The 18th Century

In America in the early years of the 18th century, some writers, such as Cotton Mather,
carried on the older traditions. His huge history and biography of Puritan New
England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in 1702, and his vigorous Manuductio ad Ministerium, or
introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were defenses of ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan
Edwards, initiator of the Great Awakening, a religious revival that stirred the eastern seacoast for
many years, eloquently defended his burning belief in Calvinistic doctrine—of the concept that
man, born totally depraved, could attain virtue and salvation only through God’s grace—in his
powerful sermons and most notably in the philosophical treatise Freedom of Will (1754). He
supported his claims by relating them to a complex metaphysical system and by reasoning
brilliantly in clear and often beautiful prose. But Mather and Edwards were defending a doomed
cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John Wise and Jonathan Mayhew moved toward a
less rigid religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes in his amusing Diary, covering the
years 1673–1729. Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily records how commercial life in
New England replaced rigid Puritanism with more worldly attitudes. The Journal of Mme Sara
Kemble Knight comically detailed a journey that lady took to New York in 1704. She wrote
vividly of what she saw and commented upon it from the standpoint of an orthodox believer, but
a quality of levity in her witty writings showed that she was much less fervent than the Pilgrim
founders had been. In the South, William Byrd of Virginia, an aristocratic plantation owner,
contrasted sharply with gloomier predecessors. His record of a surveying trip in 1728, The
History of the Dividing Line, and his account of a visit to his frontier properties in 1733, A
Journey to the Land of Eden, were his chief works. Years in England, on the Continent, and
among the gentry of the South had created gaiety and grace of expression, and, although a devout
Anglican, Byrd was as playful as the Restoration wits whose works he clearly admired.
The wrench of the American Revolution emphasized differences that had been growing
between American and British political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that
rebellion was inevitable, fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new nation’s
government, they were influenced by a number of very effective political writers, such as Samuel
Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom favoured the colonists, and loyalist Joseph Galloway.
But two figures loomed above these—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.
Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish his writings in his brother’s newspaper,
the New England Courant, as early as 1722. This newspaper championed the cause of the
“Leather Apron” man and the farmer and appealed by using easily understood language and
practical arguments. The idea that common sense was a good guide was clear in both the
popular Poor Richard’s almanac, which Franklin edited between 1732 and 1757 and filled with
prudent and witty aphorisms purportedly written by uneducated but experienced Richard
Saunders, and in the author’s Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1788, a record of his rise
from humble circumstances that offered worldly wise suggestions for future success.
 Franklin’s self-attained culture, deep and wide, gave substance and skill to varied articles,
pamphlets, and reports that he wrote concerning the dispute with Great Britain, many of them
extremely effective in stating and shaping the colonists’ cause.
Thomas Paine went from his native England to Philadelphia and became a magazine
editor and then, about 14 months later, the most effective propagandist for the colonial cause. His
pamphlet Common Sense (January 1776) did much to influence the colonists to declare their
independence. The American Crisis papers (December 1776–December 1783) spurred
Americans to fight on through the blackest years of the war. Based upon Paine’s simple deistic
beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring melodrama with the angelic colonists against the
forces of evil. Such white and black picturings were highly effective propaganda. Another reason
for Paine’s success was his poetic fervour, which found expression in impassioned words and
phrases long to be remembered and quoted. The new nation
In the postwar period some of these eloquent men were no longer able to win a hearing.
Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams lacked the constructive ideas that appealed to those interested
in forming a new government. Others fared better—for example, Franklin, whose tolerance and
sense showed in addresses to the constitutional convention. A different group of authors,
however, became leaders in the new period—Thomas Jefferson and the talented writers of
the Federalist papers, a series of 85 essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the virtues of the
proposed new constitution. They were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John
Jay. More distinguished for insight into problems of government and cool logic than for
eloquence, these works became a classic statement of American governmental, and more
generally of republican, theory. At the time they were highly effective in influencing legislators
who voted on the new constitution. Hamilton, who wrote perhaps 51 of the Federalist papers,
became a leader of the Federalist Party and, as first secretary of the treasury (1789–95), wrote
messages that were influential in increasing the power of national government at the expense of
the state governments.
Thomas Jefferson was an influential political writer during and after the war. The merits
of his great summary, the Declaration of Independence, consisted, as Madison pointed out, “in a
lucid communication of human rights…in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion, and
to the spirit of the American people.” After the war he formulated the exact tenets of his faith in
various papers but most richly in his letters and inaugural addresses, in which he urged
individual freedom and local autonomy—a theory of decentralization differing from Hamilton’s
belief in strong federal government. Though he held that all men are created equal, Jefferson
thought that “a natural aristocracy” of “virtues and talents” should hold high governmental
positions.
Notable works of the period
Poets and poetry
Poetry became a weapon during the American Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals
urging their forces on, stating their arguments, and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs
such as “Yankee Doodle,” “Nathan Hale,” and “The Epilogue,” mostly set to popular British
melodies and in manner resembling other British poems of the period.
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. Although he wrote much in the stilted manner of the
Neoclassicists, such poems as “The Indian Burying Ground,” “The Wild Honey Suckle,” “To a
Caty-did,” and “On a Honey Bee” were romantic lyrics of real grace and feeling that were
forerunners of a literary movement destined to be important in the 19th century.
Drama and the novel
In the years toward the close of the 18th century, both dramas and novels of some historical
importance were produced. Though theatrical groups had long been active in America, the first
American comedy presented professionally was Royall Tyler’s Contrast (1787). This drama was
full of echoes of Goldsmith and Sheridan, but it contained a Yankee character (the predecessor of
many such in years to follow) who brought something native to the stage.
William Hill Brown wrote the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), which
showed authors how to overcome ancient prejudices against this form by following
the sentimental novel form invented by Samuel Richardson. A flood of sentimental novels
followed to the end of the 19th century. Hugh Henry Brackenridge succeeded Cervantes’s Don
Quixote and Henry Fielding with some popular success in Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), an
amusing satire on democracy and an interesting portrayal of frontier life. Gothic thrillers were to
some extent nationalized in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799–
1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799).
The 19th Century
Early 19th-century literature
After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were
exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors of very
respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore
Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary development.
Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first version of
his poem “Thanatopsis” (1817) appeared. This, as well as some later poems, was written under
the influence of English 18th-century poets. Still later, however, under the influence of
Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly represented the New
England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a fighting liberal editor of The
Evening Post. He himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New
Yorker, Washington Irving.
Irving, the youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with ebullient young men
of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (1807–08), which satirized the foibles of
Manhattan’s citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York (1809), by “Diedrich
Knickerbocker,” a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old
Dutch families. Irving’s models in these works were obviously Neoclassical English satirists,
from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright style. Later, having met Sir Walter
Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative German literature, he introduced a
new Romantic note in The Sketch Book (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works.
He was the first American writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of
British critics.
James Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter Scott’s
“Waverley” novels, he did his best work in the “Leatherstocking” tales (1823–41), a five-volume
series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving
history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him acclaim not only
in America and England but on the continent of Europe as well. Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the
South, lived and worked as an author and editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New
York City. His work was shaped largely by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an
editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of
magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein
he lucidly explained and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in
accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day. His
masterpieces of terror—“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red
Death” (1842), “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), and others—were written according to a
carefully worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as “The Murders
in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which historians credited as the first of the genre. As a poet, he
achieved fame with “The Raven” (1845). His work, especially his critical writings and carefully
crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were translated by Charles
Baudelaire, than in his own country. Two Southern novelists were also outstanding in the earlier
part of the century: John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow
Barn (1832), Kennedy wrote delightfully of life on the plantations. Simms’s forte was the writing
of historical novels like those of Scott and Cooper, which treated the history of the frontier and
his native South Carolina. The Yemassee (1835) and Revolutionary romances show him at his
best.
The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)
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. The devastation of World
War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering 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. Despite, or
perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the
richest and most productive in American literature.
A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may
be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward
civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at
the prospect of change.
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.
Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O
Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).
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.
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 theater 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)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong,
entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global
politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that
came to define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature during the second
half of the 20th century. The 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. 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
Ntozake Shange
Wendy Wasserstein
Tony Kushner
David Henry Hwang
Richard Greenberg
Suzan-Lori Parks