Periods of American Literature

The division of American literature into convenient historical segments, or "periods," lacks
the degree of consensus among literary scholars that we find with reference to English
literature. The history of American literature stretches across more than 400 years. It can be
divided into five major periods, each of which has unique characteristics, notable authors, and
representative works.

1. The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

2. The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)
3. Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)
4. The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)
5. The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)

 The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the
1600s. This was the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, often derivative
of literature in Great Britain, and focused on the future.

In its earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical
nonfiction written by British settlers who populated the colonies that would become the
United States.

John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a
president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among
the earliest works of American literature.

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in
colonial America. John Winthrop’s Journal told sympathetically of the attempt of
Massachusetts Bay Colony to form a theocracy—a state with God at its head and with its
laws based upon the Bible

Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest
collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.
Anne Bradstreets lyrics (1650) movingly conveyed her feelings concerning religion and her
family

A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new
writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modelled on
what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers
consumed also came from Great Britain.

The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay,
shaped the political direction of the United States. a collection of 85 articles and essays
written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay under the collective
pseudonym “Publius” to promote the Ratification of the United States Constitution.
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a
quintessentially American life story.

Poetry became a weapon during the Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals urging
their forces on, stating their arguments, and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs. The
most memorable American poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known
poems, Revolutionary War satires, served as effective propaganda; later he turned to various
aspects of the American scene.

Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, wrote the first African American
book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau was another
notable poet of the era.

The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in
1789. – a kind of sentimental novel

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the
earliest slave narratives and a forceful argument for abolition.

By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though
still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800
through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in
an unprecedented manner.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip
Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo.
These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the
American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

 The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)

Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and
American writers embraced it in the early 19th century. It can be seen as a rejection of the
precepts of Classicism in general and late 18th century Neoclassicism in particular: balance,
order, harmony, rationality. It was also a reaction against the rationalism and physical
materialism of the 18th century. Romanticism emphasized: the individual, the subjective, the
irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the emotional, the visionary, the transcendental.

The Romantics had a deep appreciation of beauty, an exaltation of emotion over reason, and
senses over the intellect. They emphasized imagination as a gateway to transcendent
experience, and spiritual truth, they had an obsessive interest in folk culture, and the medieval
era, the predilection for the exotic, the mysterious, the weird, the occult etc.

Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often
tormented and always struggling against convention – terror, mystery, the supernatural, the
gothic
Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified
by its meter and rhyme scheme.

The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado”
(1846) are gripping tales of horror.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each
exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.

James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to
depict everyday life in the Northeast.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of
the upper-class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through European models
and sensibilities.

The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a

unified whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David
Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret
Fuller was editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.

Transcendentalism was an idealistic literary and philosophical movement of the mid-19th

century. Beginning in New England in 1836, various visionaries, intellectuals, scholars, and
writers would come together regularly to discuss spiritual ideas. The Boston newspapers,
which advertised their meetings, called the group the Transcendentalists.

The Transcendentalists were radical thinkers. At the time of their meetings, New England
was still holding on to a remnant of Puritanical values. There was a sense that organized
religion had authority over one's personal life and individual choices. For the
Transcendentalists, this was a big no-no! They were quite critical of conformity, or forcing
one's behaviour to match social expectations or standards. They were nonconformists -
people who do not conform to a generally accepted pattern of thought or action. They
rejected common ideas and practices, particularly organized religion. There wasn't a
Transcendentalist church or a holy book of Transcendentalism. Instead, there were regular
meetings for lively conversation and a shared hope of cultivating a modern, fluid, and
personal sense of spirituality.

The Transcendentalists believed that for every person there exists a private relationship
between the self and the universe. In fact, they believed that each person carries the universe
within himself. They thought that every individual has a universal soul, referred to as 'The
Eternal One.' Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist and poet, was at the center of the
Transcendentalist movement. He explained the idea of the universal soul by stating that
'within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty; to which every
part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.' Basically, Emerson is saying that all of
the world, its knowledge and splendor, lives within us.

They believed in a personal knowledge of God (no intermediary is necessary for communion
with God), divinity of nature, individualism.
Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began
publishing novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of
the most-enduring works of American literature.

As a young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the
allegorical “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the
Transcendentalists before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet
Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Herman Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbours. Hawthorne was also a
strong influence on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s
early life of traveling and writing.

Walt Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the
traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855),
and his frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went
through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized
the ethos of the Romantic period.

During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and
about enslaved and free African Americans were written.

William Wells Brown published what is considered the first black American novel, Clotel,
in 1853. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858).

In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first black
women to publish fiction in the United States.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published serially 1851–52, is credited
with raising opposition in the North to slavery.

Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived
largely in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886;
and she was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her
poems express a Romantic vision as clearly as Walt Whitman’s or Edgar Allan Poe’s. They
are sharp-edged and emotionally intense. Five of her notable poems are

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

“Because I could not stop for Death –”

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”

“A Bird, came down the Walk –”

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

  Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)
The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million
soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt
Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and
what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and
unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence
of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the grim realities of a
devastating war, they became writers’ primary mode of expression.

Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer
before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting
on politics in the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national
fame. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of
actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his
writing. Some of his notable works include

Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the
Mississippi (1883)

Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg”
(1899)

Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors
of the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around
them, particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.

Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism.
His Sister Carrie (1900) is the most important American naturalist novel.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen
Crane, and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris,
are novels that vividly depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in black dialect
—“Possum,” “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and
gave them what they believed was reality for black Americans. Dunbar also wrote poems not
in dialect—“We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of racism in
America during Reconstruction and afterward.

Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present
reality, but his writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic
experience, not simply document truth. He was preoccupied with the clash in values between
the United States and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and
naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable novels are

The American (1877)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

What Maisie Knew (1897)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

The Golden Bowl (1904)

 The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

Contradictory impulses:

· Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start
of the 20th century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress.

· Widespread suffering caused by the devastation of World War I and the Great
Depression in Europe and the United States.

· These contradictory impulses can be found swirling within modernism, a movement in

the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But this break was often
an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. A sense
of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. Despite, or perhaps
because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the richest
and most productive in American literature.

F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925)

Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).

Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937).

Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929)
articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of World War I,
disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as the crassness
of American culture and its "puritanical" repressions, are often tagged (in a term first applied
by Gertrude Stein to young Frenchmen of the time) as the Lost Generation. A number of
these writers became expatriates, moving either to London or to Paris in their quest for a
richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T.
S. Eliot lived out their lives abroad, but most of the younger "exiles," as Malcolm Cowley
called them (Exile's Return, 1934), came back to America in the 1930s. Hemingway's The
Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night are novels that represent the mood and
way of life of two groups of American expatriates.

The Lost Generation was the social generational cohort that was in early adulthood
during World War I. "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering,
directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period.[1] The term is
also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during
the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently
popularised by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun
Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation.

William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to

break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937)
and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His
fragmentary, multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but
his was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the
Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee
Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, cultural, and artistic movement that centered
around the Black American experience and spanned from the 1910s to the 1930s. While it
was rooted in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City, Black American writers,
musicians, and artists contributed from across the country.

The movement included Black artists from several disciplines—including music, visual art,
fashion, and literature.

Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most
important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world.

During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E.
Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century.
Playwrights drew inspiration from European theatre but created plays that were uniquely and
enduringly American.

Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s
Journey into Night (written 1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20
years of creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with The
Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946).

During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that
exposed injustice in America.

Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town

America in Our Town, first produced in 1938.
  The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)
Influences shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century. The United
States:

· emerged from World War II confident and economically strong,

· entered the Cold War in the late 1940s –conflict with the Soviet Union, the proxy wars
and threat of nuclear annihilation shaped global politics for more than four decades

· 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the
civil rights movement and the women’s movement.

· Prior to the last decades of the 20th century, American literature was largely the story of
dead white men who had created Art and of living white men doing the same. By the turn of
the 21st century, American literature had become a much more complex and inclusive story
grounded on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of
different backgrounds and open to more Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many
ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. He left the
United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he
faced as a black man in America; other black writers working from the 1950s through the
1970s also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed black man adrift in,
and ignored by, America.

James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but
his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago,
was first performed in 1959.

Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of black nationalism and sought to
generate a uniquely black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965),
by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, is among its most-lasting literary expressions.

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put
the lives of black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.

In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her
involvement in the civil rights movement.

The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist,
metafictional, postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist,
stream of consciousness—these and dozens more labels can be applied to the vast output of
American novelists. Little holds them together beyond their chronological proximity and
engagement with contemporary American society. Among representative novels are

Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)

Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)

Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)

Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)

Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1983)

Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1984)

Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)

Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)

Ha Jin: Waiting (1999)

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)

The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting
influence on American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956)
pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate
American poetry. Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations
for poetry during the second half of the 20th century and beyond.
Beat movement, American social and literary movement originating in the 1950s and centred
in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice
West, and New York City’s Greenwich Village. Its adherents, self-styled as “beat” (originally
meaning “weary,” but later also connoting a musical sense, a “beatific” spirituality, and other
meanings) and derisively called “beatniks,” expressed their alienation from conventional, or
“square,” society by adopting a style of dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from
jazz musicians. They advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the
heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or
the disciplines of Zen Buddhism. The Beats and their advocates found the joylessness and
purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal and protest.

Among the important poets of this period are

Anne Sexton

Sylvia Plath

John Berryman

Donald Hall

Elizabeth Bishop

James Merrill

Nikki Giovanni

Robert Pinsky

Adrienne Rich

Rita Dove

Yusef Komunyakaa

W.S. Merwin

Tracy K. Smith

In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three
men: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death of a
Salesman (1949) questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main
character, while Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered what might have been a benign domestic situation into
something vicious and cruel. By the 1970s the face of American drama had begun to change,
and it continued to diversify into the 21st century. Notable dramatists include

David Mamet, Amiri Baraka, Sam Shepard, August Wilson