What is literature???

Literature is any piece of writing that is

valued as work of art.
For example novels, poems, short stories,
plays

American Literature

Colonial Period (1607-1775)

Revolutionary Period (1775-1789)
Romantic Period (the 19 century)
Realism (since the 1860s)
Lost Generation (the 1920s, 1930s)
Literature between the World Wars (1918-1939)
Beat Generation (the 1950s)
Modern Literary Movements (since 1945)
Afro-American Literature
Jewish Literature
Ethnic Literature
American Drama

Colonial Period
The literature of this period was strongly
influenced by religion of the authors
(Puritanism) and was often informative of
how to survive in the wild, uncivilised
country. Sometimes the texts were just
descriptions of the hard life and
colonisation process in America of the
17th century.

Writers of Colonial Period

Descriptive and
biblical literature:
Capt. John Smith
Cotton Mather
William Bradford

Poetry:

Anne Bradstreet
Edward Taylor

Revolutionary Period
This period was marked by the War of
Independence.
4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence
1777 Battle at Saratoga (the first victory over
the British)
1781 the end of the war
1783 Britain recognizes the USA as a sovereign
state
1789 the U.S. Constitution comes in force
1789 G. Washington becomes the first U.S.
president

Literature of Revolutionary Period

- merely political character
- pamphlets, essays, declarations,
speeches etc.
Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of
Independence)
Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards
Almanach)

From the War of Independence to

the Civil War (1789-1861)
Shifting the frontier westbound (pioneers)
Growing self-awareness, pride and
patriotism
The period of slavery
The beginning of American Romantism

Literature of the period (1789-1861)

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Toms Cabin)
Washington Irving (Life of George Washington)
James Feninmore Cooper (The Last of the
Mohicanes, The Pioneers, The Prairie, The
Pathfinder, The Deerslayer)
Ralph Waldo Emerson Transcedentalist
Movement; the greatest essayist (The American
Poet, The Friendship)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)
Herman Melville a symbolist (Moby Dick)

 Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, The Pit and

the Pendulum, The Black Cat, The Fall of
the House of Ushers)
Walt Whitman (O Captain! My Captain! ,
Leaves of Grass written in free verse)
Emily Dickinson mentally ill, lived
worked and died in Amherst (Bolts of
Melody)

The Gilded Age - Realism, Local

Color, American Humour
Mark Twain (Life on Mississippi, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, The
Prince and the Pauper,)
Henry James (Washington Square, Daisy Miller)
Edit Wharton (The Age of Innocence)
Jack London Naturalist (The Call of the Wild,
The Sea-Wolf)
Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy)
Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)

Literature between the Wars

The Lost Generation (e.g.E.Hemingway,
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos
Passos, William Faulkner)
Robert Frost a poet (New Hampshire)
Carl Sandburg a realistic poet (Good
Morning, America)
e.e.cummings an experimental poet

Modern American Literature

Henry Miller a guru of hippies (Sexus, Plexus,
Nexus)
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead)
Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Lonesome Traveler)
Williams Boroughs (The Naked Lunch)
William Styron (Sophias Choice, The Long
March)
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
E.L.Doctorow (Ragtime)

 Allan Ginsberg a guru of the Beat Generation

(Kaddish and Other Poems)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the
Mind)
Gregory Nunzio Corso (The Happy Birthday of
Death)
Jewish writers: Bernard Malamud, I.B.Singer,
Saul Below, Philip Roth, Jerome David Salinger,
Joseph Heller
Black writers: James Langston Hughes, LeRoi
Jones (Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin, Toni
Morrison, Alex Haley

American Theatre
Eugene ONeil (The Emperor Jones,
Desire Under the Elms)
Tennesee Williams (A Streetcare named
Desire, Glass Menagerie)
Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman)