Colonial and Early National Period

Colonial and Early National Period

• The earliest American literature was practical, straightforward, often derivative of the literature of Great Britain, and future-centered.
• Consisted mostly of practical nonfiction written by British settlers in America
• John Smith published Histories of Virginia in 1608 & 1624, based on his life as an English explorer and president of the Jamestown Colony.
• Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote religion-focused books on the colonial America
• Anne Bradstreet wrote The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, said to be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England
• American poetry and fiction was being published in Great Britain after the declaration of independence in 1776
• Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay wrote The Federalist Papers, which greatly influenced the political direction of the United States.
• Benjamin Franklin wrote an autobiography, which told his American life story
• Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, wrote the first African American book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral

19th Century American Literature

• The early decades of the 19th century saw the beginnings of a truly American literature emerging
• 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 Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which 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 in his Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depicting his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways

Romantic Period

• A way of thinking that emphasizes and embraces individualism and a person's emotional experience over reason
• A movement that shows appreciation of the wildness of nature over human-made order
• While it emerged in Western Europe in the late 18th century, Americans embraced the movement in the early 19th century.
• Edgar Allan Poe was a genius, often tormented and struggled against writing conventions-during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849
• His works include “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, and "The Raven" a gloomy depiction of lost love, eeriness is intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme and “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”
• James Russel Lowell used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday life
• Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays
• Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, an account of his life alone by Walden Pond
• Margaret Fuller was the editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne published short stories, most notably the allegorical "Young Goodman Brown" (1835)
• He wrote The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
• Walt Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. Refused traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855)
• William Wells Brown wrote Clotel, the first Black American Novel in 1853 and The Escape, the first African American play in 1858
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper & Harriet E. Wilson are the first Black women to publish fiction in the US
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is credited with raising opposition in the North to slavery
• Emily Dickinson lived largely in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886
• She was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene
• Poem list: “I'm Nobody! Who are you?”, “Because I could not stop for Death -“, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun” and "A Bird, came down the Walk -"

Realism and Naturalism

• The Civil War in the United States caused an immense human cost
• Walt Whitman claimed that "a great literature will...arise out of the era of those four years.”
• Characterized by its detailed, realistic, and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. Writing has become the means of self-expression of the Americans.
• Samuel Clemens, pen name Mark Twain, was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became a 27-year-old writer
• Twain's work include celebrated short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, which made him famous, and humorous realism writing style “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
• Stories were humorous tall tale and its characters were realistic depictions of American people.
• Naturalism was a movement that emerged during the period but this was distinctly marked with an intensified form of realism.
• Had drawn inspiration from 19th century French who sought to document the reality, centered on the middle-class and working class.
• Theodore Dreiser embraced naturalism, and wrote His Sister Carrie, most important American naturalist novel
• Henry James had same views with realists and naturalist, and created an aesthetic experience aside

Modernist Period

• Contradictory impulses can be found swirling within modernism, a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past.
• Modernism was one of the richest and most productive periods in American literature
• 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
• Devastation of World War I and Great Depression caused suffering in Europe and US.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby
• Native son, Richard Wright, exposed and attacked American racism
• William Faulkner used his stream-of-consciousness technique in writing monologues
• His works include The Sound and Fury, which break from past literary practice
• John Steinbeck works, like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, depicted the realistically difficult lives of migrant workers who belong to the working class
• T.S. Eliot was an American by birth, British subject by choice
• The Waste Land, quintessential modernist poem but was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.
• In 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 US
• Richard Wright shaped the literature by African Americans during contemporary period
• Autobiography credits are Black Boy, and he left the US for France, repulsed by injustice and discrimination as black man
• Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man 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
• Go Tell It on the Mountain is his most accomplished and influential novel
• Gwendolyn Brooks: first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize
• Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, launched a writing career that would put the lives of black women at its center
• Awarded a Nobel Prize in 1993
• Writers and writings varied and were classified as realist, metafictional, post-modern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist, stream of consciousness
• Beat movement had been a short-lived movement in the history of the evolution and development American literature.

Post-Modernism/Contemporary Period

• Emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War
• Conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics
• Brought significant cultural shifts within
• Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl, a poem that pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that dominate American poetry