American literature

American literature
A.F. Bradley, New York · Public domain · source
Name	American literature
Caption	First edition of Moby-Dick
Region	United States
Period	17th century–present

American literature American literature emerged from colonial encounters, indigenous oral traditions, and settler communities to produce a diverse body of texts linked to figures like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Plymouth Colony, Jamestown, Virginia, and events such as the American Revolution and the Civil War. Its development intersects with institutions and movements exemplified by Harvard College, Yale College, Transcendentalism, Abolitionism, and the Harlem Renaissance, and includes landmark works associated with authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Toni Morrison.

Origins and Early Colonial Literature

Early colonial writing reflects interactions among settlers, indigenous peoples, and European powers: texts linked to John Smith, William Bradford, Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet, and missionary accounts tied to Squanto, Massasoit, and Praying Indians. Puritan prose and sermons circulated through networks including Massachusetts Bay Colony, Salem witch trials, and pamphlets reacting to events such as the Pequot War and the King Philip's War. Travel narratives and captivity narratives connected to Mary Rowlandson and exploration reports by agents of Virginia Company and Plymouth Colony set precedents for genre blending later seen in fiction by Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

19th-Century American Literature

The nineteenth century saw diversification with regional voices and national debates: the antebellum era features essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, poetry by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and reform writing connected to Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Literary institutions such as The Atlantic and The Dial supported Transcendentalism and abolitionist networks responding to the Missouri Compromise, Compromise of 1850, and the Underground Railroad. Postbellum realism and regionalism are epitomized by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and the local color of Kate Chopin, Bret Harte, and Sarah Orne Jewett.

Modernism and Early 20th Century

Modernist experimentation intensified amid urbanization, immigration, and global conflicts, with major figures like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Periodicals such as Poetry and institutions like Scribner's fostered networks that included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as expatriate communities in Paris and connections to events like World War I and Paris Peace Conference. Innovations in narrative and form informed landmark works including The Waste Land, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and As I Lay Dying.

Postwar and Contemporary Literature

After World War II, American letters expanded through voices shaped by war, civil rights, immigration, and technology. Key authors include William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, Colson Whitehead, and Annie Proulx. Movements such as the Beat Generation, Black Arts Movement, and feminist and LGBTQ+ literatures intersect with institutions like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, and events like the Stonewall riots and the Civil Rights Movement that reshaped thematic concerns.

Genres, Movements, and Themes

American letters encompass multiple genres—novelists such as Herman Melville and Mark Twain advanced the novel; poets like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop transformed verse; playwrights including Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and August Wilson shaped theater. Movements include Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Beat Generation, Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, and contemporary forms like graphic novels exemplified by creators associated with Maus and graphic memoirs. Recurring themes connect to the American Civil War, westward expansion linked to Manifest Destiny and the Oregon Trail, slavery and emancipation tied to Emancipation Proclamation, immigration linked to Ellis Island, urbanization related to New York City and Chicago, race and identity as in works responding to Jim Crow laws, gender and family in contexts of second-wave feminism, and the environment in texts engaging wilderness and frontier narratives.

Authors and Canonical Works

Canonical figures and representative works include Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography), Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), Emily Dickinson (collected poems), Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Edgar Allan Poe (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven), Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady), T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), William Faulkner (Light in August, The Sound and the Fury), Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea), James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Toni Morrison (Beloved), Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine), Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint), Don DeLillo (White Noise), Joyce Carol Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys), Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian), Margaret Atwood (note: Canadian author with frequent US publication), and contemporary prize winners such as Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad), Kazuo Ishiguro (Nobel laureate often published in the US), Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Gabriel García Márquez (linked via translation and influence), and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird). Lesser-known but influential writers include Catharine Maria Sedgwick, William Wells Brown, Frances E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, John Ashbery, Anzia Yezierska, Grace Paley, Ralph Ellison (novelist), Lorraine Hansberry, Gish Jen, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop (poet), E. L. Doctorow, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, and Sherman Alexie.

Category:Literature of the United States