An Outline

of
History of American Literature


Article From Norton Online
www.wwnorton.com


Compiled by
Masoud Abadi
[email protected]

And

Iman Kiaee
[email protected]


ii

iii
Table of Contents



From the beginning (1700) to 1820 6
From 1820 to 1865 13
From 1865 to 1914 20
From 1914 to 1945 28
Since 1945 36











iv



A Short Outline
of
History of American Literature
6

From
The Beginning
(1700)
to
1820




7
From the beginning (1700) To 1820
Overview
Notes
The new world that Columbus boasted of to the Spanish monarchs in 1500 was
neither an expanse of empty space nor a replica of European culture, tools, textiles,
and religion, but a combination of Native, European, and African people living in
complex relation to one another.
The Native cultures Columbus found in the New World displayed a huge variety of
languages, social customs, and creative expressions, with a common practice of oral
literature without parallel east of the Atlantic.
Exploratory expeditions to the New World quickly led to colonial settlements, as the
major European countries vied with each other for a portion of the western
hemispheres riches.
The role of writing during the initial establishment and administration of these
overseas colonies involved influencing policymakers at home, justifying actions taken
without their explicit permission, and bearing witness to the direct and unintended
consequences of European conquest of the Americas.
The Puritans who settled in New England represented a different type of colonist, one
that emigrated for religious rather than national or economic reasons.
Since the English language arrived late to the New World, it was by no means
inevitable that the English would dominate, even in their own colonies. But by 1700,
the strength of the (mostly religious) literary output of New England had made
English the preeminent language of early American literature.
The state of American literature in 1700, consisting of only about 250 published
works, reflects the pressing religious, security, and cultural concerns of colonial life.
Full Text
Columbuss voyage to the Americas began the exploitation of Native populations by
European imperial powers, but we need not think of the intellectual exchange between the
two hemispheres as being entirely in one direction. A Taino Indian whom Columbus seized
and trained as a translator, and renamed Diego Coln in Spain, had as much to say to his
people upon his return to the Caribbean in 1494 as Columbus did to Ferdinand and Isabella
after his triumphant first expedition. The new world that Columbus boasted of to the
Spanish monarchs in 1500 was neither an expanse of empty space nor a replica of European
culture, tools, textiles, and religion, but a combination of Native, European, and African
8
people living in complex relation to one another. After early wonder and awe at their
unexpected discovery of inhabited land, Europeans used their technological edge in weaponry
(gunpowder and steel) to conquer the region. They were aided in this task by the host of
diseases they had brought from the Old World, against which early Americans had no
immune resistance. Smallpox, measles, and typhus decimated Native populations, and in
response to the lack of a local labor force the Spanish began importing Africans to take their
place, thereby compounding genocide with slavery. But by no means were Natives merely
helpless victims. Many adopted European weapons and tactics to defend themselves from
invaders, and while some collaborated with Europeans, as did some Aztecs with Cortss
Spanish force against their king Montezuma, or the Narragansetts and Mohegans with the
New Englanders against the Pequots, they did so not out of submission or gullibility but to
gain a temporary upper hand against their Native rivalstruly, a resourceful response to an
impossible situation.
The Native cultures Columbus found in the New World displayed a huge variety of
languages, social customs, and creative expressions, with a common practice of oral literature
without parallel east of the Atlantic. Compared to the three dozen languages, common
religion and printed alphabet, and stable boundaries of the European nation-states, the Native
peoples were much more diverse. They spoke hundreds of distantly related languages and
widely differed in their social organization, from the hunting-gathering, nomadic Utes to the
highly structured farming society of the Iroquois confederation. Eight different creation
stories have been catalogued, each attesting to the religious diversity of early Americans. But
since no Native peoples had a written alphabet, they relied instead on an oral tradition of
chants, songs, and spoken narrative, what some critics have called orature, for their artistic
expressions. These verbal genres (trickster tales, jokes, naming and grievance chants, and
dream songs, among many others) are literary in the sense that they represent the
imaginative and emotional responses of their anonymous authors to Native culture. But our
Western sense of literature is mainly derived from the effects of the written word and has
little to do with the performance issues of tempo, pauses, and intonation common to verbal
genres. Translations of orature, first into English and then onto the page, leave out a great
deal.
Exploratory expeditions to the New World quickly led to colonial settlements, as the major
European countries vied with each other for a portion of the western hemispheres riches.
Early voyages by Columbus for Spain, Cabot for England, and Vespucci and Cabral for
Portugal mapped and claimed large areas for later colonies. Small settlements made on
Hispaniola by Columbus (1493) and in Jamestown by John Smith (1607) faced organized and
more numerous Native adversaries as well as internal dissent and mutiny; the early settlers
were followed by waves of better armed and equipped settlers who came to stay. The Spanish
9
were most successful in establishing their empire, which by the 1540s reached from central
North America and Florida southward, to northern and western South America. The
Portuguese settled in eastern Brazil, the French along the St. Lawrence River in present-day
Canada, first explored by Jacques Cartier and then settled sixty years later by Samuel de
Champlain. The English came to the New World late, after several failed expeditions by
Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher. Once the Jamestown colony
survived its first trials of starvation, disease, riots, and violence with the Powhatan tribe, the
English expanded from this base up and down the eastern coast of North America.
The role of writing during the initial establishment and administration of these overseas
colonies involved influencing policy makers at home, justifying actions taken without their
explicit permission, or bearing witness to the direct and unintended consequences of
European conquest of the Americas. The development of the printing press fifty years before
Columbuss first voyage allowed many of his descriptions of the New World to spur the
national ambitions and personal imaginations of the Spanish, ensuring new expeditions and
future colonies. The long lag time between sending and receiving directions from Europe
meant many written records exist as briefs, in which better informed explorers attempted to
adjust colonial policy written largely in reaction to events abroad or to justify opportunistic
actions taken without the crowns knowledge, as with Cortss messages to Charles V about
his subjugation of the Aztecs. Writing also recorded the hideous consequences of empire
wrought by the Europeans, many of whom reacted strongly against both the unintentional
infection of the Natives with Old World diseases and the enslavement of the remainder for
plantation labor. It could also be used subversively, as it was by an anonymous Aztec poet
who lamented the fall of Montezuma in the Nahuatl language, but in the Roman alphabet. It
also afforded opportunities to scribes such as Diego del Castillo and John Smith, who were
born into the European underclass, to reshape the possibilities of colonial life away from
hereditary privilege and in favor of merit, talent, and effort, all three of which were in short
supply but high demand in the New World.
The Puritans who settled in New England represented a different type of colonist, one that
emigrated for religious rather than national or economic reasons. The first Puritans who
arrived in Massachusetts founded Plymouth Plantation in 1620 and, under William Bradford,
began a settlement devoted to religious life: they thought of themselves as Pilgrims. They
were separatists whose beliefs were persecuted by the Church of England; after moving
briefly to the Netherlands, they chartered the Mayflower and sailed for America, where with
help from the Wampanoag tribe they survived their first winter. When John Winthrop arrived
in Massachusetts Bay in 1630 with many more Calvinist dissenters, Plymouth was subsumed
into the larger organization. Pilgrims and Puritans held similar beliefs, such as the doctrine of
election, that God had predestined before birth those who would be saved and damned. But
10
although the Puritans were rigidly exclusive in their early colonial days, requiring public
accounts of conversion before admitting people to church membership and their communion,
their faith emphasized rapturous joy and zeal rather than bleak or doleful subsistence.
Since the English language arrived late to the New World, it was by no means inevitable that
the English would dominate, even in their own colonies. But by 1700, the strength of the
(mostly religious) literary output of New England had made English the preeminent language
of early American literature. Bostons size, independent college and printing press at Harvard
(founded in 1636), and non-nationalist, locally driven project of producing Puritan literature
gave New England the publishing edge over the other colonies. But other tongues existed in
small enclaves within the thirteen English colonies that gave a foreign inflection to the local
culture. In Albany, New York, for example, Dutch and Belgian mixed with French and
Spanish speakers, and the inhabitants were immigrants from throughout Europe; Dutch
persisted as an everyday language until the mid-1800s. Similarly, German immigrants in
Pennsylvania prompted publishers to cater to their native language.
The state of American literature in 1700, consisting of only about 250 published works,
reflects the pressing religious, security, and cultural concerns of colonial life. Printing presses
operated in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Annapolis, and colonists could also acquire
works published in England. The most prolific author of the period was Cotton Mather,
whose writings recorded the late-century war between New England and New France and its
Indian allies, a series of biographies (in the Magnalia Christi Americana) of American
religious saints, and conduct guides for ministers and servants. Other authors focused on
relations with Native Americans, including pamphlets on conferences with New Yorks
important Iroquois allies and captivity narratives recounting the barbarity of their Indian
enemies. Still others focused on matters of unsuccessful social integration, as was the case for
Quaker dissenters in Boston in 1660, or looked ahead to social problems looming on the
horizon, as did Samuel Sewalls antislavery tract The Selling of Joseph (1700).

Making Connections
1. One of the few things that Thomas Paine and Jonathan Edwards have in common is their
reliance on simplicity and directness of rhetorical style (see Paines Common Sense and
Edwardss Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.) In Franklins Autobiography,he also
declares a bias in favor of clarity of diction. Other examples of authors whose writings are often
thought to be disarmingly simple, but which follow in the tradition of direct American
rhetoric, include Harriet Jacobss Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Walt Whitmans Leaves of
11
Grass; Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow
WallPaper; Ernest Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro; William Carlos Williamss
The Young Housewife; Allen Ginsbergs Howl;Raymond Carvers Cathedral; and Billy
Collinss Forgetfulness.
2. Since this part of the anthology covers the very beginnings of American literature, works
from the later periods understandably and often refer back to some of these foundational texts.
Illustrative comparisons are possible between Columbuss letters to Spain and Emma Lazaruss
1492; Anne Bradstreets The Tenth Muse and John Berrymans Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet; between William Bradfords chapter Mr. Morton of Merrymount from Of
Plymouth Plantation and Nathaniel Hawthornes The Maypole of Merry Mount and between
Jonathan Edwardss Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Robert Lowells Mr.
Edwards and the Spider.
3. Narratives of discovery expeditions are among the first European writings that deal with the
New World, from the letters of Columbus to the writings of Cabeza de Vaca, Thomas Harriot
John Smith, and William Bradford. These early writings helped set the tone for later works on
travel, including Mary Rowlandsons Narrative of Captivity and Restoration; Sarah Kemble
Knights The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York; Olaudah Equianos Interesting
Narrative; Walt Whitmans Crossing Brooklyn Ferry; Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn; Stephen Cranes The Open Boat; Robert Frosts Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening; Wallace Stevenss Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird; Jack Kerouacs Big Sur;
and Robert Haydens Middle Passage.
4. Texts that deal with religious fervor, both from the Puritan days and from the Great
Awakening, abound in American literature before 1820. From deeply religious works like
Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation and John Winthrops A Model of Christian Charity to more
disturbing though no less religious displays such as Mary Rowlandsons Narrative of Captivity
and Restoration and Cotton Mathers The Trial of Martha Carrier from The Wonders of the
Invisible World, the period before 1700 was saturated with Calvinist faith. The Great
Awakenings zeal prompted works like Phyllis Wheatleys On the Death of the Rev. Mr.
George Whitefield, 1770 and Thoughts on the Works of Providence as well as Jonathan
Edwardss A Divine and Supernatural Light and Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
Other religious and spiritual writings for comparison include Ralph Waldo Emersons Nature
and Brahma;Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown and The Ministers Black
Veil; Mary Wilkins Freemans A New England Nun; T. S. Eliots Journey of the Magi and
Burnt Norton; Robert Frosts Design; Robert Lowells The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket; and Philip Roths Defender of the Faith.
12
5. The ideals of the Enlightenment, reason and sympathy, helped give rise to Thomas Paines
Common Sense and The Crisis , Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence, and Benjamin
Franklins Autobiography. They shaped the founding fathers understandings of the world they
lived in and laid the foundation for the independent nation the Revolution produced. Works
that use Enlightenment ideals to represent the promise of the young nation include
Crvecoeurs Letters to an American Farmer, Equianos Interesting Narrative, and the letters of
John and Abigail Adams. Later works which interrogate that promise for its actual content of
reason and sentiment include Nathaniel Hawthornes My Kinsman, Major Molineux;
Frederick Douglasss What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?; W. E. B. Du Boiss The Souls of
Black Folks; Paul Laurence Dunbars We Wear the Mask; Countee Cullens Incident;
Carlos Bulosans Be American; Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man; and Robert Lowells For the
Union Dead.

Authors
Stories of the Beginning of the World
Native American Trickster Tales
Hannah Dustan
Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)
lvar (o lvaro) Nez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 14901558)
Thomas Harriot (1560-1621)
Samuel De Champlain (c. 1570-1635)
Thomas Morton (c. 1579-1647)
John Smith (1580-1631)
William Bradford (1590-1657)
John Winthrop (1588-1649)
Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683)
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)
Mary Rowlandson (c. 1636-1711)
Edward Taylor (c. 1642-1729)
Cotton Mather (1663-1728)
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Samson Occom (1723-1792)
J. Hector St. John de Crvecoeur (1735-1813)
John Adams (1735-1826) and Abigail Adams (1744-
1818)
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Olaudah Equiano (1745?-1797)
Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) and Hannah
Webster Foster (1762-1837)
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784)
Royall Tyler (1757-1826)



13



From
1820
to
1865



14
From 1820 To 1865
Overview
Notes
The 1941 publication of F. O. Matthiessens American Renaissance: Art and
Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman helped to establish the writers in this
volume as pioneers of American literary nationalism who helped shape American
literature for the next two centuries.
After Andrew Jacksons victory at the Battle of New Orleans to end the War of 1812,
a heroic national myth grew up around him that asserted the strength and optimism of
the American character and suggested a hopeful trajectory for national literature that
concentrated on ordinary people.
The professional writers ability to devote his or her time to creative writing during
the antebellum years was often challenged by differences in international and
American copyright laws and by negative attitudes about the writers occupation.
Despite these economic difficulties, antebellum writers had the ability to reach a
larger and more educated audience than ever before. Many used this opportunity to
argue for reform and to represent the necessity of resolving looming cultural conflicts.
Although the American renaissance should by no means be considered a coherent
school or movement, the writers included in this anthology responded to the same
pressing issues of their times and stayed in conversation with each other through their
writings.

Full Text
The 1941 publication of F. O. Matthiessens American Renaissance: Art and Expression in
the Age of Emerson and Whitman helped to establish the writers in this volume as pioneers of
American literary nationalism who helped shape American literature for the next two
centuries. Matthiessen argued that the years between 1820 and the Civil War represented a
first flowering of American literary talent. Calling the period a renaissance, he selected a
small group of neglected authors (Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau) whose works
he felt had been undervalued by readers and critics. Matthiessen argued that the writers of
this period helped to forge a stable national literary perspective and greatly influenced the
nineteenth- and twentieth- century writers who came after them. Matthiessens list of
renaissance writers has been challenged and adapted since its first publication. Among
15
other things, his list focused primarily on male writers from the same class and ethnic
background, and excluded many of the more popular novelists and poets whom most readers
living during these years might have read and recognized. Critics have also noted that
Matthiessen exaggerates the separateness of the English and American literary traditions.
Still, the idea of an American renaissance has proven useful to students and critics wishing
to study how these antebellum writers both built upon the work of those who preceded them
and shaped the work of future writers.
During the 1820s, writers and critics called for nationalistic literature to reflect the new sense
of cultural independence from Britain. After Andrew Jacksons victory at the Battle of New
Orleans to end the War of 1812, a heroic national myth grew up around him that asserted the
strength and optimism of the American character and suggested a hopeful trajectory for
national literature that concentrated on ordinary people. British literary nationalists looked
down on the efforts of American authors to establish a distinct or emancipated literary
tradition, and many of the most successful U.S. writers of the 1820s saw themselves in
conversation with European culture rather than separated from it. Instabilities in the territorial
boundaries of the growing country and unresolved sectional contradictions regarding
approaches to slavery, tariffs, and federal works projects made any consensus on how
American literature should represent its culture extremely difficult to achieve. By and large,
though, authors in the 1820s shared a sense of the distinctiveness of the American landscape,
its colonial history, and the legitimacy of its traditions, and worked to represent the ways that
ordinary Americans were coming to grips with their countrys contradictions.
The geographical expansion and population growth of the United States in the first fifty years
of the nineteenth century was matched by a marked increase in publication of books and
periodicals. As cities grew in size and transportation to the interior of the country became
faster and easier thanks to the construction of canals and railroads, the market for printed
materials expanded. The professional writers ability to devote his or her time to creative
writing during the antebellum years was often challenged by differences in international and
American copyright laws and by negative attitudes about the writers occupation. American
readers might have benefited from cheap pirated editions of novels and poems, but the
unpredictability of copyright royalties meant that many authors had to support themselves
through another occupation, such as editing or writing short journalistic criticism for a
newspaper or magazine. Social stigmas made it difficult on the one hand for male writers to
justify sole occupation as poet or novelist, and on the other hand for women to enter the
public sphere as authoritative social commentators.
Despite these economic difficulties, antebellum writers had the ability to reach a larger and
more educated audience than ever before. Many used this opportunity to argue for reform and
16
to represent the necessity of resolving looming cultural conflicts. Ralph Waldo Emersons
writings, in particular, argued for the creative power of the imagination and implied an
agency for the individual in rethinking his or her role in society. Emersons influence on
authors such as Whitman, Hawthorne, Fuller, and Melville can be found in their willingness
to question current institutions and reinterpret the status quo of American society within their
works. Much of the energy for reform during these years derived from literatures ability to
cause readers to sympathize with other peoples plights by representing characters from
unequal positions of privilege or freedomslaves, Native Americans, and poor immigrants
in urban settings. Many women writers, rising to prominence through abolitionist or urban
reform efforts, also wrote about the right to vote for women and the need for greater legal
equality between men and women. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first national
suffrage meeting of its kind, is one example of the expanded role of women in national
politics, but the massive popularity of womens temperance and anti-slavery literature
(especially Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin) speaks to the power of womens
involvement in these social issues. One typical rhetorical tactic used by both suffragist and
abolitionist reformers was to remind their readers of the unrealized potential of the
Declaration of Independence. Margaret Fuller, for example, argued in The Great Lawsuit
(1843) that Jeffersons Declaration implied that the right to vote ought to extend to women
as well as to men. Henry David Thoreaus speech Slavery in Massachusetts (1854),
meanwhile, objected strenuously to the hypocrisy of a northern state that had voted to outlaw
slavery yet abetted the recapture by southerners of fugitive slaves. As reform movements
increasingly were replaced by violent harbingers of the Civil War to come, writers of the
renaissance turned increasingly to expressions of disillusionment with the failed promise of
the American Revolution.
Although the American renaissance should by no means be considered a coherent school or
movement, the writers included in this anthology responded to the same pressing issues of
their times and stayed in conversation with each other through their writings. Much of the
literature of the antebellum years reflects the direct and indirect influences these writers had
on one another. Common interests in travel and international friendship, as well as a shared
sense of the need to shore up their current literature in references to the languages and
cultures of the classical and imperial past, also linked these authors. But their desire to root
the writings of the renaissance in a nationalist historical tradition was always in service to the
development of an American perspective that could take its place in the context of the other
cultures of the world.

17
Making Connections
1. The period introduction for 18201865 notes the development of the American
Renaissance as a way of describing those years in terms of literary nationalism. Some examples
of works from these years that try to develop and represent a national character include
Emersons The American Scholar and The Poet and Whitmans Song of Myself and
Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Any literary project attempting to adapt or cause a rebirth
in such a national perspective depends on its earlier representations; in the same way, its
success or failure will be borne out by what succeeding authors found helpful in their own
works. For early attempts that helped form the beginnings of this national character, see those
sections of William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation, which describe the voluntary Mayflower
Compact; the efforts of Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World , and Jonathan
Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light , to distinguish the elect quality of what the
colonists were doing; and the personal narratives of Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, and
Thomas Jefferson . For significant extensions and revisions in American literary nationalism
after the Civil War, please see Emma Lazaruss The New Colossus , Sui Sin Fars In the
Land of the Free , Ezra Pounds A Pact, Langston Hughess I, Too, Robert Lowells The
Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, and Michael Harpers American History.
2. Part of the provisional quality of literary nationalism in the 1820s resulted from the
repercussions of the American Revolution and authors attempts to make sense of the dramatic
change from imperial colony to new nation. Some of the works from 18201865 depict
characters coming to grips with sudden independence, including Washington Irvings Rip
Van Winkle and Nathaniel Hawthornes My Kinsman, Major Molineux . After 1865,
however, the Civil War seems to have joined the Revolution as a major historical challenge to
work through as an American author. Some examples of Civil War retrospects include Walt
Whitmans When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd , Herman Melvilles The Portent ,
Stephen Cranes War is Kind , and Robert Lowells For the Union Dead.
3. One major development in American literature 18201865 is the expansion of the means to
produce and the audience to read American novels, poems, newspapers, and magazines. The
economics of making a living as a writer also enters into the literature of this time in works
such as Emily Dickinsons [This is my letter to the World] and [Publication is the Auction]
and Fanny Ferns Male Criticism on Ladies Books and Fresh Leaves, by Fanny Fern . By
the Civil War the profession of the full-time author had become established, but before 1820
its beginnings can be traced in Anne Bradstreets The Author to her Book and Benjamin
Franklins The Way to Wealth . Another interesting trajectory is the appearance of famous
works in widely circulated pamphlet form, such as Thomas Paines Common Sense and
18
Hamilton, Jay, and Madisons The Federalist , as compared with works that appeared in the new
periodical medium, such as Margaret Fullers The Great Lawsuit and Edgar Allan Poes short
stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher.
4. In Nature , Emerson proposes a radically different approach to the way people should
interact with their environment. Many of the authors from 18201865 share an interest in
charting a special relationship between American characters and the natural landscapes they
inhabit, such as Washington Irvings Rip Van Winkle , Dickinsons [A Bird came down the
Walk ] and [I dreaded that first Robin, so] , Poes The Raven , Hawthornes Young
Goodman Brown , Whitmans Facing West from Californias Shores , and Henry David
Thoreaus Walden (especially Where I Lived, and What I Lived For []). This special
relationship has a long legacy beginning with John Smiths General History of Virginia and
William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation , Sarah Kimble Knights The Private Journal of a
Journey from Boston to New York , and Philip Freneaus The Wild Honeysuckle and On the
Religion of Nature . Later efforts to link an American voice with a country setting include Sarah
Orne Jewetts A Wild Heron , Willa Cathers Neighbor Rosicky , Robert Frosts After
Apple Picking and Birches , Sylvia Plaths Blackberrying , and Jack Kerouacs Big Sur.
5. Emersonian Transcendentalism lent itself to many of the reform movements of the
antebellum years; some of the best examples of works showing signs of his influence include
Thoreaus Resistance to Civil Government and Fullers The Great Lawsuit . Emersons
emphasis on the minds ability to rethink the way the world works is reminiscent of earlier
American texts, whether spiritually based, like John Winthrops A Model of Christian
Charity , or explicitly devoted to the emerging nation, like Jeffersons Declaration of
Independence . Legacies of Emersons willingness to reject the status quo and use literature to
argue for change extend into the present, from Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-
Paper and Wallace Stevenss Sunday Morning to Alan Ginsbergs Howl and Adrienne
Richs Diving into the Wreck





19
Authors
Washington Irving (1783-1859)

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
Catherine Maria Sedgwick (17891851)
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
William Apess (1798-1839)
Lydia Maria Child (18021880)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Fanny Fern (18111872) and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
(18231902)
Harriet Jacobs (c. 1813-1897)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)











20



From
1865
to
1914



21
From 1865 To 1914
Overview
Notes
Between 1865 and 1914, the United States transformed from a country just emerging
from a destructive civil war to an imperial nation with overseas possessions and
coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific.
Though these years brought wealth to some and stature to America in the eyes of the
world, the undesirable consequences of rapid territorial, population, and industrial
expansion were felt most by those least able to resist the greedy, unscrupulous, and
powerful.
The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of
American experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement
among authors to combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth.
To face the challenge of representing these dynamic cultural changes, American
authors turned to the international aesthetic of realism, which was an attempt to
accurately represent life as authors saw it through concrete descriptive details that
readers would recognize from their own lives.
A distinct aesthetic response to the late nineteenth century, American naturalism
continued the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but
naturalists concentrated on lower-class, marginalized people and merged the realist
attention to detail with a strong belief in social determinism rather than free will.
Another crucial development of realism was regional, or local color, writing, an
attempt to capture distinct language, perspectives, and geographical settings before
industrialization and cultural homogenization erased them.
Full Text
Between 1865 and 1914 the United States transformed from a country just emerging from a
destructive civil war to an imperial nation with overseas possessions and coasts on both the
Atlantic and Pacific. Completed in 1869, the transcontinental railroad opened up the interior
to settlement by homesteaders and prospectors, who arrived to exploit cheap land and
discoveries of gold and other useful ores. Such innovations as the development of telegraph,
telephone, and electricity networks helped develop these new Western settlements along with
the East and allowed a burst of economic prosperity and industrialization. Enticed by
promises of ready work made by businesses trying to keep wages down through an
oversupply of labor, a massive influx of immigrants arrived, mostly from Europe and East
22
Asia, and swelled the ranks of New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. By 1893, so
many Americans had moved westward that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared
the frontier closed. Americans subsequently turned their attentions overseas, toward new
territories in Samoa and Hawaii and former Spanish possessions in Cuba, the Philippines, and
Puerto Rico, in an attempt to join the European empires on the world stage.
Though these years brought wealth to some and stature to America in the eyes of the world,
the undesirable consequences of rapid territorial, population, and industrial expansion were
felt most by those with the least resources to resist the greedy, unscrupulous, and powerful.
The Native American populations of the Great Plains, whose cultures depended on the free-
roaming buffalo herds, faced the shock of interference in their hunting grounds by
crisscrossing telegraph lines and railroad tracks. The federal government developed small
reservations to replace hunting traditions with farming, always with the expectation that
Native customs and distinctiveness would eventually vanish. Much of the land stolen from
Natives was acquired cheaply by railroad companies and land prospectors, even though the
Homestead Act of 1862 had intended the land to be improved by small farmers and
immigrant families. Those homesteaders who did settle the plains were squeezed by the
pricing policies of railroad monopolies that attempted to corner the transportation market and
eliminate all competition. In the railroad industry, as with steel, oil, meat packing, and
banking and finance, corporate power was focused in the hands of a few powerful men such
as Gould, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Hill, and Rockefeller. The plight of
workers in the major cities was dire, not just because of the monopolists control over
inhumane and often dangerous working conditions, but because of corrupt government
officials who allowed them to act without hindrance. Early efforts to organize labor against
the monopolists were often violent and had to fight against social prejudices favoring
unfettered capitalism and a hands-off approach to business. In the same way, small farmers
often failed to organize because of an abiding desire for independence that trumped the
benefits of collective action.
The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of American
experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement among authors to
combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth. Immigration from Europe and
Asia resulted in a newly heterogeneous American population, now no longer mainly of New
England descent, and now more diverse in terms of class and ethnic backgrounds. As
populations in large urban centers and all geographic areas of the country increased,
newspapers and magazines focusing on specific ethnic and regional readerships flourished.
Among many others, the Jewish Daily Forward, founded by Abraham Cahan, catered to a
Yiddish-speaking New York reader, and the Overland Express was the first periodical to
feature Western-themed fiction and journalism. With new publishing opportunities available
23
to depict previously underrepresented and marginalized peoples, many fictional characters,
often created by authors from the same cultural and economic backgrounds, began to
challenge received notions about the American character. But this new diversity often
resulted in suspicion, antagonism, and cultural paranoia, triggering a cultural unease that
pitted urban against rural, labor against management, and immigrant against native. In
response, a generation of writers spoke out against social, economic, and political injustices
in newspapers and magazines. Among these were journalists known as muckrakers for
their devotion to exposing the dangers of the city and the evils of monopolies. Some notable
muckrakers included Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, who took on the railroad monopoly
on behalf of small farmers, and Lincoln Steffens, who exposed the corruption of government
officials like Boss Tweed of New York. Other writers took advantage of the new periodical
media to write the literature of argument, which brought the spirit of reform to sociology,
philosophy, and economics: some examples include Helen Hunt Jacksons A Century of
Dishonor (1881), which attacked U.S. injustices against Native Americans, Charlotte Perkins
Gilmans Women and Economics (1898), which explored wealth and womens rights, and
Thorstein Veblens Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which examined the conspicuous
consumption of the super-wealthy business magnates. Booker T. Washingtons Up from
Slavery (1900) and W. E. B. Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are two examples of
nonfiction prose that responded to racial injustices by challenging white audiences to work
toward political solutions.
To face the challenge of representing these dynamic cultural changes, American authors
turned to the international aesthetic of realism, whose European practitioners include Leo
Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, and Gustave Flaubert. American realism was an attempt to accurately
represent life as authors saw it through the use of concrete descriptive details that readers
would recognize from their own lives. William Dean Howells advanced a type of realism that
concentrated on affectionate portrayals of ordinary, middle-class characters in an attempt to
make the novel more democratic and inclusive. Henry James and Edith Wharton, meanwhile,
focused on refined mental states, rather than exterior surfaces and surroundings. Their
psychological realism attempted to find a precise language for intangible moral situations.
The realism of Mark Twain was devoted to rendering the vernacular dialects and
colloquialisms of his ordinary characters, often using humor to help readers sympathize with
roguish heroes like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
A distinct aesthetic response to the late nineteenth century, American naturalism continued
the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but naturalists
concentrated on lower-class and marginalized people and merged the realist attention to detail
with a strong belief in social determinism rather than free will. Building on the theory of
natural selection proposed by Charles Darwins Origin of Species (1859), naturalists like
24
Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London tried to represent life
scientifically rather than providentially. Characters in naturalist novels exist in worlds where
the environment determines character, events happen randomly, the strong prey on the weak,
and protagonists often have neither the intelligence nor the resources to overcome adversity.
But despite these bleak and unforgiving features, naturalist novels present their characters as
case studies to suggest social solutions: Cranes The Open Boat, for example, emphasizes
the individual frailties of its protagonists in order to commend how they eventually band
together and survive.
Another crucial development of realism was regional, or local color, writing, an attempt to
capture distinct language, perspectives, and geographical settings before industrialization and
cultural homogenization erased them. Some regionalist writing relied on nostalgia to generate
interest in authentic but vanishing characters. In the West, writers like Bret Harte, Twain, and
Owen Wister romanticized the lone cowboy and frontiersman, while Native American writers
like Sarah Winnemucca offered a Native alternative. But other writers found regional
specificity to be a vehicle for social change. Hamlin Garland used local descriptions of the
Midwest to combat nostalgic stereotypes and depict the real plight of farmers. Women writers
found regional writing an important opportunity to record their perspectives. The fiction of
Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Austin challenges readers to attune
themselves to womens thoughts and rethink societys privileging of men. Kate Chopins The
Awakening is a regional work that demands respect for a feminine perspective while also
critiquing the patriarchal constraints of Catholic Louisiana.

Making Connections
1. The most important literary theme of the 18651914 period introduction is the territorial
and population expansion and transformation of America during these years. In The
Significance of the Frontier in American History, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner
argues that the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of
American settlement westward, explain American development. Texts from 18651914 that
bear out Turners frontier hypothesis against a western setting include Mark Twains The
Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County; Bret Hartes The Luck of Roaring Camp; and
Jack Londons To Build a Fire. Earlier texts that can help students trace the development of
American assessments of frontiers, boundaries, and limits include sections of Rowlandsons A
Narrative of Captivity and Restoration; Cotton Mathers A People of God in the Devils
Territories from The Wonders of the Invisible World; Crvecoeurs Letter III (What Is an
American) from Letters from an American Farmer; James Fenimore Coopers Last of the Mohicans;
25
William Cullen Bryants The Prairies; and Walt Whitmans Facing West from Californias
Shores. Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown and Henry David Thoreaus Where I Lived,
and What I Loved For chapter of Walden both represent psychic or spiritual frontiers within
already settled areas. Later texts in search of new frontier areas outside America include
Katherine Anne Porters Flowering Judas; F. Scott Fitzgeralds Babylon Revisited; Ernest
Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro; Randall Jarrells Thinking of the Lost World; and
Jack Kerouacs Big Sur. Raymond Carvers Cathedral and Adrienne Richs Snapshots of a
DaughterinLaw also represent authors pushing against nonphysical frontiers in the form of
blindness and sexism, respectively.
2. One aspect of Native American literature stressed by this section of the anthology is the
elegiac tone of many of these writings, as white settlers displaced Native Americans from
ancestral lands and disrupted their traditional ways of life. Native writings in the anthology that
record this tone include Sarah Winnemuccas Life Among the Piutes and Zitkala as The Soft
Hearted Sioux. The excerpt from Helen Hunt Jacksons A Century of Dishonor records one
white perspective sympathetic to Natives. But the anthology can help register the weight of
Native loss by representing what they once had: begin with Iroquois and Pima Creation Stories
and continue with the Native response to the initial contact and settlement of Europeans,
including oratory by Pontiac, Samson Occam, Red Jacket, and Tecumseh in Native
Americans: Contact and Conflict and continue with the records of Black Hawk, Petalesharo,
and Elias Boudinot in Native Americans: Resistance and Removal. For contemporaneous
white writers perspectives, see Cabeza de Vacas Relation; William Bradfords chapter Indian
Relations in Of Plymouth Plantation; Benjamin Franklins Remarks Concerning the Savages of
North America; Thomas Jeffersons Chief Logans Speech from Notes on the State of Virginia;
and William Apesss An Indians LookingGlass for the White Man. For modern
representations of Natives after the period of enforced dispersal to reservations, see Louise
Erdrichs Fleur and Sherman Alexies At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School and Do
Not Go Gentle.
3. Much is made in the anthology of the public disagreement between the African American
statesmen Booker T. Washington in Up from Slavery and W. E. B. Du Boiss Of Booker T.
Washington and Others in The Souls of Black Folk. Within the Americanization cluster
appear further responses to Washington in Charles W. Chestnutts A Defamer of his Race
and Anna Julia Coopers One Phase of American Literature. Cooper points out that both
Washington and Du Bois concentrate exclusively on the black male perspective, but their
female counterparts were often to be found in print discussing race as it pertains to womens
bodies and experiences. Pauline Hopkinss Contending Forces is one such text from 18651914;
others include Phillis Wheatleys On Being Brought from Africa to America and To S.M., a
Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works;Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl;
26
Sojourner Truths I am a Womans Rights; Frances Harpers The Fugitives Wife and Bury
Me in a Free Land; Zora Neale Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me and The Gilded
SixBits; Gwendolyn Brookss poems from A Street in Bronzeville; Lucille Cliftons miss rosie
and homage to my hips; Audre Lordes Coal and The Woman Thing; Rita Doves
Adolescence I and Banneker; and Toni Morrisons Recitatif.
4. The two major aesthetic movements of these years were realism and naturalism. Prose
discussing both can be found in the Realism and Naturalism cluster, featuring work by
William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London.
Notable realist works in the anthology include Jamess Daisy Miller and The Real Thing;
Edith Whartons The Other Two and Roman Fever; and Mark Twains Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. Naturalist works include Stephen Cranes The Open Boat; Dreisers Sister
Carrie; and Londons To Build a Fire. Realism had its roots in the romantic period, and
comparisons to the heavy symbolism and idealistic narration of events can be instructive; take,
for example, James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans; Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of
the House of Usher and The Black Cat; Herman Melvilles Benito Cereno; and Nathaniel
Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown and The Ministers Black Veil. Legacies of both
realism and naturalism persist into the twentieth century: Sherwood Andersons Winesburg,
Ohio and Richard Wrights The Man Who was Almost a Man display influences of naturalist
objectivity, and John Updikes Separating and Raymond Carvers Cathedral represent late
embraces of realistic description.
5. Another development of this period was the use of local idioms and geographical references
to create a regional perspective. Examples of regionalist writing include Mark Twains The
Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Kate
Chopins Dsires Baby and The Awakening and Sarah Orne Jewetts A White Heron.
Legacies of the regionalist attempt to map out literary spaces include Edwin Arlington
Robinsons Luke Havergal and Richard Cory; Carl Sandburgs Chicago; Edgar Lee
Masterss Spoon River Anthology; Robert Frosts Mending Wall and Birches; William
Faulkners Barn Burning; Eudora Weltys Petrified Man; Flannery OConnors Good
Country People; and Tennessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire.




27
Authors
Native American Chants and Songs
Charlot (c. 1831-1900)
Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) (1835-1910)
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1835-1895)
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
Constance Fenimore Woolson ( 1840-1894)
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891) and Zitkala Sa (1876-
1938)

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

Kate Chopin (1850-1904)
Booker T. Washington (1856?-1915)

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and Theodore
Dreiser (1871-1945)
Bret Harte (1836-1902) and Mary Austin (1868-1934)

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) and Paul
Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Jack London (1876-1916)













28




From
1914
to
1945




29
From 1914 To 1945
Overview
Notes
Between 1914 and 1945, the United States engaged in two world wars and emerged as
a modern nation and a major world power.
Many of the social and cultural changes of the interwar period centered around the
sexual and psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, the social and racial writings of
W. E. B. Du Bois, and the economic and political program of Karl Marx.
Alongside these social changes, rapid advances in science and technology contributed
to the rapid modernization of America, resulting in the birth of a mass popular culture
and the sundering of empirical science from the artistic search for meaning.
The crisis point for the interwar period occurred during the 1930s, when international
cultural, economic, and political tensions resulted in the Great Depression and World
War II.
The literary aesthetic of high modernism, which represented the ways modernity
was transforming traditional culture by experimenting with, adapting, and altering
literary styles and forms, is best understood as an antagonism between popular and
serious literature.
Though modernism began as a self-consciously international and apolitical aesthetic,
many American modernists attempted to use the movement to promote national
literary and political ambitions.
American drama matured during the interwar years thanks to experiments by
playwrights reacting to Broadway and successful mixtures of various theatrical
elements.
Full Text
Between 1914 and 1945, the United States engaged in two world wars and emerged as a
modern nation and a major world power. American involvement in World War I was brief
(191719) and left many yearning for the isolation of previous years. Yet despite some
exclusionary immigration measures in the 1920s after a Red Scare of suspicion about
foreign control over labor union activities, progress toward a more mobile and international
perspective seemed unstoppable. A generation of American expatriates enjoyed European life
thanks to a newly favorable currency exchange rate. African American soldiers and officers
returned from WWI determined to see their rights in the army continue at home. And those
workers who could not travel were inspired by the international Communist movement to
30
agitate for fairer pay and conditions. After the stock market crashed in 1929 and the United
States sank into the Great Depression, social tensions threatened the countrys stability for a
decade, until Americans were united by World War II. The dominant literary aesthetic of
these years is known as modernism, a response to the contradictions and pressures of
contemporary life. In the same way that the country struggled with rapid modernization,
modernist authors struggled to put a current face on traditional literature and to translate
American themes and preoccupations into an international style.
Many of the social and cultural changes of the interwar period centered around the sexual and
psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, the social and racial writings of W. E. B. Du Bois,
and the economic and political programs of Karl Marx. Freud, the inventor and chief
practitioner of psychoanalysis, developed the idea of the unconscious, a repository of
sexual desires and dreams. Freuds theories helped some Americans break free from small-
town, white, Protestant values in favor of increasingly permissive and tolerant attitudes
toward the sexual freedoms and desires of women and acceptance of gay and lesbian
individuals. African Americans, who migrated northward to fill factory vacancies during
WWI, found a social theorist in Du Bois to describe their complex status in American
society. Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folks identified in the black psyche a double
consciousness of blacks themselves as Americans and as the racial stereotypes accepted by
whites. Through the NAACP and journals published in the black neighborhood of Harlem in
New York, the city within a city to which thousands of blacks migrated, Du Bois and
others argued for the intellectual and cultural achievements of African Americans within this
urban setting. Marxs economic theories were used to diagnose class inequalities as
antagonism between owners and management (collectively known as capital) on the one
side and labor on the other. His writings encouraged workers to reject the middle-class
individualist ethos in favor of collective action to improve the lot of all workers. Marxs ideas
led directly to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which inspired communists around the world
to act in concert to overthrow their own governments. Two infamous court cases from this
period demonstrate the resistance to the social changes these theorists promoted. The trial and
execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1921 was thought by many to have been unfairly decided
based on the defendants status as Italian immigrants and active anarchists. The conviction in
Scottsboro, Alabama, of nine black men for the rape of two white women on dubious
evidence convinced many writers that the southern justice system was fundamentally unfair
to blacks.
Alongside these social changes, rapid advances in science and technology contributed to the
modernization of America, resulting in the birth of a mass popular culture and the sundering
of empirical science from the artistic search for meaning. The increased presence of new
inventions like electric lighting and appliances, telephones, phonograph record players,
31
motion pictures, and the radio combined to make person-to-person communication quicker
and easier and to standardize American tastes in fashions and ideas. The automobile changed
America more than any other invention by allowing new industries and jobs dependent on
transportation, by causing a network of new roads and highways to spring up, and by
dictating the birth and death of cities, suburbs, and towns based on proximity to those
arteries. But while these technologies were breakthroughs in the ease and productivity of
everyday life, the science underlying them seemed increasingly difficult and contrary to
common sense. Einsteins relativity theories, Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, and the
discovery of both subatomic particles and the infiniteness of the universe threatened the
traditional role of science as an explanation of felt human experience. As a result, scientists
and artists became mistrustful of one anothers methods, and art began to rival science as a
way of interpreting reality, especially in terms of subjective experience.
The crisis point for the interwar period occurred during the 1930s, when international
cultural, economic, and political tensions resulted in the Great Depression and World War II.
In Germany, Italy, and Spain fascist dictators rose to power and began to threaten their
neighbors with aggressive rhetoric, military rearmament, and anti-Semitic genocide. In the
United States, Franklin Roosevelts New Deal offered a pragmatic solution to the disastrous
failure of free-market capitalism. Through social security, unemployment insurance, welfare
support, and government creation of utility and public works jobs, the United States averted
the revolution that had seemed inevitable. Even so, many writers were sympathetic to the
Communist cause and the USSR as the answer to the U.S. crisis, mainly because the Soviets
seemed to be the chief opponent of fascism. But the Russian dictator Stalins oppressive rule
and nonaggression treaty with Hitler in 1939 soured many to Communism by the end of the
decade.
The literary aesthetic of high modernism, which represented the ways modernity was
transforming traditional culture by experimenting with, adapting, and altering literary styles
and forms, is best understood as an antagonism between popular and serious literature. The
antimodern sentiments of many modernists who thought of the present in terms of what had
been lost did not keep them from disrespecting the literary styles of their predecessors to
represent that loss. Modernist poetry and prose tended to be short, precise, subjective, and
suggestive rather than exhaustively detailed with exterior descriptions, to include fragments
and disjointed perspectives rather than cohesive or coherent patterns, to favor questions over
pat explanations, and to reject artificial literary order and assurances of objective truth that
they did not see in the real world. When works like T. S. Eliots Waste Land did include
overarching patterns, they referred to classical or mythic narratives through allusion or
foregrounded the self-reflexive search for meaning as a rationale to continue asking difficult
questions. The modernist emphasis on individual experience over objective truth also meant
32
incorporating elements of popular culture, which had not been thought literary enough for
high art until then, mixing in colloquialisms and dialects without the aid of an interpretive
narrator. The demands of modernist style meant a small readership but prestige and influence;
modernists scorned the popular writers and desired their fame, but accused commercially
successful writers, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of selling out. Occasionally, writers could
blur the divide between middlebrow culture and serious high art, as in the case of Kay Boyle
and Raymond Chandler.
Though modernism began as a self-consciously international and apolitical aesthetic, many
American modernists attempted to use the movement to promote national literary and
political ambitions. The United States had been introduced to the audacity of modernism
through the Armory Show of Cubist paintings in 1913 in New York City and events like
Stravinskys The Rite of Spring, both of which caused uproars, and indeed most major
American proponents of modernism were permanent expatriates, like Gertrude Stein, Eliot,
Ezra Pound, and H.D., or lived abroad for part of the period. But some writers employed
modernist principles to write ambitious American works; Hart Cranes The Bridge and
William Carlos Williamss Paterson were poetic examples, as was John Dos Passoss USA
trilogy in prose. Others, like Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather, brought
modernism to bear on regional concerns, introducing an international style to a specific locale
and idiom. When modernism was used for political ends, its effects were often subtle. The
efforts of Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston
incorporated blues rhythms and folk culture into their texts, but focused on the vitality of
black culture or upbeat assessments of racial justice rather than angry denunciations of the
status quo. And modernists like Marianne Moore, H.D., Katherine Anne Porter, and Nella
Larsen depicted womens thoughts and experiences without explicitly advocating feminist
positions.
A last major development was the maturity of American drama during the interwar years
thanks to experiments by playwrights reacting to Broadway and successful mixtures of
American theatrical elements. Broadway, the center of American theatrical activity in the late
nineteenth century, had begun premiering shows and plays in New York City and then
sending them to tour the rest of the United States. In reaction to these largely commercial and
conservative ventures, Susan Glaspell and others formed the Provincetown Players in 1915 to
premier small, experimental works. Smaller houses like Glaspells often showed changes
before Broadway, as ONeill with elements of German Expressionism, Maxwell Anderson
with blank verse, George Kaufman with jokey domestic farces, and Rogers and Hammerstein
with musical comedies. Many of these experiments incorporated earlier vaudevillian and
burlesque songs and dances, as well as new formal and stylistic conventions. As many
33
modernists realized the potential of plays to speak to a larger audience, drama moved into the
literary mainstream.

Making Connections
1. The literature of this period grappled with the rapid modernization of American society,
with its technological innovations and the changes it brought for good or ill to everyday life.
Literature from between the world wars that dealt, often antagonistically, with technology
includes Robert Frosts Out, Out; Ezra Pounds In a Station of the Metro; T. S. Eliots
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land; and Carl Sandburgs Chicago. Earlier
works that had retreated before encroaching science and technology include Nathaniel
Hawthornes The Birth Mark; Henry David Thoreaus Walden; and Stephen Cranes The
Open Boat. Later works that continue to react to the inhuman effects of some technological
advances are Allen Ginsbergs Howl; Thomas Pynchons Entropy; and Sherman Alexies Do
Not Go Gentle.
2. Two hallmarks of modernist writing are difficulty and ambition; the harder the text, the less
instructive or persuasive one would expect it to be, though some authors did not accept that.
Examples of works that expected a mass following despite the elite readership they were
guaranteed by their difficulty are T. S. Eliots Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste
Land; Ezra Pounds Cantos; Wallace Stevenss Of Modern Poetry; Jean Toomers Cane;
Marianne Moores Poetry; Hart Cranes Voyages; and William Faulkners Barn Burning.
Later works that take up the challenge of modernist difficulty include Allen Ginsbergs Howl;
Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man; John Ashberys Illustrations; and Jorie Grahams At Luca
Signorellis Resurrection of the Body.
3. The Harlem Renaissance marked a full flowering of African American writing. Prompted by
the personal encouragement of W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as by his Souls of Black Folk; Harlem
based artists like the poets Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Countee
Cullen employed modernist formal and thematic experimentation to represent the
opportunities and characteristic features of Harlem. Zora Neale Hurstons How It Feels to Be
Colored Me signals an extreme artistic focus, possibly at the expense of social awareness and
activism; Hurston was taken to task, for example, by Richard Wright for her stylistic excesses in
The Man Who Was Almost a Man, which makes a good counterpoint to her short
essay. Earlier texts with affinities to the Harlem Renaissances preoccupations include Olaudah
Equianos Interesting Narrative and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, both of which testify to their
authors desires to think of themselves as Enlightenment persons as well as African Americans;
34
and Frederick Douglasss Narrative of the Life ; Harriet Jacobss Incidents in the Life; Booker T.
Washingtons Up from Slavery; and Paul Laurence Dunbars poetry, which all shared the
Harlem Renaissances mostly white audience looking for exoticism and a chance to judge
African Americans. Fruitful pairings of Harlem Renaissance works with later pieces include
Hughess The Negro Speaks of Rivers with Lucille Cliftons the mississippi river empties
into the gulf; Hughess The Weary Blues with Robert Haydens Homage to the Empress of
the Blues; and Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me with Rita Doves Adolescence I
and II.
4. Between the wars, American drama comes of age as a genre, thanks in large part to the
efforts of Susan Glaspell (Trifles) and Eugene ONeill (Long Days Journey into Night) to promote
independent theater away from the lights of Broadway. Later plays that show the influences of
these two playwrights include Tennessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur
Millers Death of a Salesman.
5. Since this part of the anthology is heavily informed by two massive military conflicts,
instructive comparisons can be made to writings from other wars throughout American history.
Works from 1914 to 1945 that make such references include T. S. Eliots Gerontion and The
Waste Land; Ernest Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro; and Faulkners Barn Burning.
More explicit works from before and after the modernist period include Mary Rowlandsons
account of King Philips War in her Narrative; Walt Whitmans Cavalry Crossing a Ford and
The Wound-Dresser; Stephen Cranes The Black Riders and War Is Kind; Philip Roths
Defender of the Faith; and Randall Jarrells The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.








35
Authors
Black Elk (1863-1950)

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Susan Glaspell (1876-1882)

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)
Raymond Chandler (1888-1965)

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) and Richard Wright (1908-
1960)

Sterling Brown (1901-1989) and Langston Hughes
(1902-1967)

Carlos Bulosan (b. 1911)





36







Since
1945






37
Since 1945
Overview
Notes
After World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest world power and assumed the
role of speaking on behalf of liberal democratic ideals.
In the aftermath of the economic and cultural reorganizations of the war, American society
became fascinated by cultural homogeneity and political unity.
The literature of the 1950s reflects the cultural preoccupations with stability and conformity
as it responded to the aesthetic project of modernism, which preceded World War II.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 began a dozen years of cultural
revolution in which intellectual unrest over the Vietnam War resulted in urban and campus
violence, but also gave rise to movements for the betterment of women, blacks, and Native
Americans.
The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertainties of the 1960s were mirrored in the
literature of the decade, in which writers came to terms with changing attitudes toward social
involvement, government and corporate power, individual and minority rights, drug use, and
technological advances like television and consumer air travel that encouraged a global
perspective but disrupted normal ways of thinking about time and space.
After the Vietnam War, Americans voted on their cynicism about government intervention
and nostalgia for traditional values by electing Ronald Reagan president in 1980.
As the Cold War ended, writers worked to broaden the cultural achievements of the 1960s,
widening the scope of American experience and casting diversity and plurality as aesthetic
ideals.
Full Text
After World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest world power and assumed the
role of speaking on behalf of liberal democratic ideals. Having fought until Germany and
Japan had unconditionally surrendered, the triumphant Allies attended to their war-ravaged
economic infrastructures, but only the United States had the wherewithal to build on its
success in the conflict. The overseas empires of Britain and France began to dissolve, often
violently. And the Soviet Union, weakened by the German assault of 1941, eventually could
not sustain the investment necessary to vie militarily with the Americans. The Cold War
(194689) between the United States and the USSR involved an ideological struggle between
capitalist and communist states worldwide, which erupted into proxy fights in Korea and
Vietnam, but eventually confirmed American military preeminence. At home, these political
38
struggles resulted in three major aesthetic reactions. First, the period immediately following
World War II was characterized by cultural conformity and nationalist ambition, as artists
responded to the Cold War by closing ranks and writing on behalf of an assumed collective
identity. Second, in the 1960s and 1970s, the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy
administration along with the turmoil of the Vietnam War prompted cultural introspection, as
more and more artists rejected conformity and searched for ways to represent previously
excluded minority voices. Third, from the 1980s to the present, artists consolidated the
progress made in the previous years, until diversity and inclusivity became aesthetic ideals as
well as political goals.
In the aftermath of the economic and cultural reorganizations of World War II, American
society became fascinated by cultural homogeneity and political unity. The war effort had
shifted industrial production to military ends and recruited women to replace factory workers
fighting overseas. When those workers came home, many women found returning to
domesticity only temporarily acceptable. Similarly, African Americans who had been drafted
into a fully integrated army found their return to second-class citizenship difficult to accept.
But for the majority of the 1950s, most Americans dedicated themselves to stability at home
in order to bolster the American cause abroad. During the Cold War, American competition
with the Soviet Union took the form of political containment of the Russians, Chinese, and
their satellite states through international organizations like the United Nations (for the
Korean War) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (in the case of the Eastern European
Warsaw Pact). Once the USSR developed nuclear weapons, both sides formulated policies
that favored deterring their adversaries economically rather than deploying the weapons. In
light of the struggle between capitalist and socialist economies, Americans treated
materialism (which valued wealth as a good in itself) as patriotic. The G.I. Bill, which
granted college educations to returning soldiers, ensured a highly skilled workforce, and the
developing network of American-owned international corporations resulted in prosperity and
the creation of a managerial class. Interstate highways connected suburbs with urban hubs to
allow businessmen to shuttle between work and home, but this increased mobility
underscored the homogeneity of these interchangeable zones of commerce.
The literature of the 1950s reflects the cultural preoccupations of stability and conformity as
it responded to the aesthetic project of modernism. Many artists sought to depict what they
took to be common or essential to all Americans regardless of gender, class, ethnicity, or
regional identity. Such striving for representativeness derived in part from the grand
ambitions of modernist novelists like Ernest Hemingway, whose lingering macho challenge
to write the Great American Novel pushed writers to universalize or generalize so that their
works could speak to any reader. Other novelists were inspired by William Faulkner to use
regional specificity to make major statements about race, history, and national identity. By
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the end of the decade, fiction writers began to suspect that novelistic conventions were
inadequate to the task of representing essential Americana, much less contemporary reality.
The Death of the Novel controversy, as it was called, pointed to the dependence of novels
on stable assumptions about character, plot development, and symbolism. During the 1960s,
novelists like Philip Roth were increasingly skeptical of such assumptions. Poetry followed a
course similar to that of prose in these years. Starting with finely wrought, intricate, personal
lyric meditations, which were stylistic holdovers from modernist influences, poets in the
Fifties began to experiment with formal openness and thematic inclusiveness of non-
mainstream perspectives. Two books that symbolized poetrys break with modernist form are
Allen Ginsbergs Howl (1956), with its wandering, oral rhythms and energetic rejections of
conformity, and Robert Lowells Life Studies (1959), featuring a less difficult, more direct
style and an autobiographical intensity. Ginsbergs and Lowells works helped prepare for the
confessional poetry of the 1960s, which stressed the distinctiveness rather than the
representativeness of the lyric voice.
The inevitable collision of conformity and individuality was foreshadowed in the election of
John F. Kennedy in 1960. Kennedys New Frontier challenged the prosperous and
complacent to provide for the underprivileged and socially marginalized through the
desegregation of the South and government programs like the Peace Corps. Many of
Kennedys civil and voting rights proposals were realized by Lyndon Johnson in the late
1960s as part of his Great Society. The assassination of Kennedy in 1963 began a dozen
years of cultural revolution in which intellectual unrest over the Vietnam War resulted in
urban and campus violence, but also gave rise to movements for the betterment of women,
blacks, and Native Americans. The feminist movement, which encouraged women to
promote their collective legal, political, and cultural interests, made strides in equality for
women not seen since suffrage; similarly, the civil rights movement made advances in
awareness and combating racial discrimination, unfinished business since Reconstruction one
hundred years earlier. But the good will earned by the Great Society was largely squandered
by escalation in Vietnam under Johnson and Nixon and the governments often deceitful
handling of information about Southeast Asia. Cynicism and activism in universities resulted
in riots on campuses and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970; unrest did not cease
until Nixon resigned in 1974 under threat of impeachment for abuse of power during the
Watergate scandal and American troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1975.
The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertainties of the 1960s were mirrored in the
literature of the decade, in which writers came to terms with changing attitudes toward social
involvement, government and corporate power, individual and minority rights, drug use, and
technological advances like television and consumer air travel that lent themselves to a global
perspective but disrupted normal ways of thinking about time and space. The Death of the
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Novel debates in fiction and the increasingly provisional, momentary nature of poetry
emphasized the fragility of language. In literary theory, the school of deconstruction, starting
in about 1966, examined the fundamentally unstable quality of all utterances and how any
statement depends on often unspoken and arbitrarily constructed assumptions. Still, some
writers like the novelists John Updike and Ann Beattie and poets like Elizabeth Bishop and
Stanley Kunitz remained committed to realistic description and traditional connections
between text and represented world. Others, like those in the Minimalist school of prose
fiction, labored to create a rigorously believable and philosophically acceptable aesthetic.
While some mainly white voices responded to the 1960s by accounting for their aesthetic
privilege, others took the decade as an opportunity to add their voices to American ideas of
distinctive identity. Large platforms like literary feminism and the Black Arts Movement
allowed individual authors to render particular experiences without having to feel they spoke
for their race, ethnicity, or gender: Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud were American writers
participating in this trend, and Adrienne Rich and Ursula Le Guin are good examples of
powerful women writers. In the case of Native American literature, for which historical and
cultural contexts did not exist to combat lingering stereotypes, the 1960s saw a parallel
movement of critical writings to supplement creative works by Native authors.
After the Vietnam War, Americans voted on their cynicism about government intervention
and nostalgia for traditional values by electing Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Reagan
presided over the demise of the Soviet Union thanks to a massive buildup in American
military spending that the Russians could not match. His economic policies hearkened back
to the personal quest for wealth of the 1950s rather than the social activism of the early
1960s. Under Reagan and Clinton, industries downsized and were made more efficient for
competition in a globalized marketplace. Instead of a monolithic communist threat, the
United States faced a succession of smaller challenges in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and
Iraq that it could dispatch handily. The new shape of American influence materialized with
the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; instead of large states,
Americans now face radical fundamentalist cells, and U.S. culture has only begun to respond
to this antagonist.
As the Cold War ended, writers worked to broaden the cultural achievements of the 1960s,
widening the scope of American experience and casting diversity and plurality as aesthetic
ideals. African American women like Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, and Rita Dove wrote in
national, racial, and ethnic terms; likewise, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich succeeded in
writing in the often ignored or suppressed tradition of Native American literature. Immigrant
writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Jhumpa Lahiri augmented national dialogues of
assimilation and ethnic identity for Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Americans.
Perhaps the most telling emblem of this contemporary acceptance of new perspectives into
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conceptions of American experience is the Internet. Online, new hypertext realities need only
be imagined to exist virtually, all users may join online communities, and writing exists in
open-ended and interactive relationships with its readers.

Making Connections
1. After World War II, America turned outward politically but inward culturally; new ideals of
conformity and homogeneity developed that are best seen in works that argue against that conformity,
like Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman; Saul Bellows Adventures of Augie March; Allen Ginsbergs Howl;
and Philip Roths Defender of the Faith. Other works of nonconformity and rebellion against
convention throughout American literature include William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation (in
which the Pilgrims record their reasons for sailing from England); Jonathan Edwardss Personal
Narrative; Henry David Thoreaus Resistance to Civil Government; Herman Melvilles Bartleby, the
Scrivener; Henry Jamess Daisy Miller; Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Edwin Arlington
Robinsons Miniver Cheevy; and William Faulkners Barn Burning.
2. One interesting feature of postwar literature is the theme of crosscultural mixtures and hybrid
perspectives that result from globalized contemporary life. Works like Jhumpa Lahiris Sexy; Rita
Doves Parsley; Gloria Anzaldas How to Tame a Wild Tongue; and LiYoung Lees Persimmons
all have to do with translations of customs or language from another culture into American English.
The vexed issue of translation has been part of the American tradition from its inception: see Cabeza de
Vacas and Thomas Harriots descriptions of Native orature; and Roger Williamss A Key into the
Language of America.
3. A major shift in American literature after World War II was the inclusion of new immigrant voices in
the spectrum of national perspectives. Examples of works that maintain ties to a previous culture while
establishing links to America include Sandra Cisneross Woman Hollering Creek; Cathy Songs The
White Porch and Lost Sister; Maxine Hong Kingstons No Name Woman; and Jhumpa Lahiris
Sexy. But the process of naturalization and the salvaging of ethnic identity were not always accepted
by the majority of Americans. The best place to start examining the nations growing pains is the
Americanization cluster in the 18651914 section of the anthology, especially in Twenty Years at Hull-
House by Jane Addamsand Jose Marts Our America. Other works that deal with the inclusion or
exclusion of minority groups include William Bradfords Dealings with the Natives and The First
Thanksgiving from Of Plymouth Plantation; Philip Freneaus An Indian Burying Ground; Henry
Wadsworth Longfellows Jewish Cemetery at Newport; Emma Lazaruss In the Jewish Synagogue at
Newport and The New Colossus; and Carlos Bulosans Be American.
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4. The publication in the late 1950s of poetry in the confessional mode helped authors break some
conventions of formality and universality in the lyric voice in favor of an autobiographical intensity.
Examples of confessional poets include Allen Ginsberg; Robert Lowell; Sylvia Plath; and Anne Sexton.
Earlier works that allowed for more individual expression include John Woolmans Journal; Thomas
Jeffersons Autobiography; Benjamin Franklins Autobiography; the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and
Frederick Douglass; Walt Whitmans Song of Myself; and the slightly fictionalized autobiographical
accounts in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-Paper and Ernest Hemingways The Snows
of Kilimanjaro.

Authors
Prose:
Eudora Welty (b. 1909)

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

John Cheever (1912-1982)
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)

Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
Grace Paley (b. 1922)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
Donald Barthelme (b. 1931)

Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

John Updike (b. 1932)
Poetry:
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Charles Olson (1910-1970)
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
John Berryman (1914-1972)
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)
James Merrill (1926-1995)
Robert Creeley (b. 1926)
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Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)

Raymond Carver (b. 1938)
Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)

Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940)

Gloria Anzalda (b. 1942)
Alice Walker (b. 1944)

Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
David Mamet (b. 1947) and Sam Shepard (b. 1943)
Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)
Art Spiegelman (b. 1948)
Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) and Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)
Richard Powers (b. 1957)
Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967)
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Galway Kinnell (b. 1927)
John Ashbery (b. 1927)
Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Michael S. Harper (b. 1938)
Simon J. Ortiz (b. 1941)
Billy Collins (b. 1941)
Louise Glck (b. 1943) and Cathy Song (b. 1955)
Joy Harjo (b. 1951)
Rita Dove (b. 1952)
Li-Young Lee (b. 1957)










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46

A Short Outline
of
History of American Literature


Article From Norton Online
www.wwnorton.com


Compiled by
Masoud Abadi
[email protected]

And

Iman Kiaee
[email protected]