Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave, challenged those racist
assumptions early on. Brought to America as a young girl, Wheatley was educated by her masters in English and Latin. She
became an accomplished poet, and her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published in England. Like
the white patriot poets, Wheatley wrote in 18th-century literary forms. But her highly structured and elegant poetry nonetheless
expressed her frustration at enslavement and desire to reach a heaven where her color and social position would no longer keep
her from singing in her full glory.
Wheatley’s poetry, along with that of other slaves, begins a powerful African American tradition in American poetry. In 1746
Lucy Terry, a slave in Massachusetts who was also educated by her owner, wrote the first poem to be published by a black
American: "Bar's Fight." The poem, which was not published until 1855, describes the victims and survivors of a Native
American raid against settlers. It was followed by Jupiter Hammon’s biblically inspired, hymnlike verse, “An Evening Thought;
Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (1761).
Born at the time of the founding of the nation, African American poetry retained its concern with the burning issues of the American
Revolution, including liberty, independence, equality, and identity. It also expressed African American experiences of divided loyalties.
Just as white Americans experienced divided loyalties in the republic’s early years—unsure whether their identity derived from the new
country or from their European past—so too did African Americans, who looked always to their African past and to their problematic
American present.
III THE 19TH CENTURY
The 19th century began with high hopes for poetic accomplishment. The first comprehensive anthologies of American poetry
appeared in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. In the first half of the century poets sought to entertain, to inform, and to put into
memorable language America’s history, myths, manners, and topography, but they did not seek to forge a radical new poetic
tradition. Their poetry built upon tradition, and they met the first great goal of American poetry: that it be able to compete in
quality, intelligence, and breadth with British poetry. But just as they achieved this goal, poetic aspirations began to change. By the
mid-19th century the new goal for American poetry was to create something very different from British poetry. Innovative poets,
particularly Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, led the way.
A The Fireside Poets
William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf
Whittier constituted a group sometimes called the Fireside Poets. They earned this nickname because they frequently used the
hearth as an image of comfort and unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories. These tremendously popular
poets also were widely read around the hearthsides of 19th-century American families. The consensus of American critics was
that the Fireside Poets first put American poetry on an equal footing with British poetry.
Bryant gained public recognition first and is best remembered for “Thanatopsis,” published in 1821 but written when he was a
teenager. Still widely anthologized, this poem offers a democratic reconciliation with death as the great equalizer and a
recognition that the “still voice” of God is embodied in all processes of nature. During a busy life as a lawyer and editor of the
New York Evening Post, Bryant wrote accomplished, elegant, and romantic descriptions of a nature suffused with spirit.
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Longfellow was the best known of the Fireside Poets, and it was with him that American poetry began its emergence from the
shadow of its British parentage. His poetic narratives helped create a national historical myth, transforming colorful aspects of the
American past into memorable romance. They include Evangeline (1847), which concerns lovers who are separated during the
French and Indian War (1754-1763), and The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which derives its themes from Native American folklore.
No American poet before or since was as widely celebrated during his or her lifetime as Longfellow. He became the first and only
American poet to be honored with a bust in the revered Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, England.
The accomplishments of the other Fireside Poets were various. Lowell’s Biglow Papers (1848) added to the American tradition of
long satirical poems. Holmes wrote several memorable short poems such as “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858). Whittier became
best known for Snow-Bound (1866), a long nostalgic look at his Massachusetts Quaker boyhood, when the family gathered around the
fireside during a snowstorm.
B Abolitionist Poetry
During the 19th century, black and white poets wrote about the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves. George Moses
Horton, a North Carolina slave, was the first Southern black poet. Joshua McCarter Simpson was a black poet from Ohio whose
memorable songs of emancipation were set to popular tunes and sung by fugitive slaves. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote
passionate abolitionist and early feminist poems that called both blacks and whites to action against oppression. Black poets
appropriated the language and style of the predominantly white, mainstream patriotic America. In using mainstream language,
these black poets showed their white audiences how differently songs of liberty and freedom sounded from the perspective of
those who had been left out of the “all men are created equal” equation. Black poets also often expressed themselves with irony
and ambiguity so that different audiences heard different intonations and meanings, a double voicing that would become central to
later African American writing.
White abolitionist poets, from their more privileged social position, could afford to be more confrontational about the issue of
slavery. Whittier was a fiery abolitionist whose numerous antislavery poems were collected in Voices of Freedom (1846).
Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery (1842) forms a long-forgotten but illuminating contribution to the tradition of American political
poems. Lowell also was an ardent abolitionist.
C Mid-Century Innovation
Many 20th-century critics date the beginnings of a uniquely American poetry to the appearance of Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt
Whitman. Whitman drew a good deal of inspiration from New England writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his 1844 essay “The
Poet,” Emerson called for a radically new American poet who would make poetry out of the rough experience of America and
break free of conventional patterns of writing and thinking. Emerson could not answer his own call; his poetry, always
challenging and often cryptic and highly symbolic, tended to fall into conventional rhythms and remained aloof from day-to-day
reality. After reading Leaves of Grass, Emerson realized that Whitman might be the first truly original American poet: “I greet you at
the beginning of a great career,” he wrote to Whitman.
D Walt Whitman
A newspaper reporter and editor, Whitman first published poems that were traditional in form and conventional in sentiment. In
the early 1850s, however, he began experimenting with a mixture of the colloquial diction and prose rhythms of journalism; the
direct address and soaring voice of oratory; the repetitions and catalogues of the Bible; and the lyricism, music, and drama of
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popular opera. He sought to write a democratic poetry—a poetry vast enough to contain all the variety of burgeoning 19th-century
American culture. In 1855 Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the book he would revise and expand for the
rest of his life. The first edition contained only 12 untitled poems. The longest poem, which he eventually named “Song of
Myself,” has become one of the most discussed poems in all of American poetry. In it Whitman constructs a democratic “I,” a
voice that sets out to celebrate itself and the rapture of its senses experiencing the world, and in so doing to celebrate the
unfettered potential of every individual in a democratic society. Emerging from a working class family, Whitman grew up in New
York City and on nearby Long Island. He was one of the first working-class American poets and one of the first writers to
compose poetry that is set in and draws its energy from the bustling, crowded, diverse streets of the city.
Whitman later added a variety of poems to Leaves of Grass. They include “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856), in which Whitman
addresses both contemporary and future riders of the ferry, and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1860), a reverie about his
boyhood on the shores of Long Island. Other poems were about affection between men and about the experiences and sufferings
of soldiers in the Civil War (1861-1865).
Whitman’s work was initially embraced more fully in Britain than in the United States. An influential 1872 anthology, American
Poems, published in England and edited by English literary critic William Michael Rossetti, was dedicated to Whitman and gave him
more space than any other poet. From then on American poetry was judged not by how closely it approximated the best British verse, but
by how radically it divorced itself from British tradition. Rough innovation came to be admired over polished tradition.
E Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, along with Whitman, is one of the most original and demanding poets in American literature. Living her whole
life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson composed nearly 2,000 short, untitled poems. Despite her productivity, only a handful
of Dickinson’s poems were published before her death in 1886. Most of her poems borrow the repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas
of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. A master of
imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form:
She used imperfect rhymes, subtle breaks of rhythm, and idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation to create fascinating word puzzles,
which have produced greatly divergent interpretations over the years.
Dickinson’s intensely private poems cover a wide range of subjects and emotions. She was fascinated with death, and many of her
poems struggle with the contradictions and seeming impossibility of an afterlife. She carries on an argument with God, sometimes
expressing faith in him and sometimes denying his existence. Many of her poems record moments of freezing paralysis that could
be death, pain, doubt, fear, or love. She remains one of the most private and cryptic voices in American literature.
Because of Dickinson’s prominence, it sometimes seems that she was the only female poet in America in the 19th century. Yet nearly a
hundred women published poetry in the first six decades of the 1800s, and most early anthologies of American poetry contained far more
women writers than appeared in anthologies in the first half of the 20th century. Dickinson’s work can be better understood if read in the
context of these poets. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, for example, was a popular early-19th-century poet whose work set the themes for other
female poets: motherhood, sentiment, and the ever-present threat of death, particularly to children. She developed, among other forms,
the same hymn stanza that Dickinson used, although she experimented with fewer variations on it than Dickinson, and her poetry was
simple and accessible. The work of Sigourney, along with that of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, Alice and
Phoebe Cary, and Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, was dismissed by most 20th-century critics until feminist critics began to rediscover the
ironic edge to what had before seemed to be conventional sentimentality. The work of these and other women poets offers a window into
the way 19th-century culture constructed and understood such concepts as gender, love, marriage, and motherhood.
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F Poe, Melville, and Others
Other poets who tried out distinctive new forms included Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. Poe devoted great effort to
writing poetry that was unlike anything before it. A careful craftsman, he examined in detail the effects that his every poetic
choice had. Poe’s poetry earned little respect from his contemporaries, who dismissed him as “the jingle man.” He had, said
Whitman, “the rhyming art to excess.” Yet Poe’s nightmarish scenes, unnerving plots, and probings of abnormal psychology gave
his poetry, as well as his tales, a haunting, memorable quality that makes him one of the most admired innovators in American
literature. The opening lines of his best-known poem, “The Raven” (1845), demonstrate Poe’s love of rhyming and his use of
varying rhythm: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of
forgotten lore.”
Melville, though much better known as a novelist, nonetheless wrote powerful poetry about the Civil War, collected in Battle-
Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). He later wrote a long and mysterious poem, Clarel (1876), about his search for faith, his
struggle with doubt, and his anxiety about the decline of civilization.
Lesser-known innovators of the 19th century include Jones Very, Sidney Lanier and Henry Timrod. Very was a Massachusetts poet who
produced strikingly original religious sonnets. Lanier was a Georgia poet who sought to reproduce in language the effects of music.
Timrod, a Southern poet who was known as “the laureate of the Confederacy,” wrote some notably original and dark poetry in the 1860s.
G Toward the 20th Century
Whitman had hoped that his work would generate new energy in American poetry. But when he died in 1892, the American poetic
scene was relatively barren. Most of the major poets had died and no successor to Whitman was emerging. William Vaughn
Moody, a poet born in Indiana, wrote The Masque of Judgement (1900), which was the first in a series of verse dramas about
humanity’s spiritual tortures and eventual spiritual victory. Stephen Crane, best known for his novels, published two volumes of
poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Poems (1899). In their tone and fragmented form, his
grim poems anticipate the concerns of many modern writers. But neither poet lived far into the 20th century.
IV THE 20TH CENTURY
By 1900 the United States was far different from the new nation it had been a hundred years earlier. Westward expansion, waves of
immigration, and increasing urbanization all combined to create a physically larger, more populous, and far more diverse country than its
founders could have imagined. These changes are tracked more visibly in America’s fiction than in its poetry, but the nation’s growing
diversity is evident in the diverse voices of 20th-century American poets. American poetry in the opening decades of the century
displayed far less unity than most anthologies and critical histories indicate. Shifting allegiances, evolving styles, and the sheer number
of poets make it difficult to categorize 20th-century poetry.
A Regionalism
In the last decades of the 19th century, American literature had entered a period of regionalism, exploring the stories, dialects, and
idiosyncrasies of the many regions of the United States. Dialect poetry—written in exaggerated accents and colorful idioms—
became a sensation for a time though it produced little of lasting value. However, one major poet who rose to fame on the basis of
his dialect poems was Paul Laurence Dunbar, a black writer from Ohio. Dunbar’s dialect poems, which romanticized the life of
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slaves in the pre-Civil War South, were extremely popular. His volumes Oak and Ivy (1893) and Majors and Minors (1895)
brought attention to African American literature, although the dialect poems later embarrassed many black poets. Dunbar also
wrote many nondialect poems and initiated through his work an important debate in African American literature about what
voices and materials are appropriate for black writers.
Other regions and groups developed their own distinctive voices. Kansas-born Edgar Lee Masters achieved success with Spoon
River Anthology (1915). His poetic epitaphs (commemorations) capture the hidden passions, deceits, and hopes of Midwesterners
buried in the fictional Spoon River cemetery. Edwin Arlington Robinson explored the lives of New Englanders in his fictional
Tilbury Town through dramatic monologues—poems written entirely in the voice of each of his characters. Many of the
monologues employ the rhythm of everyday speech and reflect a Puritan sense of humankind’s moral corruption.
Robert Frost further developed Robinson’s New England voice in poems that can be read both as regional and as some of the most
accomplished modern poetry of the early 20th century. Restrained, humorous, and understated, Frost’s poetry gives voice to
modern psychological constructions of identity without ever losing its focus on the local and the specific. He often wrote in the
standard meter of blank verse (lines with five stresses) but ran sentences over several lines so that the poetic meter plays subtly under
the rhythms of natural speech. The first lines of “Birches” (1916) illustrate this distinctive new approach to rhythm: “When I see birches
bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. / But swinging doesn’t
bend them down to stay / As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them / Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning/ After a rain…”
And while Frost’s images and voice seem familiar and old, his observations of New England life have an edge of skepticism and irony
that make his work, upon rereading, never as easy and carefree as it first appeared. Frost delivered American poetry into the 20th century.
B Modernism
The early 20th century was a time of huge industrial expansion in America, and many writers found the conditions for creating art
unfavorable in a culture that was so focused on business and making money. Part of the struggle among modernist writers concerned the
possibility or even desirability of continuing to develop a specifically American poetic tradition. Many writers exiled themselves in
cultures that seemed more conducive to art, while others decided to stay and resist through their poetry the growing materialistic culture.
One way to categorize the major modernist poets is to separate those who left the United States and wrote most of their poetry as
expatriates in Europe from those who stayed in America. Among the expatriates are Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who wrote under the
pen name H. D.), T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Those who stayed in the United States include William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane,
Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, and Robinson Jeffers. Most of the latter group
visited Europe at some point and flirted with the idea of staying there to write.
B1 The Whitman Tradition
During the first half of the 20th century a number of poets carried on what we might call a Whitman tradition. They wrote in free
verse—a rhythm that responds to the specific subject instead of adhering to a predetermined, set meter. And they strived for a
poetry that would have a wide appeal and would help define and develop a democracy. Carl Sandburg devoted his poetic career to
celebrating the power of a tough, free, democratic working class. In this way he shifted Whitman’s focus on individual identity to
a new concern with social identity, an idea that culminated in his Depression-era book, The People, Yes (1936).
Vachel Lindsay set out to tramp across America, trading poems for food. His goal was to build a kind of mass participatory poetry
through what he called “the higher vaudeville,” performances in which he led large groups of people in chanting his poetry.
Langston Hughes, who became one of the century’s most important black writers, wrote socially conscious poems that sought to
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capture the black experience. Hughes used the rhythmic structure of blues music and the improvisational rhythms of jazz in his
innovative development of Whitman’s ideas, and he insisted on a more inclusive democracy than even Whitman had proposed.
Michael Gold, born and raised in New York City slums, wrote impassioned chants to American workers, often invoking Whitman.
Were Whitman alive—so Gold imagined—he would have joined the Communist struggle to liberate the working class.
William Carlos Williams, a physician from industrial New Jersey, looked to Whitman as the source of his own American rhythms,
which he claimed to pick up from listening to Americans talk on the streets. Williams developed forms that broke Whitman’s long
lines into brief lines that focused attention on the concrete reality in front of the poet: “No ideas but in things,” he said.
Williams’s massive poem Paterson (1946-58), released in five volumes, is an epic about Paterson, New Jersey. Williams sought to
make poetry out of material considered unpoetic by conventional standards: his focus was always on the local and immediate.
B2 Imagism and After
Early in Williams’s career he belonged to a group led by Ezra Pound called the imagists. Pound, Williams, and Doolittle all met at
the University of Pennsylvania and became part of Pound’s self-declared movement to remake poetry, or, as he said, to “make it
new.” The imagist credo called for new rhythms, clear and stripped-down images, free choice of subject matter, concentrated or
compressed poetic expression, and use of common speech. The poets who subscribed to this credo applied it differently: Williams
found his new rhythms in everyday speech, while Pound sought his new rhythms in adaptations in English of Chinese, Greek,
Provençal (southern France), and other poetic traditions. Pound’s Personae (1909) demonstrated his remarkable ability to write
intense, beautiful experimental verse, echoing poems from other languages. Pound introduced the poetry of Hilda Doolittle as the
model of imagism, and her chiseled and often erotic Sea Garden poems (1916) became for many the movement’s signature book.
H. D., Pound, and Williams left imagism behind, but it continued to influence some poets for a number of years under the
leadership of Amy Lowell, a descendent of James Russell Lowell.
Pound took his modernist revolution in a surprising new direction, building his brief imagist poems into a jagged collage that
eventually became a massive long poem, The Cantos. While the individual poems that went to make up the Cantos were published
in various forms from 1917 until the 1960s, the first complete English language edition of the poem was published in 1970 as The
Cantos of Ezra Pound. This lifelong work invites comparisons with Whitman’s lifelong project, Leaves of Grass. Pound distanced
himself from Whitman, however, disliking what he saw as the 19th-century poet’s overinfatuation with America. Pound believed
the poet should be a citizen of the world and a contemporary of all the ages, able to learn from excellence wherever and whenever
it appeared. He and Williams debated this issue for years, Williams insisting that original poetry could emerge only from the local
and the present and Pound insisting that fresh beauty could come only by encounters with the distant and the past, the lost and
forgotten. Whereas Williams’s Paterson insists on staying in one place, Pound’s Cantos move through time, languages, and
cultures—leading Pound eventually to a flirtation with fascism, which he embraced while in Italy during World War II (1939-
1945). Yet both of their compilations share a collage style, built of sudden, unexpected juxtapositions of disparate materials.
Doolittle also turned to long poems with her trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to Angels (1945), and The Flowering
of the Rod (1946). In these works she turned to Egyptian mythology, ancient history, and a reconfiguration of Christian tradition
as a response to the violence of World War II.
An important result of Pound’s push to build long poems out of imagist fragments was his editing of The Waste Land (1922) by T.
S. Eliot. For many readers this poem ranks as the great statement of despair in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918). Before
its publication Pound condensed and reshaped this highly allusive, darkly suggestive work, which is built on fertility myths and
the legend of the Holy Grail. The Waste Land has been read in many different ways, its meaning as unstable and fluid as its
diverse imagery. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri, eventually became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Much
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of his later verse, including Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943), relates to his spiritual concerns and suggests a
religious pathway out of despair and toward a renewed sense of purpose.
Some American poets tried writing responses to The Waste Land. Williams was incensed by Eliot’s poem, because its erudition
suggested that readers of poetry had to be scholars. Williams, meanwhile, championed a poetry more accessible to the general
reader, a poetry written in the language of the common person. He saw his own Paterson as a kind of local and optimistic answer
to Eliot’s cosmopolitan poem of pessimism. Hart Crane, too, viewed his epic-length The Bridge (1930) as an answer to Eliot.
Crane sought a way to bridge the American past to a productive American future and reveal the wasteland of the present as a
necessary stepping-stone to that future. The Bridge is a difficult poem, written in highly charged, symbolic language and suffused
in dense imagery, much of it derived from American myth, legend, and history. Crane eventually came to believe it was a failure.
Instead of answering Eliot, Robinson Jeffers wrote some of the bleakest poetry in all of American literature from his isolated
home in California. His bitter vision, a kind of post-Waste Land, is of a cold natural world that would be better off cleansed of
humanity. With no hint of redemption, Jeffers’s poetry anticipates the dark tones of the kind of science fiction that imagines the
world after ecological or nuclear holocaust.
Other modernist poets focused even more intently on experimentation with language and form. Some of their work was quite
playful and some of it showed the influence of dada and surrealism—European movements that undermined and mocked the value
and traditions of art. E. E. Cummings wrote highly experimental poetry that parodied the platitudes of what he called the unworld,
a sterile modern world that seemed to him to strip human beings of their humanity. Using puns, unorthodox typography—words,
all lower-case, divided and sometimes spread out letter by letter across a page—and other fracturing of traditional poetic forms,
he created a playful yet serious, highly individual poetic voice. One of the most radical innovators of modern poetry was Gertrude
Stein, although most of her poetry was not published until after her death. Her work probed the ways that language ultimately
refers only to itself, not to things of the world, and she experimented with multiple, shifting speaking voices.
Marianne Moore also wrote experimental poems, but her experiments led not to the shattering of form so much as the invention of
strict new forms. She imposed on herself a discipline of precise syllable counts and elaborate structures, all in the service of
precise, witty, and distanced observation of animals and other objects rendered in surprising metaphors. Her poetry scrutinizes the
world and scrutinizes itself, always revealing a strong ethical regard for the things described. An incessant reviser of her poetry,
Moore produced a small but intricately complex body of work.
Wallace Stevens created a cerebral, philosophical poetry that nonetheless shimmers with lush and often playful sounds. Abstract
and often difficult, Stevens’s poetry seems almost the opposite of that of his friend William Carlos Williams. Whereas Williams
believed ideas could emerge only from things, and that the poet must therefore attach words to solid reality, Stevens believed
things emerged from ideas, and that without thought, there are no things or at least no things that language can embrace. Stevens
began publishing his poetry late in life, and his work forms a mature reflection on the mind’s relation to the world and one way
that the imagination can encounter the world. This encounter happens through the creation of what Stevens calls the supreme
fiction—the belief that poetry or any art creates a meaningful order and pattern in life, an order we accept even while recognizing
that it is artificially imposed by humankind.
One influential group of modernist poets from the South was dedicated initially to poetry that had a regional basis. But the main
commitment of these poets—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren—was to a well-wrought, ironic, and often
indirect or obscure poetry. Their work led to what came to be called the New Criticism, a way of reading poems and other
literature that tended to value work that was difficult, ambiguous, and that transcended its personal, historical, and cultural
surroundings. The goal was a poem that could survive on its own as a perfected work of art. Their work built upon that of other
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modernists, such as Eliot, and encouraged a new formalism—that is, a return to careful craftsmanship and tradition as the primary
virtues of poetry.
C After Modernism
As noted earlier a period of inaction in American poetry followed the death of the great 19th-century poets and lasted until the
modernist poets arose a decade or so into the 20th century. A similar lull came after the great poems by the modernists in the
1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. American poetry paused as many poets imitated what had been innovative a few decades before and
produced the new formal poems that New Critics called for. By the 1950s most of the major modernists were still alive but they
seldom produced innovative work and no longer had any interest in continuing to lead a poetic revolution.
A middle generation of 20th-century American poets emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, most of them born in the second decade of
the century. Many achieved fame, including Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, and
Delmore Schwartz. Several came to be known as confessional poets because of their use of modernist techniques to explore their
own psychology and their lives. These techniques included irony, collage, verbal finish (careful attention to word choice for the
effects of sound or rhythm as well as for meaning), and wide-ranging allusion. Berryman undertook such explorations in his
Dream Songs (1964-1968), Lowell in Life Studies (1959), and Roethke in Words for the Wind (1958). Confessional poetry broke
away from modernism’s dedication to impersonality and reopened poetry to intense self-exploration and frank revelation of
personal experiences. Although the early confessional poets rarely used their poetry to explore political issues, their investigations
of how personal identity is constructed laid the ground for a more openly political poetry that emerged in America in the late
1950s and was still written at the century’s close.
The confessional poets also became the first generation to teach the writing of poetry in America. As instructors at some of the
earliest poetry workshops, they developed poetry as a subject at a number of American colleges and universities. Some of
Lowell’s poetry students used his confessional techniques for even more intense and unsettling self-examinations—especially
Anne Sexton in All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in Ariel (1966). Steeped in Freudian analysis and imagery, these
poems tracked psychological breakdowns; and a number of confessional poets, including Sexton and Plath, took their own lives.
Their poetry explored tortured family relationships and examined the female psyche, the female body, and the dynamics of
mother-daughter interactions. Sexton’s and Plath’s poetry influenced the development of feminist poetry—poetry by women that
questioned the traditional roles society assigned to females. Confessional poetry in general served as a counterforce to the
prevailing mood of the country in the 1950s and 1960s, when the family was presented in the mass media as the source of stability
and happiness.
Also important to the development of feminist poetry and a key poet in the tradition of political investigation is Muriel Rukeyser,
whose poetry looks at labor problems and larger class issues. A contemporary of the confessional poets, Rukeyser’s work stands
apart in its commitment to social justice. Another important female poet who is equally hard to categorize is Elizabeth Bishop.
Influenced by Marianne Moore, Bishop was an intense observer of exotic and common things, always rendered in a most
uncommon language, and many of her observations suggest a psychological dimension not unrelated to the confessional poets.
Rukeyser and Bishop served as disparate but equally important sources for the poetry of Adrienne Rich, who ranks as one of the
most important poets of the second half of the 20th century. Like Plath and Sexton, Rich offers a probing examination of
motherhood and of what it means to be a woman in America in a remarkable series of books starting with her first collection, A
Change of World, in 1951. However, she moved beyond Plath and Sexton in discovering ways to apply her anger not to self-destruction
but to pointed critiques and reenvisionings of society. Beginning with a formal and very finished modernist style, Rich’s poetry over the
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years took on a much more experimental form as she explored increasingly radical political positions and interrogated America’s
assumptions about gender and the ways gender structures our social experience.
D New Directions
Many poets who had begun writing formal poetry in the 1950s and 1960s underwent changes similar to Rich’s, making striking
alterations in their verse forms and opening their poetry up to more experimental rhythms and more radical social thoughts. Some
poets, including Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, and Anthony Hecht, have devoted their entire careers to writing elegantly
structured poems, becoming among the most accomplished formal poets in American history. Others who started out as formalists
gave up allegiance to traditional forms to explore and respond to radical political change by opening up their own work to new
forms and structures. W. S. Merwin, an admirer of Pound’s early work, wrote remarkable poetry in traditional forms in the 1950s.
However, in The Moving Target (1963) he suddenly abandoned punctuation and created a haunting, new prophetic voice, free of
conventional techniques. In later books such as The Lice (1967), he addressed societal ills, including the prospect of ecological
disaster as a result of human irresponsibility. American poetry became less formal and more political, more engaged in the
immediate moment during the 1960s, as America faced the social turbulence of the Civil Rights movement and protests against
the Vietnam War (1959-1975).
This break from new formalism traces back to Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina, where Charles
Olson taught, and where poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, and others studied in the early 1950s ( see Black
Mountain Poets). Olson owed much to Pound but had less interest in Pound’s love of tradition than in his attempt to construct a
kind of poetic compendium of history and myth, as in the Cantos. Olson’s great work was The Maximus Poems (1953-1975),
which focused on his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and owed much to Williams’s epic based on the city of Paterson.
Olson developed a theory of poetry called projective verse, which called for poets to return to an organic basis for their form, to a
poetic line controlled by the physiology of the poet's breathing instead of by pre-set meter. He urged an open form that would
allow for poetry to be a process of discovery, where form emerged from the needs of the particular poem. Olson’s student Duncan
later described the experience of reading and writing the new poetry as an “opening of the field,” the entering of a poetic space
where one could wander and explore instead of being led along predetermined pathways. Olson’s call influenced many writers,
who formed a variety of dissident groups from coast to coast—all dedicated to undermining the orthodox insistence on
predetermined, closed form.
The most famous of the dissident groups came to be known as the Beats, so named for their weariness with American materialism
after World War II and their faith in a coming beatification, a new spiritual America. The movement attracted poets like Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. It began with a reading in San Francisco in 1955, when the greatest poet of the
movement, Allen Ginsberg, read his free-flowing, surrealistic Howl, the poem that became the hallmark of the movement. Initially
dismissed as unpoetical by most established and academic writers, the Beat Generation writers eventually became some of the
best-known and most widely read American poets. Whitman had displaced Eliot and Pound as the poetic source for the Beats, and
Williams had an increasingly important influence. Ginsberg throughout his career celebrated Whitman and Williams as his poetic
progenitors and followed in their tradition as an essentially urban poet. Snyder took the Beat sensibility in a different direction,
turning to the wilderness tradition in American literature and combining Zen Buddhism, Native American mythology, and deep
ecological awareness in poetry that speaks eloquently of the human responsibility to nature.
Following many different trajectories, dissident poets began to explore the ways poetry could combine politics, sexuality,
autobiography, and spirituality in an improvisational, jazzy mode. From about 1960 on, an explosive new plurality prospered in
American poetry—a sense of multiple directions with no controlling authority. One direction was a black arts movement during
the 1960s. This flourishing of African American poetry that resulted was reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and
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early 1930s, when Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen,
Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, Melvin Tolson, and Jessie Fauset were all active writers.
In the 1960s black poetry underwent redefinition and turned to a more confrontational style. Rejecting the old gradualist and
integrationist model that saw blacks merging into white society, it became a poetry written in support of social revolution and
sought to be a distinctive voice of the black community. Gwendolyn Brooks had written poems about the Chicago slums since
1945, and in 1950 she became the first black to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But with the black arts movement of the 1960s,
she redefined her poetic mission, writing more directly for a black audience and becoming, as she said, more “non-
compromising.” LeRoi Jones, who later took the name Amiri Baraka, was a central figure in the movement. He specifically
rejected Eliot and the modernists and embraced the chanting, rebellious voices of Whitman, Williams, and the Beats. The new
black poetry turned to the streets of the black communities for its language and to the powerful tradition of African American
jazz, blues, and rock music for its rhythms. It also aligned itself with the poetry of oppressed people in other countries,
particularly developing countries around the world.
A number of black poets developed the poetic possibilities of black urban speech in politically aware, performance-based writing,
which sometimes involved chanting or rapping. These poets included Don Lee (who took the name Haki R. Madhubuti), Sonia
Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and June Jordan. Other black poets, such as Michael Harper and Pulitzer-Prize winner Yusef
Komunyakaa, examined the deep ironies of African American history in a more formal voice, yet retained associations with jazz
and blues. And still others, including Rita Dove, the first black poet laureate in the United States, produced striking, lyrical
composites of autobiography, confession, black dialect, and African American history in a language of precise observation
reminiscent of Moore or Bishop.
Another direction away from formal modernism led to deep image poetry, a name given to the work of Robert Bly, James Wright,
Galway Kinnell, and others who were born in the 1920s. These poets rejected what they saw as capitalism’s sterile public facade
and turned to what Bly called a “deep inwardness,” looking to internal spiritual sources that lie deep within the self and taking
leaps into the unconscious to retrieve mysterious, disturbing, and often healing images.
Yet another direction led to the New York School, a group of artists, writers, and musicians in which John Ashbery and Frank
O’Hara represented poetry. Ashbery and O’Hara wrote wildly experimental poetry that derived from dada and from an embrace of
Whitman’s open-road aesthetic—namely a desire to keep moving and to celebrate change, instability, and chance. The resulting
poems provide verbal trips through landscapes of shifting discourse with no center and no fixed voice: modes of speech alternate
rapidly, high diction is mixed with street slang, and moments from different realms of experience are juxtaposed. This work
influenced Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and others who are known as Language poets. This group attacks the idea of a unified
voice and, through collaborative work, disguises or erases the distinctions between individual poets. In doing so, the Language
poets work to undermine all the institutions that are built on America’s infatuation with individualism, including much of
American poetry itself.
It is impossible to name the myriad schools and movements in American poetry that flourished near the turn of the century, when
vigorous and unbridled variety marked the poetic scene more than ever. Philip Levine, Frank Bidart, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and
many other poets were developing the confessional poem in surprising ways, focusing autobiographical examination in more intense
lyric forms than earlier confessional poets had. C. K. Williams added to the confessional poem a sometimes brutal narrative edge as he
extended the possibilities (and the length) of the long line favored by Whitman and Ginsberg. Jorie Graham extended the poetic line as
well, developing Stevens’s philosophical poetry through fascinating labyrinths of speculation and imagery that cross and juxtapose the
multiple cultures of her experience.
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E Multicultural Voices
In the last decades of the 20th century American poetry gained much of its energy from a melding of America’s many distinct
cultural traditions. For example, Asian American writers—themselves part of a diverse and multicultured community—turned
increasingly to poetry as a means of exploring both their integration into American culture and their growing sense of distinctive
ethnic identity within that culture. Garrett Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, John Yau, and Cathy Song are just a few of the recent and
remarkable poets whose work expands the definition of Asian American poetry.
Chicano and Chicana poetry also has a long history in America, much of it centered in New Mexico, where Victor Bernal
published intricate lyrics in the early 20th century. But the amount of poetry increased dramatically after 1967, when Quinto Sol
Publications was founded to publish Chicano and Chicana work. José Montoya, Rudolfo Anaya, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cherrie
Moraga, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and Gary Soto are among the innovative Chicano and Chicana writers. Much of their work blends
poetry and prose, Spanish and English, and oral and written traditions.
Native Americans, of course, have the longest sustained tradition of poetry in North America, and many of the powerful Native
American writers at work today ground their work in the long-standing traditions and oral cultures of their peoples. As with
Chicano and Chicana writers, some Native American poets wrote in English early in the nation’s history. But most Native
American poetry in English is of relatively recent origin. The highly original group of writers at work at the close of the 20th
century included N. Scott Momaday (of the Kiowa people), Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki), Simon Ortiz (Acoma), Sherman Alexie
(Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), Carroll Arnett (Cherokee), Roberta Hill (Oneida), Wendy Rose (Hopi), James Welch (Blackfeet), Paula
Gunn Allen (Laguna), Linda Hogan (Chicasaw), Joy Harjo (Creek), and Ray Young Bear (Mesquakie).
The history of American poetry is usually told as the story of a handful of great poets, from Anne Bradstreet through William
Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost. But these poets
form a small part of America’s vast poetic production, much of which is by people whose names are forgotten. Journals and
newspapers preserve much of their work, and scholars have just begun to rediscover 18th- and 19th-century American poetry in
those archives. Similarly, much of the most popular, politically astute, and radical 20th-century poetry appeared in workers’
newspapers and journals and popular songbooks—and a great deal of this work still awaits rediscovery.
With the vast amount of culturally diverse poetry being written today and with the growth and reach of the Internet, American
poetry may well be approaching its most prolific stage. The Internet dwarfs the archives of the past in its ability to make
thousands of new poetic voices available to everyone who cares to read them. “To have great poets, there must be great audiences,
too,” wrote Whitman in 1855. His challenge remains valid today: The poets are out there, thousands of them, waiting for the
audience that will be worthy of them.
Contributed By:
Ed Folsom
Drama
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I INTRODUCTION
American Literature: Drama, literature intended for performance, written by Americans in the English language. American drama
begins in the American colonies in the 17th century and continues to the present. See also Drama and Dramatic Arts.
Most American plays of the 18th and 19th centuries strongly reflected British influence. In fact, no New York City theater season
presented more American plays than British plays until 1910. The reasons behind this phenomenon are complex, but a common
language and the ready availability of British plays and British actors offer the most obvious explanation.
Although the British repertory dominated the American stage for so long, American drama had begun to diverge from British
drama by the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1828 to 1836. British plays, which typically reflected the attitudes and
manners of the upper classes, were by then in conflict with more egalitarian American values. Despite this growing divergence,
British actors, theater managers, and plays continued to cross the Atlantic Ocean with regularity, and most American plays copied
British models until the early 20th century. For this reason some critics claim that American drama was not born until the end of
World War I (1914-1918).
By the end of the 19th century American drama was moving steadily toward realism, illuminating the rough or seamy side of life and
creating more believable characters. Realism remained the dominant trend of the 20th century in both comedies and tragedies. American
drama achieved international recognition with the psychological realism of plays by Eugene O’Neill and their searing investigation of
characters’ inner lives. As the century advanced, the number of topics considered suitable for drama broadened to encompass race,
gender, sexuality, and death.
II BEGINNINGS: 1600S AND 1700S
Because settlement was sparse and living conditions were arduous in the American colonies, little theatrical activity took place
before the mid-18th century. The first-known English-language play from the colonies, Ye Bare and Ye Cubb (1665), is lost. The
play’s existence is known as a result of the controversy it aroused in the Virginia Colony, where a lawsuit was filed to prevent the
play from opening. Several colonies had passed antitheater laws based on a Puritan belief that the seventh of the Ten
Commandments prohibited dancing and stage plays.
The oldest surviving American play is Androborus by Robert Hunter (1714). Hunter, the New York Colony’s governor, published
the cartoonish play as an attack on his political enemies, despite New York’s antitheater law. Intended for a reading public rather
than a viewing audience, it established a tradition of political satire that became common fare in American drama of the 1700s.
Before more American plays had appeared, a company of British professional actors established a touring circuit in the 1750s
with an all-British repertory. By the early 1760s this group was known as The American Company and American writers
occasionally submitted plays to the actors, though few were produced. But in 1767 The American Company staged The Prince of
Parthia, a tragedy by Thomas Godfrey, in Philadelphia. This is usually considered the first professional production of a play
written by an American. The play itself is indistinguishable from imitations of the works of English dramatist William
Shakespeare that abounded in Britain in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
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During the American Revolution (1775-1783), most professional actors moved to Jamaica. Satirical plays were written as
propaganda during the war, either supporting British control of the colonies or attacking it. British soldiers presented some of the
pro-British plays. Few other plays were performed during the war years, although they were widely read and recited. The Battle of
Brooklyn (1776), which was pro-British and written anonymously, presented rebel generals, including George Washington, as
drunks, lechers, and cowards. The Blockade (1775), written by British General John Burgoyne, was performed in British-occupied
Boston. The play’s ridicule of American soldiers was subsequently burlesqued in The Blockheads; or the Affrighted Officers
(1776), written by an anonymous playwright identified only as a patriot. The Blockheads depicts British soldiers as so terrified of
the Americans that they soil themselves rather than go outside to use the latrine. Mercy Otis Warren, who created several biting
satires of the British, may have written The Blockheads as well. She remained the strongest American dramatic voice of the
Revolution and championed the rebel cause in The Group (1775), a play that describes Britain, called Blunderland, as a mother
who eats her own children. The Patriots (1775?), a play by Robert Munford, was unusual in its appeal for a neutral stance and its
attacks on both sides for their intolerance.
By the mid-1780s professional actors were touring in America again. In 1787, when the Constitution of the United States was
being written, Royall Tyler wrote The Contrast, the finest American play of the 18th century. This five-act comedy owes much to
The School for Scandal (1777) by British playwright Richard Sheridan. Like Sheridan’s play, The Contrast is a comedy of
manners that satirizes the customs of the upper classes. It compares British and American fashions and values and ultimately sides
with what it sees as American candor and patriotism over British duplicity and artificiality. A masterful element of the play is the
Yankee character Jonathan, whose honest innocence stands in stark contrast to the rumor-mongering and gossiping of the play’s
British characters and the American characters who emulate them.
The 1700s also saw the first American play written by a woman reach the professional stage. The melodramatic comedy Slaves in
Algiers (1794) by Susanna Rowson reflects troubles at that time with pirates along North Africa’s Barbary Coast who interfered with
shipping and ran a white slave trade that involved selling girls and women into prostitution. Although the villain was treated comically,
the conflict and resolution in this play indicated a move toward melodrama, a form of drama that became extremely popular in the 19th
century.
III NATIONHOOD: THE 1800S
American plays, while still a minority, began to appear in the theater repertory in the 19th century. Although American plays were
still styled after British models, their subject matter came to be based on specifically American incidents or themes. In the United
States as in Britain, many plays reflected the influence of romanticism, a European literary and artistic movement. Melodrama, with
its outpourings of emotion, was the most prevalent dramatic form in the 19th century. Gothic melodramas, which emphasized horror,
mystery, and the supernatural, and melodramas with tragic endings appeared regularly in American theaters from the 1790s on—in many
cases adapted or translated from German, French, and British plays.
A American Themes
The first prolific writer of melodramas was William Dunlap, who also translated several German plays for production in the
United States. Dunlap adapted Revolutionary War history in André (1798), a fictionalized account of the final days of British spy
Major John André. In 1803 Dunlap reshaped the play as a musical, Glory of Columbia, in which George Washington is elevated to
divine status. It was an early example of spectacle dominating dramatic content. Dunlap took spectacle even further in A Trip to
Niagara (1828) by making the play’s purpose the duplication of scenic wonders that the audience would recognize, such as
Niagara Falls.
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Replication of local color, as in A Trip to Niagara, became the norm in 19th-century American melodrama and encompassed
details of scenery, dialects, and gestures representative of specific locations; contemporary slang; and historical incidents. An
early example is She Would Be a Soldier (1819) by Mordecai Noah. The play depicts the military spectacle of the War of 1812
between the United States and Britain and features a heroine who disguises herself as a soldier to help the American cause and
join the man she loves.
Although American drama of the 19th century usually followed European models, its subject matter often came from specifically
American situations. Superstition (1824), a romantic tragedy by James Nelson Barker, for example, was set in New England of
1675. It discussed conflicts between Native Americans and white settlers, British interference in local affairs, Puritan xenophobia
(fear and dislike of foreigners), and the idea of witchcraft. Superstition, in which the hero is tried and executed for witchcraft, was
the first of many American plays to explore themes of isolationism, bigotry, and intolerance.
Barker’s The Indian Princess (1808) was the first professionally produced play to explore Native American characters and
themes. It told the story of Pocahontas, a Native American who married an English colonist. A vogue for so-called Indian plays
began in the 1820s and continued through the 1840s. While the Pocahontas story was popular in these plays, the most famous
such drama was Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John Augustus Stone. It was written as a vehicle for
American actor Edwin Forrest, who began in 1828 to offer annual awards for new plays on American themes and gave Metamora
first prize. This melodrama was typical of most Indian plays in its setting in an earlier period of frontier history (the 1670s) and its
characterization of the Native American hero. Metamora was viewed as natural but uncivilized—that is, living in harmony with
nature but unfamiliar with what European settlers saw as civilized ways. The play put forth sentiments in harmony with white
values and ended with Metamora’s inevitable death as the representative of a displaced race that cannot survive with the white
man. By midcentury the waning importance of Indian plays was signaled by works that lampooned them. Irish-born playwright
John Brougham, for example, wrote Metamora, or the Last of the Pollywogs (1847), a musical burlesque that made fun of the
idealized and earnest original.
Also in the 1820s an African American acting troupe called the African Theatre was organized in New York City by dramatist
William Henry Brown. The troupe produced plays by Shakespeare as well as African American plays, including The Drama of
King Shotaway (1823) written by Brown. Although Indian plays of the 1820s and 1830s written by whites preached tolerance and
understanding for Native Americans, white toughs chased Brown’s company off the stage, and no copies survive of the African
American plays it produced.
American romantic plays took various forms. But without the American slant in subject matter, it would be difficult to distinguish
these plays from British melodrama and romantic tragedy. What may be the best American play of the time, Francesca da Rimini
(1855), is a romantic verse tragedy by George Henry Boker about an Italian noblewoman of the 14th century. It presents a villainous
fool, a forbidden love affair, and a grotesque, semi-villainous hunchback in the role of the protagonist. However, nothing in the play’s
characters and setting or its imitation of Shakespearean style marks the play as American.
B Forms of Melodrama
Melodrama was the most pervasive dramatic genre of the 19th century. Melodramas were typically overflowing with emotion, set
in mysterious locations, and peopled with stereotypical characters: heartless villains, heroines in distress, and strong heroes who
faced almost insurmountable odds in rescuing those heroines.
Frontier melodrama enthralled audiences in the first half of the 19th century. Nick of the Woods (1838) by Louisa Medina
capitalized on the spectacle, romance, and danger of the frontier—for example, when the title character escapes his pursuers by
17
plunging over a waterfall in a burning canoe. Playwrights repeatedly glorified backwoodsmen and moved toward making Native
American characters into villains. One of the most successful frontier melodramas, Davy Crockett (1872) by Frank Murdoch,
featured the so-called natural gentleman. This character had developed from an earlier view of the Native American but was now
white and considered a gentleman, despite his life outside society and his uncouth ways.
Another form of melodrama was the temperance play, which illustrated the evils of alcohol and supported a ban on its sale. An
example is The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) by W. H. Smith. Temperance plays had American locations and were
staged frequently from the 1830s until the Civil War (1861-1865), though they continued to be produced until passage in 1917 of
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Most of these plays included scenes of the
acute stages of alcoholism; featured protagonists who are lured into alcoholism by villains; and showed the victims losing
everything until the play’s climax, when they convert to abstinence and regain their life and family. Because the formulas of the
plays accommodated moral lessons important to social crusaders and reformers of the period, temperance plays attracted
audiences formerly opposed to the theater.
Melodramatic comedy appeared frequently in the 1800s, while comedies of manners, so popular in the previous century, were
rare. A notable exception and one of the most successful and well-written plays of the 19th century was Fashion (1845) by Anna
Cora Mowatt. Yet what most tellingly distinguished Fashion from earlier American comedies, such as The Contrast, was its
melodramatic subplot and its heroine in distress. In the play, a newly wealthy woman attempts to marry her unwitting daughter to
a morally corrupt French count. While satirizing Americans who imitate European manners, it also prescribed a cure for this so-
called disease of imitation through extended exposure to a rural environment. Like frontier melodramas, the play urged Americans
to resist British cultural models.
Racial, social, and economic tensions in American society before the Civil War period found a way into popular drama, most
successfully in stage adaptations of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental versions of the
novel filled so many professional stages that this material was performed more often than any other American play of the time. An
1852 adaptation by George Aiken was the most enduring version. Stage adaptations of novels proliferated from the 1850s until
motion pictures took over the tradition in the 20th century. Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), a stage adaptation of the
novel The Quadroon (1856) by Mayne Reid, is the most well-crafted melodrama on the subject of slavery and racism in the mid-19th
century. It combines local color from Louisiana, ethnic mixes, spectacle in the form of a burning steamboat, and a tragic heroine whose
ancestry (a black great-grandparent) prevents her from marrying the man she loves.
C A Shift Toward Realism
Drama after the Civil War was marked by greater realism. Playwrights created plays in three-dimensional settings with characters
speaking authentic-sounding dialogue. Beginning in the late 1870s European theater reached profound levels of psychological
realism, prompted by the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While melodramatic plots still prevailed in late-19th-
century American theater, several American playwrights began to move in the direction of Ibsen. Shenandoah (1888) by Bronson
Howard told the story of two friends who attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point together, fought on opposite sides in
the Civil War, and loved the other’s sister. Despite the plot complications, the play revisited the war with realistic detail and
found enormous popularity with audiences because of its combination of melodramatic tension and comic romance. A master of
melodrama in a realistic style was actor and playwright William Gillette, who excited audiences with his own Civil War thrillers.
In Secret Service (1896), for example, Gillette played a Northern spy working in Virginia.
Other late-19th-century playwrights whose works marked the gradual move toward realism included Steele Mackaye and William
Dean Howells. In Hazel Kirke (1880) by Mackaye, the title character defies her father by marrying the man she loves, rather than
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the man he has chosen for her. A melodrama without a villain, the play was also notable for its more natural dialogue. Howells,
best known as a novelist and critic, advocated realism in literature generally. Many of his short comic plays, such as The Mouse
Trap (1889), were set in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, focused on a single incident involving a married couple, and
incorporated believable dialogue.
Howells also championed the work of other writers, including actor and playwright James Herne, whose work came closest to
Ibsen’s. However, Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) upset too many American audiences with its harsh, raw treatment of
infidelity and marital distress, and its power was recognized only by later generations. Herne had more success with gentler
realism in such plays as Shore Acres (1892), in which two brothers finally gain an understanding of one another in old age.
IV THE MODERN ERA: THE 1900S
Realism continued to be a primary form of dramatic expression in the 20th century, even as experimentation in both the content and the
production of plays became increasingly important. Such renowned American playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and
Arthur Miller reached profound new levels of psychological realism, commenting through individual characters and their situations on
the state of American society in general. As the century progressed, the most powerful drama spoke to broad social issues, such as civil
rights and the AIDS crisis, and the individual’s position in relation to those issues. Individual perspectives in mainstream theater became
far more diverse and more closely reflected the increasingly complex demographics of American society.
A Before World War I: 1900-1914
Realism reached new levels in the prewar work of David Belasco and Clyde Fitch, both of whom directed their own plays.
Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (1905) sentimentally recreated a rural California town of the mid-19th-century Gold Rush
days, while Fitch’s The City (1909) explored the evils of shady business deals and drug addiction. Realistic portrayals of
sensational subjects also flourished in many plays of this era. For example, The Easiest Way (1909), by Eugene Walter,
dramatized the situation of a kept woman whose acceptance of financial support from one man leads to her rejection by the man
she loves.
Social tensions in the United States began to preoccupy dramatists in the years leading up to World War I (1914-1918). An early
example of this was The Great Divide (1906) by William Vaughn Moody. The story of a New England woman’s move to Arizona,
the play juxtaposed a Western, rural sensibility against an Eastern, urban one. The most prolific of prewar playwrights with a
social agenda was Rachel Crothers, who addressed such issues as society’s double standard for men and women in A Man’s World
(1909). The New York Idea (1906), a social satire by Langdon Mitchell, managed to entertain while commenting meaningfully on
divorce. The American family, and its development and disintegration, was a recurring theme of playwrights at this time, and it would
dominate much American playwriting for the rest of the 20th century.
B From World War I to World War II: 1914-1939
With World War I, European developments in modern drama arrived on the American stage in force. A host of American
playwrights were intent on experimenting with dramatic style and form while also writing serious sociopolitical commentary.
From this time forward Britain’s influence, although never absent, became much less important to American drama.
One of the first groups to promote new American drama was the Provincetown Players, founded in 1915 in Provincetown,
Massachusetts. The play Trifles (1916) by Susan Glaspell, a subtle study in sexism, was among its first productions. The company
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was headed by Glaspell’s husband, George Cram Cook, but its star was Eugene O’Neill, the most experimental of American
playwrights in the 1920s. O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) was one of the first plays to introduce expressionism in America.
Expressionism was a movement in the visual, literary, and performing arts that developed in Germany in the early 20th century, in
part in reaction against realism. Expressionism emphasized subjective feelings and emotions rather than a detailed or objective
depiction of reality. The Hairy Ape depicts a rejected ship laborer who feels he belongs nowhere until he confronts an ape in a
zoo. He sets the caged animal free only to be destroyed by it.
American expressionism was distinguished from its German forebears by a searching focus on the inner life of the central
character, whose detailed depiction is in stark contrast to all other characters. The most famous example of American
expressionism is The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice, a play that focuses on the emotional journey of the leading
character, Mr. Zero, after he is replaced at his job by an adding machine. Rice was the first playwright to demonstrate silent film’s
influence on theater in On Trial (1914), which borrowed the flashback technique. Some of the most novel expressionist
experiments employed collage-like scenic effects and cacophonous musical and sound techniques to explore social issues. Such
plays include Processional (1925), a depiction of a West Virginia miners’ strike by John Howard Lawson, and Machinal (1928), a
bleak study by Sophie Treadwell of the destruction of a young woman.
B1 The Glory Days
The 1920s was the most prolific decade for professionally produced plays on the New York City stage. During the so-called glory
days of the 1920s and early 1930s audiences saw incisive and exciting American drama. What Price Glory (1924) by Laurence
Stallings and Maxwell Anderson was set in France during World War I. Its portrayal of two soldiers’ behavior satirized the often-
romanticized vision of warfare. Anderson tried to reinvigorate drama in verse with such plays as Winterset (1935).
During this period O’Neill reached for greatness with vast five-hour plays. Strange Interlude (1928), a nine-act play, explored
through its leading female character the way in which hidden psychological processes affect outward actions. It was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1928. Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy, was a powerful adaptation of three ancient Greek
tragedies by Aeschylus that told the story of Orestes and are known as the Oresteia. Set in New England after the Civil War
(which replaces the Trojan War of the Oresteia), Mourning Becomes Electra recounts the moral, emotional, and physical
destruction of two generations of the Mannon family, emphasizing the far-reaching consequences of adultery, incest, jealousy, and
vengeance. Both plays capture O’Neill’s lifelong investigation of the human condition and the forces that plague humankind. In
1936 O’Neill became the first American playwright to win a Nobel Prize for literature.
Also in the 1920s and early 1930s, comedies of manners made a comeback through delightfully glib, lightly satirical plays such as
Philip Barry’s Holiday (1928), about a man who decides to enjoy his newly made fortune while he is still young. In a later
comedy of manners, End of Summer (1936) by S. N. Behrman, a flighty, middle-aged socialite pursues both fascist and left-wing
men in an attempt to remain a player in a world quickly passing her by.
African American characters became more visible in plays of this period. In the play In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) by Paul Green,
the main character, whose father is white and mother is black, works to help his black community but is defeated by the racial
prejudice of both whites and blacks. In Abraham’s Bosom won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for drama. White playwrights wrote most
of the plays featuring black characters from this period, while black playwrights remained on the margins of the theater world
until the 1950s.
Even the musical was overhauled in the bustling theatrical activity of the 1920s and early 1930s. Most notably, lyricist Oscar
Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern teamed up to create Show Boat (1927), a musical production adapted from a novel of the
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same name by American author Edna Ferber. This was the first American musical to fully integrate a musical score with meaningful and
consistent dialogue and lyrics.
B2 The Great Depression
American theater attendance declined severely in the 1930s and after, primarily as a result of new sound technology that gave
motion pictures a voice. But films were not the only drain on theater attendance. The economic collapse of the Great Depression
of the 1930s closed many theaters permanently. The austerity of the 1930s inspired a new wave of hard-edged drama that tackled
economic suffering, left-wing political ideologies, fascism, and fears of another world war. European agitprop techniques, which
used literature and the arts for political propaganda, animated many plays about the working class. The most famous of these
plays is Waiting for Lefty (1935) by Clifford Odets. In the play taxi drivers decide to go on strike, but the true concern of the play
is a more abstract debate over the pros and cons of capitalism. Odets also wrote one of the finest expressions of 1930s anxieties,
Awake and Sing! (1935), in which a Marxist grandfather commits suicide for his family’s financial benefit, and his grandson
ultimately dedicates himself and the life insurance money to helping his community rather than seeking better opportunities
elsewhere.
The plays of Lillian Hellman also displayed a social conscience. Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), in which a child’s
vengeful anger causes the downfall of a school and the two women who run it, explored the devastating effects of evil in an
intolerant society. Langston Hughes paved the way for acceptance of African American drama with his successful play Mulatto
(1935), about the complexity of race relations. The global scale of fears in the 1930s was reflected in the plays of Robert
Sherwood, whose satirical attack on weapons manufacturers in Idiot’s Delight (1936) predicted the impending world cataclysm of
World War II. It was awarded the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
C Postwar Drama: 1945-1960
During World War II (1939-1945) little drama of note appeared that was neither escapist fare nor wartime propaganda. With the
end of hostilities, however, two playwrights emerged who would dominate dramatic activity for the next 15 years or so: Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams. Miller combined realistic characters and a social agenda while also writing modern tragedy, most
notably in Death of a Salesman (1949), a tale of the life and death of the ordinary working man Willy Loman. Miller’s The
Crucible (1953), a story about the 17th-century Salem witch trials, was a parable for a hunt for Communists in the 1950s led by
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
Tennessee Williams, one of America’s most lyrical dramatists, contributed many plays about social misfits and outsiders. In A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a neurotic, impoverished Southern woman fights to maintain her illusions of gentility when
forced to confront the truth about her life by her sister’s working-class husband. Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which
won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, similarly focused on pretense and its destructiveness and destruction in an unhappy family.
The 1940s also launched lighthearted musicals, most notably a series with lyrics and score by the productive partnership of
librettist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rodgers. Their first collaboration, the love story Oklahoma! (1943), set the
style for musicals until the 1960s with its thorough integration of text and music.
Realism continued strongly in the 1950s with character studies of society’s forgotten people. Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) by
William Inge told the story of the unfulfilled lives of an alcoholic doctor and his wife. O’Neill’s painful autobiographical play,
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), considered his masterpiece by many critics, premiered after the playwright’s death in
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1953. The play chronicled a day in the life of the Tyrone family, during which family members inexorably confront one another’s
flaws and failures.
In the late 1950s African American playwriting received a tremendous boost with the highly acclaimed Raisin in the Sun (1959),
the story of a black family and how they handle a financial windfall. Written by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun was the
first Broadway production to be directed by an African American, Lloyd Richards. Also at the end of the 1950s the semiabsurdist
plays of Edward Albee, starting with Zoo Story (1959), caught the American imagination with their psychological danger and
intelligent dialogue. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) depicted the destructive relationship of a married couple
primarily through their verbal abuse.
D The Mainstream Redefined: The 1960s to the 1990s
The civil rights movement and antiwar protests of the mid-1960s exploded in drama as regional and experimental theaters
proliferated and many talented new dramatists came to the fore. Experimental theater companies, including the Living Theater and
the Open Theater, experimented with group dynamics by placing performers and audience members in the same physical space.
The Serpent (1968) by Jean-Claude Van Itallie, which used this elimination of physical barriers between actors and audience,
recreated Biblical stories through the depiction of modern, often politically charged, events and images, for instance the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. Megan Terry’s plays, such as Calm Down Mother (1965), experimented with traditional
dramatic structure through actor transformations, wherein one actor in any given piece would be playing multiple roles and would
switch between characters without apparent transition. Terry, and other feminist playwrights, challenged contemporary social
codes of behavior in their presentation of different points of view, giving voice to traditionally disenfranchised members of
American culture—for example, lesbian women. Many African American voices had a confrontational edge. In his violent
Dutchman (1964), Amiri Baraka portrayed white society’s fear and hatred of an educated black protagonist. The autobiographical
Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) by Adrienne Kennedy addressed the difficulties of being an American of mixed racial ancestry.
Horror stories of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) found their way into drama for several decades, most notably in Indians (1969) by
Arthur Kopit, Streamers (1976) by David Rabe, and Redwood Curtain (1993) by Lanford Wilson.
Small-scale musicals, such as the modern romance The Fantasticks (1960), written by Tom Jones with music by Harvey Schmidt,
and the antiwar rock musical Hair (1967), by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, became long-running hits and continued to
influence plays in the late 20th century. Plays that dealt openly with homosexuality also found large audiences, starting in the
1960s. They included Boys in the Band (1968) by Mart Crowley, Torch Song Trilogy (1981) by Harvey Fierstein, and Love!
Valour! Compassion! (1995) by Terrence McNally. Neil Simon emerged as the premiere playwright of comedies for several
decades with such works as The Odd Couple (1965), about two bachelors living together, and the autobiographical Brighton
Beach Memoirs (1983), about a lower-middle-class Jewish family.
Sam Shepard and David Mamet loomed large in American drama of the 1970s, much as Miller and Williams had in the 1950s.
Shepard’s hard-edged drama, which explored the American family and the often-destructive myths of the American West, was
most biting in Buried Child (1978) and True West (1980). Buried Child won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Mamet created a
darkly comic style that imitated the fragmented speech of the inarticulate and employed profanity as nearly every part of speech.
Mamet’s American Buffalo (1975) used a Chicago junk shop as a symbol of American capitalism, and his Pulitzer-Prize winning
Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) depicted the moral decay brought about by the win-at-all-costs ethic of the American salesman.
The movement known as postmodernism found expression in the American theater chiefly through staging and direction, rather
than through the plays themselves. Postmodern staging and design tended toward the minimal and sometimes incorporated images
from earlier plays and productions. Postmodern directors sought to uncover multiple layers of meaning in a play. These
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approaches were sometimes effectively appropriated by feminist playwrights. Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and The Conduct of
Life (1985), both by Maria Irene Fornés, used spatial experiments, such as moving the audience from room to room instead of
changing stage scenery. Wendy Wasserstein more safely explored the complex social issues raised by the women’s movement in
Uncommon Women and Others (1977) and The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
In the late 1970s Lanford Wilson had success with realistic ensemble pieces, which had large casts and no one central character.
His works, such as The Fifth of July (1978), perpetuated the ensemble tradition of Odets, Williams, and Inge. American musicals
also enjoyed experimental developments in the work of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. His romantic A Little Night
Music (1973) was written entirely in three-four time, and his Into the Woods (1987) refashioned traditional fairy tales for adults.
By the 1980s many American playwrights found themselves tied to topics of current interest. The Normal Heart (1985) by Larry
Kramer confronted the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis. ‘Night Mother (1983) by Marsha Norman discussed the question
of when suicide might be justifiable. In his M. Butterfly (1988), David Henry Hwang artfully examined the famous opera Madama
Butterfly (1904), by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, and the ways in which Western civilization feminizes Eastern civilization.
In the 1980s two new playwrights repeatedly took audiences into new territory, while expressing themselves in language as far
apart as their subject matter. August Wilson set about creating a history of the African American experience in the 20th century in
narrowly focused domestic dramas. Fences (1983) portrayed conflicts between father and son as the result of their coming of age
in different eras. The Piano Lesson (1990) focused on conflicts between a brother and sister over selling a family heirloom to buy
the land that they work and that their ancestors worked as slaves. Both plays won Pulitzer Prizes. Eric Overmyer harnessed
sophisticated language, satire, and vibrant theatricality to dissect a corrupt social and political infrastructure in On the Verge
(1986) and In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe (1988).
A central event in drama of the 1990s was the two-part Angels in America by Tony Kushner. The two parts, titled Millennium
Approaches (1991) and Perestroika (1993), won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993; Tony Awards for best play followed in 1991 and 1994.
Angels in America follows eight characters over a six-year period, chronicling the effects of AIDS on their lives. Through its
subject matter, bright humor, and visual theatricality Angels in America inspired audiences across the country.
The 1990s also saw the return of exciting domestic drama by playwrights assumed by many to have finished their careers: Arthur
Miller’s Broken Glass (1994) and Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (1994) received popular and critical acclaim. Younger
established playwrights continued to challenge audiences, mostly in small or regional theaters. Mamet’s Oleanna (1992)
investigated sexual harassment. Overmyer’s Dark Rapture (1992) combined crime, greed, and sex in the style of motion-picture
thrillers. Wilson’s Seven Guitars (1995) revisited the black experience in 1940s America. Wasserstein’s An American Daughter
(1997) looked at gender politics in Washington, D.C. Sondheim’s musicals became darker in his treatment of presidential
assassination in Assassins (1990) and out-of-control love and guilt in Passion (1994).
E Recent Trends
The direction of American drama presented troubling questions as the 20th century drew to a close. Economic woes of regional
and experimental theaters resulted in a multitude of plays with a single setting and no more than two or three characters, which
made them less expensive to produce. The aging of American theater audiences and competition from other forms of
entertainment also endangered drama’s future. Theaters were rejecting many large-scale plays as too risky and unlikely to draw
big enough audiences to cover production expenses. Consequently, musicals, which were reliable crowd-pleasers, and revivals
dominated Broadway theater seasons. Almost all nonmusical plays originated in regional theaters. The expense of touring
productions meant that most new plays reached a geographically diverse audience only if they were adapted to motion pictures or
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television. Many playwrights appeared to write with a film or television adaptation in mind, a tendency accentuated by the fact
that motion-picture companies owned many theaters and producing organizations.
Although experimentation continued and poignant subject matter was still addressed in some quarters, many playwrights worried
that American theater had become too conservative in its mainstream and too specialized in its smaller venues. The chief concern
as the 20th century ended was whether the 21st century would provide enough opportunities for strong new dramatic voices.
Contributed by: Ronald Wainscott
Prose
I INTRODUCTION
American Literature: Prose, fiction and nonfiction of the American colonies and the United States, written in the English language
from about 1600 to the present. This literature captures America’s quest to understand and define itself. From the beginning
America was unique in the diversity of its inhabitants; over time they arrived from all parts of the world. Although English
quickly became the language of America, regional and ethnic dialects have enlivened and enriched the country’s literature almost
from the start. Today American prose encompasses a variety of traditions and voices that share a common context: the
geographical region now known as the United States. Native American literatures, which were largely oral at the time of colonial
settlement, stand apart as a separate tradition that is itself strong and varied.
For its first 200 years American prose reflected the settlement and growth of the American colonies, largely through histories,
religious writings, and expedition and travel narratives. Biography also played an important role, especially in America’s search
for native heroes. Fiction appeared only after the colonies gained independence, when the clamor for a uniquely American
literature brought forth novels based on events in America’s past. With a flowering of prose in the mid-1800s, the young nation
found its own voice. By then fiction had become the dominant literary genre in America. In the 20th century, American literature
took its place on the world stage and began to exert influence on other literatures. For a discussion of American drama or poetry,
see American Literature: Drama and American Literature: Poetry.
II BEGINNINGS: THE 1500S AND 1600S
When European explorers first saw North America, Native American cultures had rich, established literatures. Legends, folktales,
and other forms of literature were preserved in oral form and passed down from one generation to the next through ceremonies
and other community gatherings, as well as within family groups and other informal settings. Much of this literature disappeared
with the destruction of Native American cultures that followed white settlement of the continent. Among the richest set of Native
American stories that survive are creation myths, descriptions of the beginnings of the universe and the world and of the origin of
humankind. In Native American cultures, these myths served purposes similar to those served in Judeo-Christian cultures by the
stories in the biblical book of Genesis. The creation myths of Native American cultures share with the Genesis accounts a concern
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with relationships among the divine, the human, and the world of animals and plants; the reasons behind those relationships; and
the saga of the universe before the advent of humanity.
Long before settlers arrived in America, explorers reported on their voyages to the continent. Through the 1600s American literature
grew from exploration narratives to include histories of settlement—both natural histories of the land and social histories of the people.
Religious writings expressed the values and beliefs of American colonists.
A Exploration Narratives
The earliest literature about America consists of impressions of America recorded by European explorers after they returned
home. Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci provided some of the earliest European descriptions of the American continent in letters
and maps from an expedition in 1499 and 1500; these had appeared in print by 1505. In 1507 German geographer and
cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published Cosmographiae introductio, a collection of documents that included letters written
by Italian-Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus to his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Such texts were
circulated among explorers and high-ranking political officials who made decisions about funding further expeditions.
The first works published in English about America also recorded discoveries and solicited support for new voyages. Before 1600
Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Hakluyt, Thomas Harriot, and John White had published accounts of discoveries. Although Raleigh's
narratives focused on the land now called Venezuela, he became a key figure in the history of the British in North America when
he founded the first English colony in America, the Roanoke Colony, in 1585 under the sponsorship of Queen Elizabeth I, on an
island off the coast of what is now North Carolina.
In support of Raleigh, Thomas Harriot wrote A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), primarily to
encourage the queen's continued support of the Roanoke Colony, whose first settlement had just failed. Harriot's text included
descriptions of the native population as well as observations of plant and animal life near the colony. Richard Hakluyt never
traveled to America, but his writing was instrumental in encouraging the queen to invest more money in voyages of exploration.
He collected diaries, letters, ships’ logs, and commercial reports, mostly from his English compatriots but also from Portuguese,
Spanish, and French voyages. Hakluyt published these writings in Diverse Voyages Touching the Discovery of America (1582)
and Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589-1590). In these compilations,
Hakluyt made grand statements about British imperialism and for the first time claimed America as properly belonging to
England.
A later compilation by Hakluyt included The Fifth Voyage of M. John White into the West Indies and Parts of America called
Virginia, in the Year 1590 (1593), which had been written by John White. White’s work centered on a great mystery. He had led a
group of colonists who founded a second colony on Roanoke Island, and after the birth of the first British child in the Americas, White’s
granddaughter Virginia Dare, he returned to England. Upon his return to Roanoke, all signs of the colony were gone. The fate of the
colony remains a mystery to this day.
B Histories
The writings of Captain John Smith, an explorer whose travels took him up and down the eastern seaboard of America, represent a
shift from exploration narrative toward early history. Exploration narratives typically record the thrills and terrors of encountering
the unknown, and early histories of America also capture this sense of novelty. Early histories, however, were written primarily
by settlers rather than by explorers. They generally sought religious explanations—chiefly God’s will—for the dangers and
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challenges of colonial life. Although Smith still wrote to gain funding for further voyages, he had begun to record his observations
as a historian in A Description of New England (1616).
William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, wrote his History of Plymouth Plantation from 1630 to 1647,
although it was not published until 1856. Earlier accounts published in England— Good News from New England (1624) by
Edward Winslow and Mourt's Relation (1622) by an unknown author—provided extensive source material for Bradford when he
recalled the earliest years of his colony. John Winthrop, who served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1630 to
1649, kept extensive journals that were published nearly 200 years later as History of New England from 1630 to 1649 (1825-
1826). Another important historian of early America was Thomas Morton, whose New English Canaan (1634-1635) used humor in
portraying what he considered to be the overbearing and intolerant qualities of the Puritans.
C Religious Writings
Histories of early America, especially in New England, were filled with references to the Bible and to God's will. All events could
be explained from this religious perspective: Storms and sicknesses might represent God's wrath; a bountiful harvest might signify
God's blessing. Given the Puritans’ sense of a direct relationship with God, it is not surprising that sermons and other religious
writings dominated literature in America in the 1600s. John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams, and John Winthrop were
among the most prominent theologians in the first generation of settlers. They were followed by the Mather family—Richard
Mather, his son Increase Mather, and Increase's son Cotton Mather—in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Religious writings
recorded strenuous debates about church doctrine, such as the role of free-will and good works in an individual’s salvation,
although certain issues discussed by the theologians went beyond religion. Williams’s A Key into the Language of America
(1643), for example, was remarkable for its efforts to understand America's indigenous peoples.
Other contact between natives and settlers was less friendly. Increase Mather wrote a history of the first sustained conflict
between Native Americans and colonial settlers, known as King Philip's War (after a Wampanoag chief, Metacomet, whom the
colonists called Philip). In A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England (1676), Mather urged his community to
reform so that God would not subject them to more trials of that sort.
Mather was also instrumental in bringing to press The Sovereignty and Goodness of God … A Narrative of the Captivity and
Restoration of Mary Rowlandson (1682). This work is a firsthand account by a colonist who was taken captive by Narragansett
Indians during King Philip’s War. It presents a dramatic tale of suffering and of Rowlandson's efforts to make sense of that
suffering. Her story became the model for a new genre of early American literature: captivity narratives. Such accounts became
staples of American prose and eventually provided material for American fiction. While still religious in tone and purpose,
captivity narratives emphasized the experiences of individuals rather than the progress of nations. They also incorporated many of
the fundamentals of fiction, making use of sympathetic characters, dramatic action and setting, and vividly portrayed sources of
evil in stereotypic renditions of Indian savagery.
The Salem witch trials of 1692 constituted another dark period in early American history, as accusations of witchcraft in a
Massachusetts town resulted in the execution of 14 women and 6 men. Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, Relating to
Witchcraft and Possessions (1689), although written before the Salem trials, indicated a growing interest in the occult on the part
of religious leaders. Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) documented the events of the witch trials. Robert Calef's
More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700) offered a biting response to Mather and the hysteria of religious leaders involved in
the Salem witch-hunt. As a result of his interest in witchcraft and of Calef's scathing accusations, Cotton Mather tends to be
remembered as a witch-hunter, although his own writings suggest a relatively moderate stance on the subject .
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III TOWARD INDEPENDENCE: THE 1700S
During the 1700s, American prose underwent tremendous changes in form, theme, and purpose as the colonies moved toward declaring
their independence from Great Britain. As the century began, prose remained primarily religious in its endeavors to make sense of what
still seemed a decidedly new world. As the century wore on, political thought—especially regarding the relationship between the
colonies and the mother country—increasingly occupied American writers.
A Religious Writings
American religious writing in the 1700s reached a height of drama in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), the best-
known sermon by clergyman Jonathan Edwards. The strength of this appeal to religious fear left his congregation in tears. A
powerful orator, Edwards led a revival movement known as the Great Awakening to revitalize religious practice in the colonies.
Edwards's ideas were a complicated mix, shaped not only by his study and love of the Puritans but also by 17th- and 18th-century
European philosophy. Some of Edwards's best religious works were also philosophical investigations. In A Careful and Strict
Enquiry into … Notions of … Freedom of Will … (1754), Edwards argues that human actions are predetermined by God, thus
negating the notion of free will.
Cotton Mather remained an important literary figure in the 18th century. His Magnalia Christi Americana (The Great Works of
Christ in America, 1702) is an epic history of New England that celebrates the founding generation of Puritans. Like his earlier
works, it is profoundly religious; however, its size, scope, and interest in the human side of the Puritan founders marked a new
achievement in American literary history. Mather's prolific career included writings on science and medicine as well as theology
and history. His Sentiments on the Small Pox Inoculated (1721) was instrumental in introducing the smallpox vaccine to New
England.
As Mather's career indicates, the scope of American prose began to broaden after 1700. In The Negro Christianized (1706),
Mather also became one of the first Americans to address issues of race by arguing that Africans should receive Christian
education and be allowed to join the church. Slavery had been introduced to the American colonies in the early 17th century. By
the early 18th century, antislavery sentiments were rising. In 1700 New England judge Samuel Sewall published a strong
antislavery tract, The Selling of Joseph, which drew on both legal and biblical references.
B Travel Narratives
A new genre, the travel narrative, would become especially influential late in the 1700s. One of the first was written by a
schoolteacher, Sarah Kemble Knight. The Journal of Madam Knight, written in 1704 although not published until 1825, gives a
lively account of her journey through hostile Indian territory. Knight was less interested in religious explanations for her
experience than Rowlandson had been some 20 years earlier, and more concerned with conveying the actual dangers of her day-
to-day existence. Her journal is one of a long line of travel narratives that includes Travels Through the Interior Parts of North
America (1778) by Jonathan Carver and Travels Through North and South Carolina … (1791) by William Bartram. Travel stories
often blended observations on nature and landscape with tales of personal courage and achievement.
A book similar to the travel journal in its descriptions of experiences in a new land was Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
by French writer Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur. This work also anticipated American fiction, particularly in the creation
of its distinctive first-person narrator, Farmer James. Written toward the end of the American Revolution, Letters from an
American Farmer was an interesting effort to describe and define what it meant to be an American.
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C Journalism
The first successful American newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, was founded in 1704; it was joined by the Boston Gazette in
1719. At a time when newspaper journalism was concerned primarily with reporting political events, the New-England Courant,
started by James Franklin in 1721, became the first newspaper to include literary entertainment. Franklin’s younger brother
Benjamin Franklin published humorous social commentary in the Courant under the pen name and persona of Silence Dogood,
the widow of a minister. Magazines also appeared for the first time in the colonies during the mid-1700s. Before 1800 magazines
were concerned primarily with measuring America’s developing culture against the British model.
During the 1700s Boston and Philadelphia became centers of publishing in addition to being political and commercial hubs.
Benjamin Franklin was a key figure in establishing a vibrant intellectual community in Philadelphia. In 1727 he and a group of
friends established a men’s reading club in Philadelphia called the Junto. Members shared printed works and discussed topics of
the day. Such reading and discussion clubs became an important part of American literary culture, particularly at colleges, but
Franklin’s was especially influential because it evolved into a prototype for the lending library . By 1729 Franklin had started his
own printing house and was editing and publishing a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. In the 1740s his press released the
first novel published in America, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded by British author Samuel Richardson.
Women organized literary circles in the 1750s and 1760s. These groups, known as salons, resembled men’s reading clubs. They
also encouraged members to compose their own work, mainly poetry.
D Political Writing
By the mid-1700s American prose was first and foremost political. Many 18th-century thinkers believed in the ability of reason to
control human destiny and improve the human condition, an enormous change from the belief in predestination that characterized
the 17th century. As a result, the 18th century was known as the Age of Enlightenment. In the American colonies Enlightenment
thought was expressed chiefly through political discourse. American thinkers asserted a growing belief in the supremacy of reason
over church doctrine; they also emphasized the importance of the individual and freedom over and above established authorities
and institutions. America's great Enlightenment writers—Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson—also played major roles
in the American Revolution.
Franklin began his literary career as a publisher but made his greatest contribution to American literature as a writer. In his
writing Franklin advocated hard work as the key to success. His views come across clearly in the maxims, proverbs, and
homespun wisdom that filled his Poor Richard's Almanack, which was published annually from 1733 to 1758 under the pen name
Richard Saunders. Franklin’s almanac sayings were collected in The Way to Wealth (1757) in the form of a speech by a character
named Father Abraham. It is one of Franklin’s great statements on the self-made man. Like much of Franklin's writing, the work
reached an enormous audience through translations into European languages. Franklin’s Autobiography was first published in full
in 1868, 78 years after his death; it is considered an American classic because of its portrait of Franklin and American life during
his time.
Thomas Paine became a leading figure in the cause of American independence with the pamphlet Common Sense (1776). This
enormously popular political document asserted that the American colonies received no advantage from Great Britain and that
every consideration of common sense called for them to establish an independent republican government. Written in a
straightforward style using the language of the common person, Common Sense was published six months before the Declaration
of Independence was adopted. At that point, most colonists still believed that their grievances with Great Britain could be settled
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peaceably. Paine profoundly shook this belief, insisting that there was no turning back and making his readers feel that each
person had the power and responsibility to participate in the cause of revolution.
Although it lacked the searing rhetoric of Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence was a crucial achievement in both
politics and American prose. It was structured in the form of an assertion that was then proven through specific examples. The
declaration was written by a committee made up of Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston,
though Jefferson was ultimately responsible for most of the phrasing. The declaration and the Constitution of the United States
(1787) were key statements of American freedom, but as collaborative documents they necessitated compromises to satisfy all of
their authors. One of the most significant compromises was the absence of any mention of slavery. Slavery was antithetical to the
ideals of the American Revolution, but for the sake of unity with the Southern colonies, whose economy was rooted in slavery, no
protest was made against it as a social evil.
A final flurry of political writing at the close of the century arose from the debate over ratification of the Constitution. Federalists
supported the strong central government outlined in the Constitution, while an anti-Federalist faction opposed it. A series of
essays supporting ratification was published in 1787 and 1788 and circulated in pamphlets. The essays, later published as The
Federalist, were written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay.
E Voices Outside the Mainstream
While the debate on individual rights and government powers went on, some whose rights were not under debate spoke up. From
1774 to 1783 Abigail Adams conducted an extensive correspondence with her husband, John Adams, while they were separated
during the Revolution and its aftermath. These letters, which were published as Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife,
Abigail (1876), describe in detail everyday life in the young nation. Remarkably, in letters written during the drafting of the
Declaration of Independence, she asked that women's rights and status be considered as part of this statement of human rights.
Her requests were not radical by today's standards, but they constituted bold steps for her day. Judith Sargent Murray, a Boston
writer, vigorously argued against the notion that women were not equipped for work in the public sphere. Her essay “On the
Equality of the Sexes” was published in 1790 in the Massachusetts Magazine.
Slave narratives recorded another side of life in America. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789) was one of the first autobiographical narratives by a slave, beginning with his
childhood in Africa. The slave narrative gained strength during the 19th century as slavery became a prominent topic of political
discussion. Equiano's title alone made a significant statement: With it he reclaimed his African identity (Olaudah Equiano) and
subordinated the slave name (Gustavus Vassa) he was given by his captors.
Conversion to Christianity provided a focus for several early American autobiographies, including Equiano's and the first-known Native
American autobiography in English. “A Short Narrative of My Life” was written in 1768 by Samson Occum, a member of the Mohegan
tribe who became a Presbyterian minister; it was not published in its entirety until 1982.
F The First American Fiction
American fiction became established only after the American Revolution. The Power of Sympathy (1789), a tragic love story by
William Hill Brown, is generally considered the first American novel. Charles Brockden Brown is among the best-remembered
novelists of the period. His Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) is a cleverly plotted horror story that emphasizes dark,
supernatural visions. Other notable novels of the time include Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), a tragic romance that
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involves a young woman’s journey from England to the colonies during the Revolution; Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants (1793), the
story of an English family whose life improves in America; and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797), a novel in the form of letters.
IV NATIONHOOD: THE 1800S
In the early 1800s America faced a difficult challenge: how to create its own culture. The religious and political writers of the
17th and 18th centuries offered some guidance. Cotton Mather, for example, had argued for the uniqueness of America's mission.
But none of those writers could satisfy the growing American appetite for prose fiction focused on American issues and grown
from American imaginations. Calls for an American literature began during the Revolution and became more frequent and urgent
as independence was assured.
Over the course of the 19th century the country progressed from an agricultural economy concentrated on the Eastern seaboard to an
industrialized nation that spanned the continent. With the dramatic changes in the nation came dramatic changes in its literature. When
the century opened, only a handful of novels had been written, but by mid-century American fiction rivaled the best in the world.
Biography and history remained strong; religious writing, on the other hand, had substantially declined in importance.
A Manifestations of Nationhood
Among the first manifestations of nationhood was the recognition that America had its own language and that American English
differed from British English. Pioneering lexicographer Noah Webster led a call for uniquely American traditions in language and
literature, and he undertook the massive project of developing an American dictionary. He had already advocated changes in
American spellings of English words in such writings as Dissertations on the English Language (1789). Webster published his
first dictionary in 1806. The first edition of his major work, American Dictionary of the English Language, came out in 1828. What
made this work radical was his insistence on defining words based not only on traditional English usage but also on American variations
in usage, called Americanisms, and his inclusion of at least 5000 new words not previously recognized by English dictionaries.
A1 History
Gaining independence also provided the United States with a history of its own. Samuel Miller’s A Brief Retrospect of the
Eighteenth Century (1803) and Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution
(1805) were both substantial histories of 18th-century America, including the Revolution. Many of the histories of America from
the early and mid-1800s achieved additional drama through their authors’ interpretations of the growing greatness of the nation.
Foremost among these patriotic and romantic histories was the monumental ten-volume History of the United States (1834-1876)
by George Bancroft, who is often called the father of American history.
A2 Early Fiction: Irving
Local histories, like general histories, were also of interest in the early part of the century. History of New York (1809), by
Washington Irving but ostensibly written by Irving's famous comic creation, the Dutch American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker,
offered a surprising twist on standard local history. A satire on the exaggeration and earnestness often found in local histories, this
work seemed to reflect America's desire to break away from established forms of writing and to engage more fully in the world of
imaginative literature.
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Literary magazines proliferated in the early 1800s, bearing witness in yet another way to a public appetite for fiction. Port Folio
was founded in Philadelphia in 1801 and discussed both politics and literature. From 1807 to 1808 Irving and James Kirke
Paulding published the literary magazine Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and
Others, which was devoted to satirical writings.
Through his satires, sketches, and short stories, Irving was one of the most influential American authors of the first half of the
19th century. Among Irving’s best-known legends is “Rip Van Winkle,” in which a man from New York’s Catskill Mountains
falls asleep before the beginning of the Revolution and wakes up after it is over to find his world happily transformed. In “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” an awkward and naive schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane is driven from his small New York town
by a faked headless horseman. First published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), this story and others like
it provided American legends and helped shape an American folklore.
A3 Westward Expansion
Travel narratives became increasingly popular, especially as the country expanded westward. With the Louisiana Purchase, the
United States took possession of a vast, unmapped territory. Early accounts of expeditions made in the name of future national
expansion include Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and Through the Western Parts of Louisiana (1810) by
explorer Zebulon Pike, and History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the
Missouri (1814). The latter work, which emphasizes the idea of the explorer as hero, was compiled by diplomat Nicholas Biddle
from the notes of the expedition.
America’s westward expansion also generated a sizable collection of political prose, especially in light of manifest destiny—a
belief that the country’s territorial expansion was not only inevitable but also divinely ordained. The term manifest destiny was
coined by writer John Louis O'Sullivan in "Annexation," an article that argued for the annexation of Texas and appeared in the
July-August 1845 issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Other articles in that issue acknowledged that as the
United States expanded, Native American cultures were being lost.
With westward expansion came displacement of Native Americans. From the early 1800s on, anguished speeches were presented
by Native American leaders who faced a bleak future. Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, delivered one such speech to the
Iroquois nation in 1806. Other speeches addressed to American officials in Washington, D.C., pointed to the destruction of Native
American cultures as the United States expanded.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnologist and geologist, preserved a great deal of information about Native Americans in the Great
Lakes region. He married a Native American, immersed himself in Native American cultures, and studied several tribal languages.
From the 1820s to the 1850s Schoolcraft wrote at length on Native Americans. Although his writings gave a white man’s views of
native peoples, they preserved many materials, including a collection of Ojibwa and Ottawa legends and myths in Algic
Researches (1839). One of Schoolcraft’s most important works was the monumental study Historical and Statistical Information
Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (6 volumes, 1851-1857), which later
writers used as source material about Native Americans.
A4 Biography
Biography and autobiography served the new nation’s sense of its history and its need for heroes in the 1800s. In some cases these
genres worked explicitly, as did some histories, to develop a mythic stature for American heroes, and biography began to merge
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with legend. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were favorite figures for legendary biography. Boone was introduced to audiences
by John Filson's history, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, in 1784. His character was further developed
by Timothy Flint, whose Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone (1833) portrayed Boone as a hero similar to the fictional character
Natty Bumppo, created by James Fenimore Cooper. Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834), attributed to Crockett,
mythologized another early frontier hero.
The Native American experience also began to be told in autobiography. William Apes was the first Native American to produce
extensive writings in English. In A Son of the Forest (1829) he described his conversion to Christianity and his participation in the
War of 1812 between the United States and Britain.
The greatest development in 19th-century American biography was the slave narrative. The tensions produced by slavery in
America had already become apparent by the Revolution, but they heightened considerably in the 1800s, right up until the
American Civil War (1861-1865). Frederick Douglass created a masterpiece of the genre with Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a work that he revised and enlarged several times for later editions. While describing his life
as a slave and his struggle toward freedom, Douglass emphasized the primary role that literacy played in opening opportunities
for African Americans. He represented his ability to write his own story as the ultimate act of a free man. Harriet Jacobs offered a
different but no less horrifying portrayal of the evils of slavery in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). In the book, Jacobs
told of the sexual abuse experienced by young female slaves. Prior to the Civil War, former slaves who wished to tell their stories
found access to publishers through connections with white abolitionists. Douglass's text included a preface, written by abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison, that encouraged the reader to trust the author. Another important work about the situation of black
Americans was The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) by Martin
Robison Delany. In this work Delany argued for a separatist state for blacks; some historians now consider him to be the first black
nationalist.
B American Romanticism
During the late 1700s and early 1800s, romanticism was the dominant literary mode in Europe. In reaction to the Enlightenment and its
emphasis on reason, romanticism stressed emotion, the imagination, and subjectivity of approach. Until about 1870 romanticism
influenced the major forms of American prose: transcendentalist writings, historical fiction, and sentimental fiction.
B1 Transcendentalism
In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of romanticism. The

movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts, and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Like romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the
transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human
imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their
chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature (1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school
and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His other key transcendentalist works include The American Scholar (1837),
a volume in which he addressed the intellectual’s duty to culture, and "Self-Reliance" (1841), an essay in which he asserted the
importance of being true to one’s own nature.
Henry David Thoreau, a friend and protégé of Emerson’s, put transcendentalist ideas into action. Walden; or, Life in the Woods
(1854) is his journal of a two-year experiment in living as simply and self-reliantly as possible in a small hut that he built on the
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shores of Walden Pond, near Concord. His essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849) is a statement against government coercion that
records his short stay in jail after he refused to pay a tax in support of the Mexican War (1846-1848). In this essay Thoreau
asserted that each individual indirectly supported the wrongs of a nation—for example, slavery or war—simply by paying taxes
and voting for government representatives. To express disapproval of government policies, he advocated passive resistance, or
nonviolent protest through noncompliance.
Other influential transcendentalists included educator and philosopher Bronson Alcott, whose interests centered on education
reform, and social reformer Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was a major early work of American
feminism. Along with Emerson and critic and reformer George Ripley, Fuller founded The Dial in 1840. This periodical was
dedicated to publishing the verse and philosophical writings of the transcendentalists.
B2 Historical Fiction: Cooper, Hawthorne, and Others
The self-confidence and nationalism of the newly created United States of America energized fiction as well as nonfiction.
Historical fiction took off first, influenced by Sir Walter Scott, an enormously popular British writer who established the genre.
Historical fiction was an expression of romanticism in its probings of human nature and emotions and its romanticizing of the
American past and the American frontier. The first generations of Puritans in New England, the Salem witchcraft trials, white
conflicts with Native Americans, and the American Revolution provided popular subjects for American historical fiction. One of
the earliest examples of the genre was Samuel Woodworth's The Champions of Freedom (1816). James Fenimore Cooper was the
first American master of the form, however.
In Cooper's first published novel, Precaution (1820), he consciously imitated British fiction of the time, especially the novels of
Jane Austen. With The Spy (1821), however, Cooper began his career as a specifically American novelist. This best-seller is set in
New York during the American Revolution and has as its main character a spy working for General George Washington. The
Pioneers (1823) is one of a series of five novels called the Leather-Stocking Tales. Over the course of the Leather-Stocking Tales,
Cooper developed one of America's first fictional heroes, the white frontiersman Natty Bumppo. In the tales, Bumppo bridges
Native American and white cultures through his friendships, while articulating the consequences of further white settlement for
Native Americans. Staking a claim for the importance of American history and landscape as an imaginative resource, Cooper
continued to write until his death in 1851, profoundly influencing the direction of American prose. Another author who
contributed to American historical fiction before mid-century was Lydia Maria Child. Her novel Hobomok (1824) focuses on the
relationship between a white woman and a Native American man.
New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was also a master of historical fiction. Influenced to some extent by transcendentalism,
Hawthorne’s views of the movement were mixed. His novel The Blithedale Romance (1852) is loosely based on a
transcendentalist experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. Still, Hawthorne’s work, with its deep ethical concern about sin,
punishment, and atonement, is less optimistic than most transcendental writing. Hawthorne was a descendant of one of the judges
at the Salem witch trials, and he set many of his works in Puritan New England and during early crises in American history. The
Scarlet Letter (1850), a story of rebellion within an emotionally constricted Puritan society, is an undisputed masterpiece in its
powerful psychological insights. Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) collects some of his best short stories and sketches, including
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” and “Young Goodman Brown.”
The first African American to publish a novel was William Wells Brown, who combined historical fiction, national legend, and
the increasingly divisive subject of race. His novel Clotel (1853) is the fictional account of a child born to Thomas Jefferson and a
slave. It was intended to point out the distance between American ideals of liberty and the actual living conditions of American
slaves, who also were sons and daughters of that promised liberty. Harriet E. Wilson was the first African American woman to
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publish a novel. Our Nig (1859) focuses on the injustices faced by free blacks in the North, a topic not readily acknowledged at the
time.
B3 Good and Evil: Melville and Poe
Herman Melville became a close friend of Hawthorne’s after Melville moved to Massachusetts in 1850. Melville, who was born in
New York City, worked on a number of ships after his father's financial ruin and death and based several novels on his voyages.
Redburn (1849) was inspired by his first voyage as a cabin boy on a ship to Liverpool, England, and White-Jacket (1850) by his
last voyage. He also worked on several whaling ships and witnessed the violence of life at sea. These tales of exotic travel
adventures brought Melville early success. Ironically, Melville's popularity dropped after the publication of the book now
considered a masterpiece of American fiction, Moby Dick (1851). Far removed from his earlier travel narratives, Moby Dick was
dedicated to Hawthorne, and like Hawthorne's work was darkly metaphysical, symbolic, and complex. The story of the captain of
a whaling boat, Ahab, and his relentless hunt for one whale, Moby Dick is also about the mysterious forces of the universe that
overwhelm the individual who seeks to confront and struggle against them. Written in a powerful and varied narrative style, the
book includes a magnificent sermon delivered before the ship’s sailing, soliloquies by the ships’ mates, and passages of a
technical nature, such as a chapter about whales.
While transcendentalism was fundamentally optimistic, celebrating human creativity and the beauty of nature, Hawthorne and
Melville demonstrated that asking questions about the nature of the universe could lead to answers illuminating the darker side of
life. In the depths of the imagination, they saw hints of unfathomable evil rather than rays of divine light. Edgar Allan Poe was
another writer who inverted transcendentalist promises. In his disturbing prose and poetry, Poe explored the nature of humanity
and frightened readers with what he found. His tales are obsessed with death, madness, and violence. Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque (1840) ranks among the triumphs of romantic horror. Poe also invented the detective story with such works as “The Murders
in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). In Poe’s longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), a
sea journey to the South Pole suggests other, more primal journeys—to the center of the mind, to the source of all evil, and toward an all-
encompassing void.
B4 Sentimental Fiction: Stowe
The sentimental novel is a major form of American fiction that grew out of the responses of white writers to the abuses of slavery.
The most famous and historically most significant work of American sentimental fiction is Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) by Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Sentimental fiction aimed to arouse pity for the oppressed and offered a natural form for novelists writing about
the evils of slavery. In Stowe's novel and in novels that followed in this tradition, pity for the oppressed did not necessitate
revolutionary change but rather called for an outpouring of Christian love. Sentimental fiction elicited this “Christian” sympathy
from Northern white women in particular by demonstrating how the slave system violated the most basic bonds of humanity, such
as that between mother and child.
Some sentimental fiction focused on gender by showing the dangers faced by young women, who might be driven to compromise
their morals as a result of extreme poverty or the loss of their family and subsequent loss of social position. One such novel was
Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850).
C The Civil War and After
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President Abraham Lincoln is credited with having humorously described Stowe as "the little woman who wrote the book that
made this great war." Uncle Tom’s Cabin was powerful as propaganda and expressed the deep antislavery feelings of the North.
Lincoln himself was among the greatest American orators of the 19th century and can be included in the roster of significant
American writers because of the measured succinctness of his prose. Moved to despair by the tragic conflict of the Civil War
(1861-1865), he turned American oratory away from the ornate rhetoric of statesman Daniel Webster to the inspirational
simplicity of his 1863 Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address in 1865. Few other American public figures have
equaled Lincoln's command of forceful, precise, and inspiring prose.
Two movements became increasingly important in American fiction after the Civil War: regionalism and realism. As the country
expanded in area and population, regional differences became more apparent and of greater interest, especially to people in the
established cultural centers of the East. Increasing urbanization and the expansion of the railroads had made more of the country
accessible. Regional literature would do the same. Realism emerged as a literary movement in Europe in the 1850s. In reaction to
romanticism, it emphasized the everyday and through detailed description re-created specific locations, incidents, and social classes. Like
regionalism, it reveled in the particular.
C1 Regionalism
Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. With increasing urbanization and more
accessible transportation, small, rural communities became a subject of literary interest. As early as 1820 America had developed
a taste for fiction with specific, localized settings and topics. Toward mid-century, regional voices had emerged from newly
settled territories in the South and to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. In many of these works local dialects, sayings, and
spellings were used for humorous effect. Among the successful publications of early regionalists were Georgia Scenes (1835) by
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, an anthology called The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Sketches (1845), and Some Adventures of
Captain Simon Suggs (1845) by Johnson Hooper, which was set in Alabama.
Mary Wilkins Freeman, best known for A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), and Sarah Orne Jewett, best known for
Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), both wrote about rural northern New England. The first audiences for their stories were not
their own communities, however. The stories found their readership among the urbane readers of New York City’s Harper's New
Monthly Magazine and Boston’s Atlantic Monthly magazine.
Tales of the West also became a popular form of regional writing and created frontier outlaws and heroes, such as Billy the Kid.
These tales were especially suited to the short-story form. Foremost among writers who contributed to legends about the West was
Bret Harte, especially in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), a collection of stories about California.
Beginning in 1860 the publishing house of Beadle and Adams introduced dime novels—inexpensive tales with exciting plots
intended for popular consumption. The first dime novels were set during key events of early American history such as the
Revolutionary War, but plots soon incorporated frontier lore, conflicts between cowboys and Indians, and the taming of the West
for white settlement. Dime novels may be seen as precursors of the Western, a genre that would reach the height of its popularity
in the first half of the 20th century.
In the second half of the 19th century, issues specific to the industrial city also engaged writers of fiction, who portrayed the
sometimes hidden struggles of city life. “Life in the Iron Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis was originally published in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1861. It was an important early realist representation of the long hours, drudgery, and bleak future of factory
workers. Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) by Edward Bellamy compared an egalitarian and socialist vision of America as it
might be in the year 2000 to the very real miseries of urban life in the 1880s.
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Kate Chopin built her reputation on regionalist stories of Louisiana, for example, in the collection Bayou Folk (1894). She is,
however, best remembered for writing one of the first important feminist novels, The Awakening (1899). The book realistically
depicts Creole life in Louisiana as it tells the story of a young woman in a stultifying marriage who discovers a new sense of self when
she takes a lover.
C2 Realism and Naturalism: Twain, Crane, and Others
Realism entered American literature after the Civil War, soon followed by naturalism, an extreme form of realism. Naturalism had
an outlook often bleaker than that of realism, and it added a dimension of predetermined fate that rendered human will ultimately
powerless.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, is sometimes called a regionalist for his vivid portrayals
of Southern character and dialect. However, he also ranks among the great American realists because he scrupulously included so
many sides of life in his works and refused to make the horrifying look palatable. He published from 1865 until 1910, but his
literary fame was firmly rooted in the 19th century and its crises of racism, class conflicts, and poverty. Twain's works also
include some of the best American humor, starting with the short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,”
which was published in a newspaper in 1865. Twain’s best-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are seemingly simple stories that also offer searing indictments of corruption at all levels
of society. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer celebrated boyhood at the same time that it cleverly revealed the workings of small-
town America—small-minded at times, generous in spirit at other times. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered
Twain’s masterpiece. In it, the boy Huck Finn learns about human nature’s evil side as well as its kind side. As a result of his
close friendship with a black man who is escaping slavery, Huck also must confront the conflict between individual intuition
about what is right and the prevailing views of society on the subject.
In both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Twain's genius comes through in his realistic depiction of the psychology and the moral
development of his two young characters. Both works are similar in this way to Little Women (1868-1869), a novel by Louisa
May Alcott that records the moral and intellectual coming of age of four young women. Alcott was the daughter of
transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. Her still-popular novel is one of a series of works that show her serious concern with childhood
and adolescence.
In addition to Twain, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris are notable late-19th-century American writers in
the realist or naturalist traditions. Howells, a noted literary critic and novelist, was a friend of Twain’s and along with him
pioneered realism in American literature. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howell’s best-known novel, is the study of a self-
made businessman who is ultimately ruined financially by his determination not to compromise his integrity.
Despite an early death at the age of 29, Crane published several brilliant although grim stories. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893), the story of a doomed young woman’s life in a New York City slum, is so bleak that Crane had difficulty finding a
publisher. His second work, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is an intense examination of the psychology of fear and the state
of the human mind during war; it met with immediate success. Norris's best-known works were McTeague (1899), a portrait of the
effects of greed, and The Octopus (1901), which depicts the conflict between farmers and the railroad over land and power in
California. His works reflect his concern with social and economic forces and their effect on human lives.
A less well-known writer in the realist tradition at the end of the century was Frances E. W. Harper, an African American woman
born free in the former slave state of Maryland. An early black activist, Harper was a successful and frequent public speaker on
behalf of the rights of blacks and of women. Her novel Iola Leroy, or The Shadows Uplifted (1892) tells the story of a woman of
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mixed racial ancestry who is freed from slavery, serves as a nurse during the Civil War, and is eventually reunited with her family after
the war.
V MODERNISM: THE 1900S
During the 20th century a communications revolution that introduced motion pictures, radio, and television brought the world into view
—and eventually into the living room. The new forms of communication competed with books as sources of amusement and
enlightenment. New forms of communication and new modes of transportation made American society increasingly mobile and familiar
with many more regions of the country. Literary voices from even the remotest corners could reach a national audience. At the same
time, American writers—particularly writers of fiction—began to influence world literature.
A Fiction: 1900 to 1945
The 20th century saw the emergence of modernism. Modernism responded to the world’s complexity by asserting that the individual had
the potential to achieve a broader perspective than that offered by any one society or its history. Although realism, naturalism, and
regionalism were still viable modes of expression, they reflected the increasingly complex reality of 20th-century society. Immigration
and industrialization led to increasing urbanization, and, in turn, to class stratification. At the beginning of the 19th century, American
authors struggled to convince the world that they had a history; by the 20th century, American authors, like European authors, had to
grapple with more than enough history.
A1 Psychological Realism
Henry James was a key figure in American literature’s transition from the 1800s to the 1900s. Although more of his novels were
published before 1900 than after, his style, which was characterized by psychological rather than physical realism, and his themes
seemed a long way from much of 19th-century American literature. James’s use of American and European subject matter and
perspectives, as well as his sense of the complexities of both individual and cultural history, make him a modernist and a writer
the 20th century can claim as one of its literary representatives. Like many of his characters, Henry James lived an international
life, and his novels moved away from the 19th century’s concern with American settings. Instead, many of his novels are
animated by a complex interplay and at times conflict between the appeal of an older European culture and a younger American
idealism. This interplay is present in such novels as The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove
(1902), and The Ambassadors (1903). Over time James moved toward ever greater subtlety of insight and precision of statement,
and his later novels, such as The Golden Bowl (1904), became increasingly concerned with the mysteries of human passion.
Edith Wharton, whose works show the influence of James, was another key turn-of-the-century figure. Many of her novels take
place among the wealthy and worldly elite of New York City and focus on the restrictions imposed on individuals by social
definition and convention. Two of her best-known works, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), examine
these conventions and their tragic consequences. In the disastrous love story Ethan Frome (1911), which is written from a man’s
perspective in a bleak, rural New England setting, Wharton studied the mental and emotional traps that limit people’s desire and ability to
change.
A2 Social Realism and Naturalism
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As James and Wharton examined the sometimes complex psychology of America’s elite, other writers turned to the psychological
and physical reality of the laboring classes, whose ranks continued to swell with high rates of immigration in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Several American authors who are sometimes known as social realists looked at working conditions, often
for the purpose of social reform. In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel that exposed the unsanitary and miserable
working conditions in the stockyards of Chicago, Illinois. The book led to an investigation by the federal government and the
subsequent passage of pure food laws.
The novels of Theodore Dreiser were deeply imbued with an understanding of the brutal injustices of social class, and they rank
as magnificent examples of 20th-century American naturalism. Sister Carrie (1900) depicts the downfall of a young woman who
moves from small-town America to Chicago and then to New York City. An American Tragedy (1925) shows the downfall of a
weak young man who tries to rise from poverty into glamorous society. Jack London was another 20th-century naturalist. His
writings depict the force—often violent—of nature and of human nature, combining realism with idealist views on human
betterment. The Call of the Wild (1903) describes how a domesticated creature reverts to a primitive state in order to survive.
Other writers who worked in the mode of social realism were Sinclair Lewis and Josephine Herbst. Lewis focused on the
American middle class, replacing traditional notions of its complacency with a vision that was far harsher and at times bitter. In
both Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), Lewis satirically portrayed the monotony and emotional, spiritual, and intellectual
poverty of American middle-class life. Herbst’s Pity is Not Enough (1933) was the first in a trilogy that tracked the development
of American society by tying one family’s history to larger social and historical events.
As the popularity of social realism implied, the reading audience of the United States changed as social and economic realities
changed. Immigrant populations added great variety to 20th-century American fiction. Among the first to record their experiences
were Jewish immigrants. Abraham Cahan came to the United States from Russia in the 1880s and helped form a Jewish literary
community in New York City. He was a cofounder of the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper, in 1897. Cahan’s
fiction included The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (1898) and the novel The Rise of Devid
Levinsky (1917), which was an early depiction of the Americanization of a Jewish immigrant.
Later writers to focus on the Jewish experience in America included Russian-born Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth. Yezierska’s
most acclaimed novel was Bread Givers (1925), about a Jewish woman’s struggle to resolve the conflicts between her religion and
her search for self. Roth’s Call it Sleep (1934) chronicles several years in the childhood of a young Jewish boy. Told from the boy’s
perspective, the novel often follows his stream of consciousness.
A3 The Lost Generation
A period of disillusion and cynicism that followed World War I found expression in the writings of a group of Americans living in
Paris who became known as the Lost Generation. Although the group never formed a cohesive literary movement, those
associated with it shared a bitterness about the war, a sense of rootlessness, and dissatisfaction with American society. The most
influential American writers of this generation include novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, dramatist Thornton
Wilder, and poets Archibald MacLeish and Hart Crane. The term lost generation was first used by writer Gertrude Stein in her
preface to Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) to characterize Hemingway and his circle of expatriate friends in Paris.
In The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms (1929), both set in Europe during and after the war, Hemingway portrayed the
emotional exhaustion of this generation and their seemingly vain search for meaning and value in life. Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby (1925) is an exquisitely beautiful and tragic tale of the state of the American dream; his works often reflected the material and
emotional excesses of America in the 1920s, a period he called the Jazz Age.
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A4 Experimental Writers
Stein had moved to Paris in 1903, and she gathered around her a large group of painters and writers. She offered both advice and
support to the Lost Generation writers, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Her own writing is noted for innovations in
narrative style, such as simplification and fragmentation of plot and the use of unconventional syntax and punctuation. Stein’s
fiction includes Three Lives (1909), a character study of three women, and The Making of Americans (1925), a novel dealing with
her family’s social and cultural history.
Another innovative American writer was John Dos Passos, whose bitter, highly impressionistic novels attacked the hypocrisy and
materialism of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. His Manhattan Transfer (1925), a panorama of life in New York City
between 1890 and 1925, introduced his “newsreel” technique of inserting fragments of popular songs and news headlines into his text.
It also introduced his “camera eye” technique of providing his own point of view in short, poetic narratives.
A5 The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the
Harlem neighborhood of New York City. It marked the first time that African American literature attracted significant attention.
No common style or ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance, but the poets, novelists, political essayists, and dramatists who
participated in the endeavor shared a commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience. They also
shared a strong sense of racial pride and a desire to better the social and economic situation of blacks. Major prose writers in the
movement were historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who was best known for his nonfiction, and Jean Toomer, whose
novel Cane (1923) voiced a theme of the Harlem Renaissance in its identification with the lives of the black poor. Zora Neale
Hurston, another important member of the Renaissance, tracked a Southern black woman's search for her true identity in the novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
A6 The Great Depression and Its Legacy
The glitter and excess of the Jazz Age ended with the 1929 stock market crash, which ushered in the so-called angry decade of the
1930s. Many novels of the decade echoed the despair of the Great Depression. During the Depression a federal agency, known
first as the Works Progress Administration and later as the Works Projects Administration (WPA), was created to put unemployed
Americans to work on public projects. One arm of the WPA was the Federal Writers Project (FWP), which ran from 1935 to 1941.
The FWP employed writers to produce travel guides, local histories, nature studies, and other books. The FWP not only produced
interesting material, it also provided training for some exceptional authors, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, both of
whom went on to write about tensions between races and social classes. Wright’s Native Son (1940) explores the extreme
psychological pressures that drive a young urban black man to violence. It established Wright as the leading African American
author of the 1940s and as a key influence on younger writers, including James Baldwin. Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the
Mountain (1953), depicts Harlem in the 1930s. Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) is often cited as one of the great American novels
of the 20th century. In this account of an unnamed young black man’s search for his place in the world, Ellison confronts the idea that
American society consciously turns a blind eye to its black members.
B Regionalism
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The vastness of the United States and the great diversity of its people have always been reflected in its literature. This was especially true
in the 20th century, which witnessed the blossoming of strong regional traditions in the West and the South.
B1 The West
Frontier life was still new enough to raise invigorating questions at the turn of the 20th century, when a genre known as the
Western developed. Westerns were rooted in the physical reality of the West as well as in the history and mythology of its
settlement by whites. The novel The Virginian (1902) by Owen Wister set the standard for many later Westerns. It depicts a soft-
spoken, well-mannered Southerner who works as a ranch hand in Wyoming and discovers nobility and heroism in the cowboy’s
code of ethics. Zane Grey, best known for Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), later wrote many more Westerns, becoming one of
the foremost authors of the genre.
The works of Willa Cather drew upon the landscape of the Nebraska plains and the experiences of immigrant farmers in the
Nebraska community of her youth. Some of Cather’s finest works feature strong female characters and include idealized visions
of past or passing worlds. My Ántonia (1918) follows the life of a young girl of Czech ancestry in rural Nebraska and depicts the
dignity of immigrant farm families. In Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), a Roman Catholic missionary recalls his
experiences among the Native Americans of New Mexico.
Many of the works of John Steinbeck focus on the overwhelming forces of nature and on issues of class. However, they are also
about the American West, particularly California. His novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) offers a stark portrait of the sufferings of
migrant farm laborers who trekked to California during the Great Depression. One of his later works, East of Eden (1952), is a
family history on a grand scale, suggestive of primal struggles between good and evil.
B2 The South
The South was home to a variety of remarkable 20th-century American prose writers. Common to many of these writers was a
consuming interest in depicting the life and social interactions of small towns and their inhabitants, who are often shown as
eccentric or even grotesque. Ironically, this subject matter, which has become almost a stereotype for Southern fiction, owes much
to a Midwestern writer, Sherwood Anderson. His Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was an influential collection of short stories that
centers on psychologically twisted, frozen, or otherwise exaggerated characters, all of whom live in one small Midwestern town.
William Faulkner, a friend of Anderson’s, is a preeminent figure in 20th-century American literature, known for his novels about
the conflict between the old, pre-Civil War South and the new South. His characters inherit a terrifying set of passions—anger,
hatred, obsession, and the will to power—that make his works mythic statements on the determining aspects of identity. Faulkner
is known also for the complexity of his style, which includes multiple points of view, inversions of time, and stream-of-
consciousness narrative. The Sound and the Fury (1929), the novel that introduced many of his breakthroughs in style, is
fragmented by four narrative voices. Several of Faulkner's greatest novels, including Light in August (1932) and Absalom,
Absalom! (1936), intertwine his themes of memory and inheritance with paralyzing and poisonous myths of racial difference.
In style and subject, North Carolina author Reynolds Price is considered among those most influenced by Faulkner. Price's trilogy
of The Surface of Earth (1975), The Source of Light (1981), and The Promise of Rest (1995) is a Faulknerian epic of one family's
history.
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The South was also rich in women writers during the 20th century. Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell, offers a
romantic picture of Southern life during the Civil War. Ellen Glasgow investigated the constraints of aristocratic Southern society
and the abuses and inevitable decay of that society in such novels as In This Our Life (1941). The novels The Heart is a Lonely
Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946) by Carson McCullers gain much of their atmosphere from their settings in
small Southern towns.
Flannery O’Connor mixed Southern Gothic—the tradition of Faulkner, prophecy, and evangelistic Roman Catholicism in writing
about the South in her novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and her short story collections, such as A
Good Man is Hard to Find (1955). The characters of Eudora Welty also incorporate qualities of the grotesque. Many of them are
trapped in time, refusing to acknowledge something essential about themselves, as in her acclaimed novel The Optimist's
Daughter (1972).
C Fiction: 1945 to the Present
The fiction that arose out of World War II (1939-1945) lacked the desire to shock that had energized previous war novels, and
writers seemed able to regard armed conflict with greater philosophical detachment. After the explosion of the first atomic bomb
at the end of the war, America and the world entered a new era during which the possibility of mass destruction weighed heavily
on the collective consciousness. The idea of individuality—its negative consequences as well as transcendent powers—became a
unifying principle of American literature following World War II.
Protest movements of the 1960s led to a remarkable diversification of perspective and expression in American literature later in the
century. Among the forces for social change were the civil rights movement, the student movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement,
the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement. Each, to varying degrees, changed American
culture. Although a few voices outside of the mainstream—by virtue of style or perspective—had always played some role in American
literature, after the 1960s it became increasingly difficult even to define a mainstream.
C1 War Narratives
Two of the most impressive novels about World War II were From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones and The Naked and
the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer. Both were hard-edged and concerned with the adaptation of the individual to the restrictions
of military life. Two novelists who began their successful careers with war books were James A. Michener and Irwin Shaw.
Michener’s career began with a collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947); Shaw’s novel The Young Lions
(1948) is about the war in Europe. Humor, a recurring feature of American writing, enlivened such novels as A Bell for Adano
(1944), in which John Hersey dealt with the occupation of an Italian town by U.S. Army forces. Thomas Heggen’s work Mr.
Roberts (1946) is a bittersweet story about the U.S. Navy that also incorporates humor.
C2 Beat Generation
After the war a group of American writers referred to as the Beat Generation communicated their profound disaffection with
contemporary society through their unconventional writings and lifestyle. Notable writers associated with the group included
novelists Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Their writing was
characterized by a raw, improvisational quality as they liberated writing from formal concerns and plot, often drawing on personal
experience. Perhaps the best-known Beat novel is Kerouac’s semiautobiographical On the Road (1957), which celebrates direct
sensory experience and freedom from everyday responsibilities.
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C3 Experimentation
The works of Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Norman Mailer, and Don
DeLillo represent the experimentation in style and form that began in the 1950s and has continued to the present. Nabokov,
although Russian-born, became one of the greatest masters of English prose. Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), novels with
American settings, are remarkable examples of tragicomedy that make readers question the standard categories for prose.
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is at once humorous and terrifying in its precise portrayal of rebellious adolescence; written in
1951, it remains enormously popular. So too does Catch-22 (1961), a darkly comic and wildly inventive novel by Joseph Heller
about the insanity of war and the absurdity of military authority.
In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Pynchon leads his characters (and his readers) on a wild goose chase, marking the path with
seemingly significant, but actually irrelevant, clues to an impossible mystery. Vonnegut based his novel Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969) on his experiences in a German prison camp during World War II. The setting of this multilevel narrative alternates
between the camp and a fictional planet, incorporating elements of science fiction in the process. Mailer's The Armies of the Night
(1968), about his experiences at peace marches, explicitly challenges the presumed distinction between history and fiction by
giving actual events the drama of a novel. DeLillo’s work draws on a broad range of topics, from the world of American football
players to the role of the media in society, to explore the effects of popular culture on the psychology of the individual. His White
Noise (1985) is a complex and often humorous study of nuclear age America—from its new family structures to its new academic
disciplines.
Novelists John Cheever and John Updike exhibited similar concerns and approaches in their somewhat detached, sometimes
satirical explorations of upper-middle-class suburban life in the Northeast. Cheever's novels range from a relatively benign story
of an eccentric family in The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) to a bleak tale of fratricide in Falconer (1977). Updike is perhaps best
known for his series of four novels written between 1960 and 1990. The series begins with Rabbit, Run (1960), which is about a
man fleeing from life’s responsibilities and his own disillusion.
Joyce Carol Oates, who first received widespread notice in the 1960s, remained one of the most prolific American writers at the
end of the century. Many of her novels combine strong naturalism with Gothic horror, including A Garden of Earthly Delights
(1967), Bellefleur (1980), and What I Lived For (1994).
C4 Diversity
The Jewish tradition in American fiction, which dates to the 1920s and 1930s, remained strong in later decades. This is evident in
the works of Bernard Malamud; Canadian-born Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976; and Philip
Roth. Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) tells of the suffering of a Russian Jew who is accused of ritual murder of a child but refuses to
succumb to bitterness. Many of Bellow’s works revolve around Jewish intellectuals and their quest for self-knowledge. His novel
Herzog (1961) portrays a middle-aged man’s existential crisis after his wife leaves him. Roth’s first success came with Goodbye,
Columbus (1959). His American Pastoral (1997) follows the psychological deterioration of an American family over several
generations, and comments more broadly on the ills of American society in the late 20th century.
After the 1970s several African American female writers appeared at the forefront of American literature. From her first novel,
The Bluest Eye (1970), through Beloved (1988) and Jazz (1992), Toni Morrison cast an unblinking eye on slavery and its legacies
while also offering hope, particularly in the strength of bonds among women. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature
in 1993. Other African American women whose prose enriched late 20th-century literature were Alice Walker, best known for
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The Color Purple (1982), and Gloria Naylor, who received a National Book Award for her first novel, The Women of Brewster
Place (1982).
In the second half of the century Native American novelists began reassessing the experience of their cultures. House Made of
Dawn (1968) by N. Scott Momaday was one of the first 20th-century works to discuss the contemporary Native American
experience. Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko is the story of a young man of mixed Native American and white ancestry
who seeks to recover from the terrifying violence of his world. James Welch's Fools Crow (1986) returns to 1870, a time of
catastrophic change for the Blackfeet Native Americans of Montana. Louise Erdrich, whose novels include Love Medicine (1984)
and Tales of Burning Love (1996), was another writer who took a hard look at Native American culture in the late 20th century.
Hispanic American and Asian American authors brought strong voices to American literature after the 1960s. Mexican American
literature had informed the earliest American Westerns, and Hispanic folk ballads and legends of the vaquero (cowboy) had been
staples in the tall tales of the frontier. More recently, Rudolfo Anaya, author of the novels Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and
Albuquerque (1994), and Sandra Cisneros, author of the novel The House on Mango Street (1984), have written about language,
identity, cultural change, and other struggles of Hispanic American life.
Much of Asian American literature deals with the inevitable conflicts experienced by those who bridge two cultures. Modernity
and Americanization are typically the realm of youth, while traditional culture and history remain the dying province of their
elders. Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1989), by Maxine Hong Kingston, blend the old and new in an interweaving of
legend and narration. The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), by Amy Tan, dramatize conflicts between
Chinese immigrants and their American-born children.
D Nonfiction
Twentieth-century American nonfiction includes so many varied and profound contributions to current affairs, history, and science that it
is impossible to touch on more than a few. What American writers had long sought came true in the 1900s: America’s literary traditions
had fully matured.
D1 Public Affairs and History
Theodore Roosevelt, United States president from 1901 to 1909, left a long record of his personal philosophy in The Rough
Riders (1899) and in other writings such as travel adventures, history, biography, and politics. Roosevelt’s narratives emphasize
the strength of nature and of humans and reflect the influence of the scientific theories of British scientist Charles Darwin.
Magazines and newspapers, whose arrival had represented a great achievement for the young colonies, proliferated in the 20th
century, in multiple languages. Foreign language publications addressed specific communities, especially immigrant communities,
which usually shared political interests as well as language. Some journals, such as The Masses (founded in 1911) and The
Liberator (founded in 1918), were voices of radicalism. The Crisis, a journal published from 1910 to 1934, was dedicated to racial
equality and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, an influential intellectual and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. His finest nonfiction
prose includes the essay collection The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his autobiographical Dusk of Dawn (1940).
Much American political reporting and analysis achieved brilliance in the 1930s. Among the books that helped prepare perplexed
Americans for World War II were Inside Europe (1936) by journalist John Gunther, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937)
by novelist Elliot Harold Paul, and Not Peace but a Sword (1939) by foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean. After the war, John
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Hersey's landmark report Hiroshima (1946; reissued with an update in 1985) described the devastation brought by the first atomic
bomb (see Hiroshima).
Traditional views of American history were presented by historians Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard in The Rise of
American Civilization (1927), Samuel Eliot Morison in The Oxford History of the American People (1965), and Henry Steele
Commager in The Search for a Usable Past (1967). Accounts of specific trends and eras include Anti-Intellectualism in America
(1963) by Richard Hofstadter, a study of the effects of conservatism, and The Guns of August (1962) by Barbara Tuchman, about
the beginnings of World War I.
A political issue that became the subject of extensive analysis by American writers during and after the 1960s was the Vietnam
War (1959-1975). My Lai 4 (1970) by Seymour M. Hersh details a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops in 1968.
Frances FitzGerald wrote Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972).
Some writers of fiction turned to nonfiction during the postwar period. Truman Capote invented what he called the “nonfiction
novel” with In Cold Blood (1966), a harrowing account of the murder of a Kansas family based on interviews with the murderers.
Norman Mailer's books The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, both published in 1968, vividly describe
and interpret headline-making political protest.
D2 The Black Experience
Out of the protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s came many writers whose works revealed the experiences of blacks and
women. Amiri Baraka probed racial issues in his Home: Social Essays (1966) and Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965
(1971). Eldridge Cleaver contributed significant essays on American society in Soul on Ice (1967). Black nationalist leader
Malcolm X wrote his influential work The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) with Alex Haley, who later became famous as the
author of the best-selling work Roots (1976), a semifictional account of Haley's family history from its African beginnings to the
present. Maya Angelou, a poet-novelist and children's author, wrote several books constituting a powerful memoir of her life,
starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which describes her childhood in the South.
D3 Women’s Experience
Modern American feminist writing can be divided into three broad categories. Writings in the first category endeavored to show
that the roles and behaviors believed to be acceptable and appropriate for women had also entrapped them and limited their
opportunities. A pioneering work in this category was The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan, which challenged several
long-established American attitudes, especially the notion that women could find fulfillment only as wives and mothers. Friedan's
phrase feminine mystique refers to the idealization of the traditional female role of wife and mother; Friedan contended that this
idealization constituted a conspiracy to prevent women from competing with men. The second category of feminist writing
focused on direct social action, such as protesting against male-dominated institutions and forming advocacy groups to represent
and promote women’s interests politically and socially. Two representative works of activist feminist writing, both published in
1970, are Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone. The
third and most recent trend in feminist writing focuses less on criticisms of society and more on the establishment of full,
flourishing women’s cultures, where such subjects as literature, politics, and art are reassessed from a specifically female
viewpoint or ideological framework. This movement has been termed cultural feminism; one of its early and influential
spokespersons was Robin Morgan, whose essays were collected in Going Too Far (1978).
44
D4 The Environment
Another trend in writing to gain notice in the 1960s was associated with the environment, although it had its start much earlier.
Writing in this genre is generally characterized by a deep and sustained interest in the natural world as a physical, emotional, and
spiritual resource. Environmental writing in American literature is often said to have started with Henry David Thoreau, whose
writings supported a belief in nature’s intrinsic value, a view that was still new when Walden; or, Life in the Woods was published
in 1854. Later writers of the 19th and early 20th century encouraged environmental conservation, including naturalist John
Burroughs in such works as Wake-Robin (1871) and Accepting the Universe (1920). Writings by explorer and naturalist John
Muir, including his first book, The Mountains of California (1894), reflected his spiritual view of nature and his belief in the need
for political protection of environmental resources.
In the 20th century, A Sand County Almanac (1949), by conservationist and philosopher Aldo Leopold, offered a simple formula
for a balanced relationship between humankind and the land, which he called the land ethic. It held that each person must become
a steward of the land, and that personal ethics should extend to the natural world. In the 1960s biologist Rachel Carson drew
attention to new hazards to the environment. In Silent Spring (1964) she discusses the widespread and irreversible damage caused
by chemical pesticides, acid rain, and nuclear waste. This book, which reached a large readership and advanced the political cause
of environmental protection, is considered one of the most important works in the movement.
Environmental literature in the later 20th century includes a wide range of viewpoints. In Desert Solitaire (1968) and Voice
Crying in the Wilderness (1989), Edward Abbey emphasized the need for direct action by individuals on behalf of the
environment. Other additions to the growing tradition of environmental literature are personal essays, reflections, and travelogues
by Annie Dillard, including A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), and by William Least Heat-Moon, including Blue Highways (1982)
and Prairyerth (1991).
D5 Literary Criticism
Literary criticism in the 20th century began with the neohumanists, who upheld classical traditions and called for a firmer ethical
basis for art. These theories were expounded by such critics as Paul Elmer More in Shelburne Essays (11 volumes, 1904-1921),
William Crary Brownell in American Prose Masters (1909), and Irving Babbitt in The New Laokoön (1910).
The appraisal of American writing as a distinct national literature began in the 1920s with the groundbreaking Studies in Classic
American Literature (1923) by English novelist D. H. Lawrence. American scholar Vernon Louis Parrington provided a
sociopolitical interpretation of American literature in his treatise Main Currents in American Thought (3 volumes, 1927-1930). A
survey of American letters more suited to the general reader was contributed by literary historian Van Wyck Brooks in a
multivolume series that began with The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936). At about the same time, H. L. Mencken
unleashed a direct assault on the contemporary tastes and prejudices of what he called the American “booboisie.” Mencken’s
literary reviews appeared from 1924 to 1933 in the magazine American Mercury.
Between the late 1930s and 1945 a critical approach known as New Criticism developed. Taking its name from a 1941 essay by
John Crowe Ransom, it emphasized close analysis of text and structure rather than analysis of social or biographical contexts.
Critics expounding this approach included Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren.
Several other literary scholars were less doctrinaire. Among them were Joseph Wood Krutch, whose essays were collected in The
Modern Temper (1929) and The Measure of Man (1954), and Lionel Trilling, author of one of the most influential of modern
critical essays, The Liberal Imagination (1950). Also noteworthy were Malcolm Cowley, author of Exile's Return (1934); Alfred
45
Kazin, author of On Native Grounds (1942) and The Inmost Leaf (1955); and Leslie Fiedler, whose Love and Death in the
American Novel (1960) provided a new interpretation of certain American themes and approaches.
One of the most rounded literary critics and theorists in 20th-century America was Edmund Wilson. Erudite yet never pedantic, he
remained unaligned with any formal school of criticism. Axel's Castle (1931) established his literary intelligence, and later critical
works, such as The Wound and the Bow (1941) and The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 (1965),
confirmed his stature.
In the late 20th century, literary criticism flourished at Yale University, where Harold Bloom was concerned with the anxiety and
the creative stimulus stemming from literary influence and with the desirability of academic consensus on which literary works
were truly important. He expressed these views in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973) and The Western Canon:
The Books and School of the Ages (1994). Based on the academic movement known as deconstruction, originated by literary critic
Jacques Derrida, other Yale scholars challenged the idea that a text has a single, unchanging meaning. They argued that
interpretation “deconstructs” multiple layers of meaning in a text.
VI CURRENT TRENDS
American literature at the end of the 20th century was exceptionally diverse, and all indications pointed to an increasingly
multicultural literature in the 21st century. New voices spoke up in Native American, African American, Asian American, and
Mexican American communities, even as writers in previously unrepresented ethnic minorities joined their ranks. Women's issues
remained at the forefront as did gender issues in general, and more gay and lesbian authors were heard. American prose still
shared some common ground, however, as authors responded to cultural crises and concerns. While creating unique worlds for
smaller communities within America, the nation’s diverse voices also continue to respond to our common contexts of land,
government, technology, and popular culture.
See also Criticism, Literary; Drama and Dramatic Arts; Novel; Poetry; Short Story.
Contributed By:
Margaret Reid
46

Aa, History of American Literature (Whole), Encarta

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Encarta’s History of American Literature

II BEGINNINGS: 1600S THROUGH THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783)

A New England Puritan Poetry

C Revolutionary Era Patriotic Poetry

D Early Black Voices

III THE 19TH CENTURY

A The Fireside Poets

F Poe, Melville, and Others

G Toward the 20th Century

IV THE 20TH CENTURY

B1 The Whitman Tradition

B2 Imagism and After

II BEGINNINGS: 1600S AND 1700S

III NATIONHOOD: THE 1800S

C A Shift Toward Realism

IV THE MODERN ERA: THE 1900S

A Before World War I: 1900-1914

B From World War I to World War II: 1914-1939

B1 The Glory Days

B2 The Great Depression

C Postwar Drama: 1945-1960

D The Mainstream Redefined: The 1960s to the 1990s

Contributed by: Ronald Wainscott

II BEGINNINGS: THE 1500S AND 1600S

III TOWARD INDEPENDENCE: THE 1700S

E Voices Outside the Mainstream

F The First American Fiction

IV NATIONHOOD: THE 1800S

A2 Early Fiction: Irving

In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of romanticism. The

B2 Historical Fiction: Cooper, Hawthorne, and Others

B3 Good and Evil: Melville and Poe

B4 Sentimental Fiction: Stowe

C The Civil War and After

C2 Realism and Naturalism: Twain, Crane, and Others

V MODERNISM: THE 1900S

A Fiction: 1900 to 1945

A2 Social Realism and Naturalism

A3 The Lost Generation

A5 The Harlem Renaissance

A6 The Great Depression and Its Legacy

C Fiction: 1945 to the Present

D1 Public Affairs and History

D2 The Black Experience

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