American Literary History

American Literary History
Name	American Literary History
Country	United States
Period	17th century–present
Major authors	Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway

Contents

American Literary History offers a chronological and thematic account of writing in the lands of the present-day United States from colonial settlement through contemporary multicultural production, connecting texts such as The Federalist Papers, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Leaves of Grass, The Great Gatsby, Beloved with institutions like Harvard University, Columbia University, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and events including the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's suffrage movement. It surveys movements including Puritanism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Modernism, Harlem Renaissance, Postmodernism and highlights authors linked to awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Book Award.

Overview and Definitions

Scholars define the field by texts produced in contexts like colonial Jamestown, Virginia, Plymouth Colony, antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, and metropolitan centers such as New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, San Francisco, California, linking canonical items like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Common Sense (pamphlet), Moby-Dick to institutional actors including the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Academy of American Poets and events such as the Mexican–American War, the Great Depression, World War II. Definitions debate inclusion of writings from regions attached to the Spanish Empire, French colonial empire, and territories like Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska alongside diasporic texts tied to African American, Native American, Latinx, Asian American communities.

Recurring themes include national identity as debated in Federalist Papers and Common Sense (pamphlet), slavery and abolition in Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe), migration in texts tied to Dust Bowl narratives and Great Migration accounts by Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, gender and domesticity in novels by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, race and resistance in works by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and environmental writing from Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson. Genres range from Puritan sermons in New England to frontier narratives like James Fenimore Cooper's tales, slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano and Sojourner Truth-adjacent figures, detective fiction influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, science fiction with practitioners such as Octavia Butler, and lyric and experimental poetry practiced by Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath.

Regional traditions map to places like New England (Transcendentalism, Puritan prose), the South (plantation narratives, Southern Gothic tied to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor), the Midwest (regional realism from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson), West Coast scenes in San Francisco (Beat poets) and Los Angeles (Chicano literature). Indigenous literatures involve figures and nations such as Leslie Marmon Silko and the Navajo Nation, while African American literary traditions center on communities in Harlem, New York and cities like Chicago, Illinois and New Orleans, Louisiana producing the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago Black Renaissance, and contemporary voices connected to movements including Black Lives Matter. Latino/a and Latinx literatures involve authors such as Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, linkages to Puerto Rico and Mexican American histories in Texas, while Asian American traditions feature Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and histories tied to Angel Island and Chinatown, San Francisco.

Critical frames include New Criticism as practiced around institutions like Yale University and Columbia University, Historical New Criticism reacting to Civil War scholarship, New Historicism associated with schools in Princeton University and University of California, Berkeley, Marxist readings linked to University of Chicago scholars, feminist criticism emerging from Smith College and Barnard College networks, and postcolonial approaches attentive to writers from Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Literary historiography debates canon formation influenced by publishing houses like HarperCollins, periodicals such as The Atlantic (magazine), academic prizes like the Pulitzer Prize, and anthology projects including The Norton Anthology of American Literature; recent methodologies foreground ethnic studies programs at University of California, Los Angeles, Howard University, and digital humanities projects hosted by Library of Congress and University of Virginia.