11 11 “An Overview of American Literature” “An Overview of American Literature” From The Norton Anthology of American Literature Nina Baym, General… [608093]

11 11 “An Overview of American Literature”
“An Overview of American Literature”
From The Norton Anthology of American Literature
Nina Baym, General Editor

Overview: Beginning to 1700
Columbus’s voyage to the Americas began the
exploitation of Native populations by European impe rial
powers, but we need not think of the intellectual
exchange between the two hemispheres as being entir ely
in one direction. A Taino Indian whom Columbus seize d
and trained as a translator, and renamed Diego Coló n in
Spain, had as much to say to his people upon his re turn
to the Caribbean in 1494 as Columbus did to Ferdinan d
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, tex tiles,
and religion, but a combination of Native, European , and
African people living in complex relation to one an other.
After early wonder and awe at their unexpected disc overy
of inhabited land, Europeans used their technologic al
edge in weaponry (gunpowder and steel) to conquer t he
region. They were aided in this task by the host of
diseases they had brought from the Old World, again st
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. B ut
by no means were Natives merely helpless victims. M any
adopted European weapons and tactics to defend
themselves from invaders, and while some collaborat ed
with Europeans, as did some Aztecs with Cortés’s
Spanish force against their king Montezuma, or the
Narragansetts and Mohegans with the New Englanders
against the Pequots, they did so not out of submiss ion or
gullibility but to gain a temporary upper hand agai nst their
Native rivals—truly, a resourceful response to an
impossible situation.
The Native cultures Columbus found in the New World
displayed a huge variety of languages, social custo ms,
and creative expressions, with a common practice of oral
literature without parallel east of the Atlantic. C ompared
to the three dozen languages, common religion and
printed alphabet, and stable boundaries of the Euro pean
nation-states, the Native peoples were much more
diverse. They spoke hundreds of distantly related
languages and widely differed in their social organ ization, from the hunting-gathering, nomadic Utes to the hig hly
structured farming society of the Iroquois confeder ation.
Eight different creation stories have been catalogu ed,
each attesting to the religious diversity of early
Americans. But since no Native peoples had a writte n
alphabet, they relied instead on an oral tradition of
chants, songs, and spoken narrative, what some crit ics
have called “orature,” for their artistic expressio ns. These
verbal genres (trickster tales, jokes, naming and
grievance chants, and dream songs, among many other s)
are “literary” in the sense that they represent the
imaginative and emotional responses of their anonym ous
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 issu es of
tempo, pauses, and intonation common to verbal genr es.
Translations of orature, first into English and then onto
the page, leave out a great deal.
Exploratory expeditions to the New World quickly le d to
colonial settlements, as the major European countri es
vied with each other for a portion of the western
hemisphere’s riches. Early voyages by Columbus for
Spain, Cabot for England, and Vespucci and Cabral f or
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 arm ed and
equipped settlers who came to stay. The Spanish 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. Th e
Portuguese settled in eastern Brazil, the French alo ng the
St. Lawrence River in present-day Canada, first exp lored
by Jacques Cartier and then settled sixty years lat er by
Samuel de Champlain. The English came to the New
World late, after several failed expeditions by Wal ter
Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher. Onc e
the Jamestown colony survived its first trials of s tarvation,
disease, riots, and violence with the Powhatan trib e, 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 actio ns
taken without their explicit permission, or bearing witness
to the direct and unintended consequences of Europe an

22 22 “An Overview of American Literature”
conquest of the Americas. The development of the
printing press fifty years before Columbus’s first voyage
allowed many of his descriptions of the New World t o
spur the national ambitions and personal imaginatio ns 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 writt en
largely in reaction to events abroad or to justify
opportunistic actions taken without the crown’s
knowledge, as with Cortés’s messages to Charles V
about his subjugation of the Aztecs. Writing also r ecorded
the hideous consequences of empire wrought by the
Europeans, many of whom reacted strongly against bo th
the unintentional infection of the Natives with Old World
diseases and the enslavement of the remainder for
plantation labor. It could also be used subversivel y, as it
was by an anonymous Aztec poet who lamented the fal l
of Montezuma in the Nahuatl language, but in the Ro man
alphabet. It also afforded opportunities to scribes such as
Diego del Castillo and John Smith, who were born in to
the European underclass, to reshape the possibiliti es 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 Plymo uth
Plantation in 1620 and, under William Bradford, beg an a
settlement devoted to religious life: they thought of
themselves as Pilgrims. They were separatists whose
beliefs were persecuted by the Church of England; a fter
moving briefly to the Netherlands, they chartered t he
Mayflower and sailed for America, where with help from
the Wampanoag tribe they survived their first winte r.
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 t hose
who would be saved and damned. But although the
Puritans were rigidly exclusive in their early colo nial days,
requiring public accounts of conversion before admi tting
people to church membership and their communion, th eir
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 woul d
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. Boston’s size, independe nt
college and printing press at Harvard (founded in 1 636),
and non-nationalist, locally driven project of prod ucing
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 wer e
immigrants from throughout Europe; Dutch persisted as
an everyday language until the mid-1800s. Similarly ,
German immigrants in Pennsylvania prompted publishe rs
to cater to their native language.
The state of American literature in 1700, consisting of
only about 250 published works, reflects the pressi ng
religious, security, and cultural concerns of colon ial life.
Printing presses operated in Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Annapolis, and colonists could al so
acquire works published in England. The most prolif ic
author of the period was Cotton Mather, whose writi ngs
recorded the late-century war between New England a nd
New France and its Indian allies, a series of biogra phies
(in the Magnalia Christi Americana ) of American religious
“saints,” and conduct guides for ministers and serv ants.
Other authors focused on relations with Native
Americans, including pamphlets on conferences with New
York’s important Iroquois allies and captivity narr atives
recounting the barbarity of their Indian enemies. S till
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 Sewall’s
antislavery tract The Selling of Joseph (1700).
Overview: 1700 Overview: 1700 Overview: 1700 Overview: 1700 – – –– 1820 1820 1820 1820
During the eighteenth century, the religious, intel lectual,
and economic horizons of the thirteen English colon ies
expanded, challenging the dominance of Puritan cult ure
with Enlightenment thought and uniting the differen t
regions behind common national interests. The death of
the minister and author Cotton Mather in 1728
symbolizes the waning influence of Puritan theocent rism.
The scientific and philosophical writings of Isaac N ewton

33 33 “An Overview of American Literature”
and John Locke argued in favor of a worldview that
accepted the ability of individuals to puzzle throu gh and
understand the universe and placed a premium on mut ual
sympathy, or “sentiment,” to guide moral action rat her
than religious grace alone. The Enlightenment emphas is
on sentiment helped guide Americans to accept rapid
population expansion due to European immigrants, lu red
overseas by tales of healthier, less crowded commun ities
and merit-based opportunities, and economic expansi on,
especially in industries relating to agriculture an d
shipping. The boom in these industries resulted in
cosmopolitan comforts, wealth and prosperity, and t rade
linkages between the colonies and the other ports a nd
countries of the Atlantic Rim. But it also caused s uffering
for exploited indentured laborers and the African s laves
who were brought to work on plantations. And the tw o
populations who had met each other when the Pilgrim s
landed in 1620 found their numbers and influence
dwindling: many communities of New England Indians
disappeared entirely due to urban expansion, and fr om
the same cause many of the small-town Puritan
settlements lost families due to religious dissensi on and a
search for better farmlands. The same prosperity and
security that led colonists to rely less on their n eighbors
for their physical safety allowed them to think les s of what
separated them from communities in other colonies ( or
from those descended from other ethnicities) than o f their
common social and cultural experiences—potentially
national interests that would lead directly to the
Revolution.
The Enlightenment involved the uneasy mixture of new
scientific and philosophical investigations into th e nature
of the universe with traditional responses to scrip ture.
Some of these questioners were “deists,” who believ ed in
a comprehensible universe ordered by a supreme bein g
who was rational and benevolent. Their empirical stu dies
replaced the Puritans’ habit of looking past realit y for
emblems of spiritual grace with an emphasis on the
stable, observable world. People became more intere sted
in how their actions related to the social well-bei ng of
their neighbors than their own spiritual progress; similarly,
readers were more eager to read the accounts of ord inary
individuals as they thoughtfully responded to the f eelings
and experiences of others, such as Benjamin Franklin ’s
Autobiography , than the metaphysical introspections of
divines like Cotton Mather popular in the preceding
generations. Enlightenment thought drove many to re ject
the innate depravity of human beings in favor of th e
assumption that people were basically good, and therefore capable of living together in sympathy an d
understanding with their fellow citizens.
In response to the Enlightenment’s intellectual rig or and
call to ethical sentiment, the “Great Awakening” of 1735–
50 encouraged a return to Calvinist zeal by stressi ng an
intense emotional commitment and complete surrender to
faith. Itinerant ministers like the Methodist Georg e
Whitefield traveled the countrysides of England and
America, preaching to thousands of new converts wit h
appeals designed to register with the cult of feeli ng John
Locke’s philosophy had sponsored. Jonathan Edwards’ s
preaching in New England was the most successful
integration of Enlightenment thought and Puritanic zeal
during the Great Awakening. His ministry rejuvenate d the
Calvinist doctrine of election in spite of its irra tionality by
stressing the rational delights to be gained by
surrendering to God’s sovereignty and how spiritual ly
moving true religious feeling could be. Edwards wen t too
far when he demanded early signs of personal
conversion; his Northampton congregation dismissed him
from his ministry in 1749.
Imperial politics and the American Revolution domin ated
the writings of the late eighteenth century. After the
British began imposing punitive and damaging laws o n
the colonies to punish dissent and repay debts from a
recent war with France, the Second Continental
Congress pushed through a Declaration of Independen ce
authored by Thomas Jefferson. What had started as a
meeting to oppose overseas taxation policies quickl y led
to open revolt once the common interests of the
delegates were made clear. Revolutionary writings b y
Thomas Paine, most notably Common Sense (1776) and
The American Crisis, used Enlightenment ideals and the
antimonarchy language of the British Whig Party to spur
public support for the fledgling rebellion. The suc cess of
Paine’s writings underscores the growing importance of
American newspapers, the first of which appeared in
1704, and whose number had grown to about fifty by the
Revolution. Significant political writings like tho se by
Hamilton and Jay and Madison’s Federalist Papers
(1787–88), which successfully argued for adoption o f the
U.S. Constitution, appeared mainly in New York
newspapers, and after the war, poets and satirists like
Philip Freneau continued to use periodicals to engag e in
partisan attacks on political positions. Some succe ssful
women writers, most notably Judith Sargent Murray a nd
Sarah Wentworth Morton, used pseudonymous
publications in periodicals to claim their right as women to

44 44 “An Overview of American Literature”
engage in the political sphere traditionally reserv ed for
men. And some women novelists like Susannah Rowson
and Hannah Webster Foster capitalized on the increas ed
appetite for women’s writing to publish novels they hoped
would sell enough to stay in print.
Lasting effects of the Enlightenment include a grea ter
social mobility, cultural acceptance of ideals such as
reason and equality, and the assumption of an innat e
moral sense in all Americans. Whereas John Winthrop
had assumed in his Model of Christian Charity (1630) that
both privileged and poor had a stable place in soci ety, by
1800, President John Adams would remark on the
American lack of an aristocracy and therefore the
possibilities for social mobility unheard of in Eur ope, at
least for white men. Others were less fortunate: Af rican
Americans were enslaved, and even the Founding
Fathers turned a blind eye to such hypocrisy; and wh ite
women, despite their privileges, could neither vote , nor
own property, nor earn wages for themselves. Native
Americans, too, found their lot unacceptable: they had
supported the British in the Revolution and now fac ed
reprisals from greedy and vengeful Americans. But b y
and large, the preeminent mood of the period was on e
that supported the ultimate “perfectability of man, ” and
the Enlightenment principles that had led to the
Revolution would eventually be extended to those gr oups
that had not won liberty and equality. For many, Ben jamin
Franklin’s example proves most representative for th is
period: ambitious, self-educated, and constantly cu rious,
self-improving, introspective, and civic-minded. Fra nklin’s
influence and direct involvement are evident in man y of
the important documents and treaties of the
Revolutionary period. His idealistic assumption tha t all
people shared a common sense of right and wrong was
shared by many Enlightenment thinkers and represent s a
fundamental tenet of American democracy.
Overview: Overview: Overview: Overview: 1820 1820 1820 1820– –1865 1865 1865 1865
The 1941 publication of F. O. Matthiessen’s American
Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emers on
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 betwee n
1820 and the Civil War represented a first flowerin g of
American literary talent. Calling the period a
“renaissance,” he selected a small group of neglect ed
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.
Matthiessen’s list of “renaissance” writers has bee n
challenged and adapted since its first publication. Among
other things, his list focused primarily on male wr iters
from the same class and ethnic background, and
excluded many of the more popular novelists and poe ts
whom most readers living during these years might h ave
read and recognized. Critics have also noted that
Matthiessen exaggerates the separateness of the Eng lish
and American literary traditions. Still, the idea o f an
American “renaissance” has proven useful to student s
and critics wishing to study how these antebellum w riters
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 o f cultural
independence from Britain. After Andrew Jackson’s
victory at the Battle of New Orleans to end the War of
1812, a heroic national myth grew up around him tha t
asserted the strength and optimism of the American
character and suggested a hopeful trajectory for na tional
literature that concentrated on ordinary people. Br itish
literary nationalists looked down on the efforts of
American authors to establish a distinct or “emanci pated”
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 reg arding
approaches to slavery, tariffs, and federal works p rojects
made any consensus on how American literature shoul d
represent its culture extremely difficult to achiev e. By and
large, though, authors in the 1820s shared a sense of the
distinctiveness of the American landscape, its colo nial
history, and the legitimacy of its traditions, and worked to
represent the ways that ordinary Americans were com ing
to grips with their country’s contradictions.
The geographical expansion and population growth of the
United States in the first fifty years of the ninet eenth
century was matched by a marked increase in publica tion
of books and periodicals. As cities grew in size an d
transportation to the interior of the country becam e faster
and easier thanks to the construction of canals and
railroads, the market for printed materials expande d. The

55 55 “An Overview of American Literature”
professional writer’s ability to devote his or her time to
creative writing during the antebellum years was of ten
challenged by differences in international and Amer ican
copyright laws and by negative attitudes about the
writer’s occupation. American readers might have
benefited from cheap pirated editions of novels and
poems, but the unpredictability of copyright royalt ies
meant that many authors had to support themselves
through another occupation, such as editing or writ ing
short journalistic criticism for a newspaper or mag azine.
Social stigmas made it difficult on the one hand fo r male
writers to justify sole occupation as poet or novel ist, and
on the other hand for women to enter the public sph ere
as authoritative social commentators.
Despite these economic difficulties, antebellum wri ters
had the ability to reach a larger and more educated
audience than ever before. Many used this opportuni ty to
argue for reform and to represent the necessity of
resolving looming cultural conflicts. Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s writings, in particular, argued for the c reative
power of the imagination and implied an agency for the
individual in rethinking his or her role in society .
Emerson’s influence on authors such as Whitman,
Hawthorne, Fuller, and Melville can be found in thei r
willingness to question current institutions and re interpret
the status quo of American society within their wor ks.
Much of the energy for reform during these years de rived
from literature’s ability to cause readers to sympa thize
with other people’s plights by representing charact ers
from unequal positions of privilege or freedom—slav es,
Native Americans, and poor immigrants in urban sett ings.
Many women writers, rising to prominence through
abolitionist or urban reform efforts, also wrote ab out the
right to vote for women and the need for greater le gal
equality between men and women. The Seneca Falls
Convention of 1848, the first national suffrage mee ting of
its kind, is one example of the expanded role of wo men in
national politics, but the massive popularity of wo men’s
temperance and anti-slavery literature (especially Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ) speaks to the
power of women’s involvement in these social issues .
One typical rhetorical tactic used by both suffragi st and
abolitionist reformers was to remind their readers of the
unrealized potential of the Declaration of Independ ence.
Margaret Fuller, for example, argued in “The Great
Lawsuit” (1843) that Jefferson’s “Declaration” impl ied that
the right to vote ought to extend to women as well as to
men. Henry David Thoreau’s speech “Slavery in
Massachusetts” (1854), meanwhile, objected strenuou sly to the hypocrisy of a northern state that had voted to
outlaw slavery yet abetted the recapture by souther ners
of fugitive slaves. As reform movements increasingl y
were replaced by violent harbingers of the Civil Wa r to
come, writers of the renaissance turned increasingl y to
expressions of disillusionment with the failed prom ise of
the American Revolution.
Although the American renaissance should by no mean s
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 conver sation
with each other through their writings. Much of the
literature of the antebellum years reflects the dir ect and
indirect influences these writers had on one anothe r.
Common interests in travel and international friend ship,
as well as a shared sense of the need to shore up t heir
current literature in references to the languages a nd
cultures of the classical and imperial past, also l inked
these authors. But their desire to root the writing s of the
renaissance in a nationalist historical tradition w as always
in service to the development of an American perspe ctive
that could take its place in the context of the oth er
cultures of the world.
Overview: 1865-1914
Between 1865 and 1914 the United States transformed
from a country just emerging from a destructive civ il 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 i nterior
to settlement by homesteaders and prospectors, who
arrived to exploit cheap land and discoveries of go ld and
other useful ores. Such innovations as the developm ent
of telegraph, telephone, and electricity networks h elped
develop these new Western settlements along with th e
East and allowed a burst of economic prosperity and
industrialization. Enticed by promises of ready wor k made
by businesses trying to keep wages down through an
oversupply of labor, a massive influx of immigrants
arrived, mostly from Europe and East Asia, and swel led
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 subsequentl y
turned their attentions overseas, toward new territ ories in
Samoa and Hawaii and former Spanish possessions in
Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, in an attem pt to
join the European empires on the world stage.

66 66 “An Overview of American Literature”
Though these years brought wealth to some and statur e
to America in the eyes of the world, the undesirabl e
consequences of rapid territorial, population, and
industrial expansion were felt most by those with t he least
resources to resist the greedy, unscrupulous, and
powerful. The Native American populations of the Gr eat
Plains, whose cultures depended on the free-roaming
buffalo herds, faced the shock of interference in t heir
hunting grounds by crisscrossing telegraph lines an d
railroad tracks. The federal government developed s mall
reservations to replace hunting traditions with far ming,
always with the expectation that Native customs and
distinctiveness would eventually vanish. Much of th e land
stolen from Natives was acquired cheaply by railroa d
companies and land prospectors, even though the
Homestead Act of 1862 had intended the land to be
improved by small farmers and immigrant families. Th ose
homesteaders who did settle the plains were squeeze d
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 beca use of
the monopolists’ control over inhumane and often
dangerous working conditions, but because of corrup t
government officials who allowed them to act withou t
hindrance. Early efforts to organize labor against the
monopolists were often violent and had to fight aga inst
social prejudices favoring unfettered capitalism an d a
hands-off approach to business. In the same way, sm all
farmers often failed to organize because of an abid ing
desire for independence that trumped the benefits o f
collective action.
The literature of this period appears in the context of the
dramatic diversification of American experience, bo th
ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent mo vement
among authors to combat the social inequities arisi ng
from too-rapid growth. Immigration from Europe and Asia
resulted in a newly heterogeneous American populati on,
now no longer mainly of New England descent, and no w
more diverse in terms of class and ethnic backgroun ds.
As populations in large urban centers and all geogr aphic
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 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 chara cter.
But this new diversity often resulted in suspicion,
antagonism, and cultural paranoia, triggering a cul tural
unease that pitted urban against rural, labor again st
management, and immigrant against native. In respon se,
a generation of writers spoke out against social,
economic, and political injustices in newspapers an d
magazines. Among these were journalists known as
“muckrakers” for their devotion to exposing the dan gers
of the city and the evils of monopolies. Some notab le
muckrakers included Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris,
who took on the railroad monopoly on behalf of smal l
farmers, and Lincoln Steffens, who exposed the
corruption of government officials like Boss Tweed o f
New York. Other writers took advantage of the new
periodical media to write the “literature of argume nt,”
which brought the spirit of reform to sociology,
philosophy, and economics: some examples include
Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881),
which attacked U.S. injustices against Native Ameri cans,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics
(1898), which explored wealth and women’s rights, a nd
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899),
which examined the “conspicuous consumption” of the
super-wealthy business magnates. Booker T.
Washington’s Up from Slavery (1900) and W. E. B. Du
Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are two examples
of nonfiction prose that responded to racial injust ices by
challenging white audiences to work toward politica l
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 wo uld
recognize from their own lives. William Dean Howell s
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

77 77 “An Overview of American Literature”
Wharton, meanwhile, focused on refined mental state s,
rather than exterior surfaces and surroundings. Thei r
“psychological realism” attempted to find a precise
language for intangible moral situations. The reali sm of
Mark Twain was devoted to rendering the vernacular
dialects and colloquialisms of his ordinary charact ers,
often using humor to help readers sympathize with
roguish heroes like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
A distinct aesthetic response to the late nineteent h
century, American naturalism continued the realist
attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of
characters, but naturalists concentrated on lower-c lass
and marginalized people and merged the realist atte ntion
to detail with a strong belief in social determinis m rather
than free will. Building on the theory of natural s election
proposed by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859),
naturalists like Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodor e
Dreiser, and Jack London tried to represent life
scientifically rather than providentially. Characte rs in
naturalist novels exist in worlds where the environ ment
determines character, events happen randomly, the
strong prey on the weak, and protagonists often hav e
neither the intelligence nor the resources to overc ome
adversity. But despite these bleak and unforgiving
features, naturalist novels present their character s as
case studies to suggest social solutions: Crane’s “ The
Open Boat,” for example, emphasizes the individual
frailties of its protagonists in order to commend h ow they
eventually band together and survive.
Another crucial development of realism was regional , or
“local color,” writing, an attempt to capture disti nct
language, perspectives, and geographical settings b efore
industrialization and cultural homogenization erase d
them. Some regionalist writing relied on nostalgia to
generate interest in authentic but vanishing charac ters. In
the West, writers like Bret Harte, Twain, and Owen W ister
romanticized the lone cowboy and frontiersman, whil e
Native American writers like Sarah Winnemucca offer ed a
Native alternative. But other writers found regiona l
specificity to be a vehicle for social change. Haml in
Garland used local descriptions of the Midwest to c ombat
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
women’s thoughts and rethink society’s privileging of
men. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a regional work that demands respect for a feminine perspective whi le
also critiquing the patriarchal constraints of Cath olic
Louisiana.
Overview: Overview: Overview: Overview: 1914 1914 1914 1914– –1945 1945 1945 1945
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 Wa r I
was brief (1917–19) and left many yearning for the
isolation of previous years. Yet despite some
exclusionary immigration measures in the 1920s afte r 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 fro m 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
agitate for fairer pay and conditions. After the st ock
market crashed in 1929 and the United States sank i nto
the Great Depression, social tensions threatened th e
country’s stability for a decade, until Americans w ere
united by World War II. The dominant literary aesthe tic 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 trans late
American themes and preoccupations into an
international style.
Many of the social and cultural changes of the inte rwar
period centered around the sexual and psychological
theories of Sigmund Freud, the social and racial wri tings
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. Freud’s theories helped some Americans break
free from small-town, white, Protestant values in f avor of
increasingly permissive and tolerant attitudes towa rd 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 thei r
complex status in American society. Du Bois’s The Souls
of Black Folks identified in the black psyche a “double

88 88 “An Overview of American Literature”
consciousness” of blacks themselves as Americans an d
as the racial stereotypes accepted by whites. Throu gh the
NAACP and journals published in the black neighborh ood
of Harlem in New York, the “city within a city” to which
thousands of blacks migrated, Du Bois and others ar gued
for the intellectual and cultural achievements of A frican
Americans within this urban setting. Marx’s economi c
theories were used to diagnose class inequalities a s
antagonism between owners and management
(collectively known as “capital”) on the one side a nd labor
on the other. His writings encouraged workers to re ject
the middle-class individualist ethos in favor of co llective
action to improve the lot of all workers. Marx’s id eas led
directly to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which i nspired
communists around the world to act in concert to
overthrow their own governments. Two infamous court
cases from this period demonstrate the resistance t o 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, o f
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 moderniza tion
of America, resulting in the birth of a mass popula r culture
and the sundering of empirical science from the art istic
search for meaning. The increased presence of new
inventions like electric lighting and appliances,
telephones, phonograph record players, motion pictu res,
and the radio combined to make person-to-person
communication quicker and easier and to standardize
American tastes in fashions and ideas. The automobil e
changed America more than any other invention by
allowing new industries and jobs dependent on
transportation, by causing a network of new roads a nd
highways to spring up, and by dictating the birth a nd
death of cities, suburbs, and towns based on proxim ity to
those arteries. But while these technologies were
breakthroughs in the ease and productivity of every day
life, the science underlying them seemed increasing ly
difficult and contrary to common sense. Einstein’s
relativity theories, Heisenberg’s uncertainty princ iple, and
the discovery of both subatomic particles and the
infiniteness of the universe threatened the traditi onal role
of science as an explanation of felt human experien ce. As a result, scientists and artists became mistrustful of one
another’s methods, and art began to rival science a s a
way of interpreting reality, especially in terms of
subjective experience.
The crisis point for the interwar period occurred du ring
the 1930s, when international cultural, economic, a nd
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 rearma ment,
and anti-Semitic genocide. In the United States, Fra nklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal offered a pragmatic solution t o the
disastrous failure of free-market capitalism. Throug h
social security, unemployment insurance, welfare
support, and government creation of utility and pub lic
works jobs, the United States averted the revolutio n 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 S oviets
seemed to be the chief opponent of fascism. But the
Russian dictator Stalin’s oppressive rule and
nonaggression treaty with Hitler in 1939 soured man y 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 underst ood as an
antagonism between popular and serious literature. The
antimodern sentiments of many modernists who though t
of the present in terms of what had been lost did n ot keep
them from disrespecting the literary styles of thei r
predecessors to represent that loss. Modernist poet ry and
prose tended to be short, precise, subjective, and
suggestive rather than exhaustively detailed with e xterior
descriptions, to include fragments and disjointed
perspectives rather than cohesive or coherent patte rns, to
favor questions over pat explanations, and to rejec t
artificial literary order and assurances of objecti ve truth
that they did not see in the real world. When works like T.
S. Eliot’s Waste Land did include overarching patterns,
they referred to classical or mythic narratives thr ough
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 incorpor ating
elements of popular culture, which had not been tho ught
literary enough for high art until then, mixing in
colloquialisms and dialects without the aid of an

99 99 “An Overview of American Literature”
interpretive narrator. The demands of modernist styl e
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. Occasional ly,
writers could blur the divide between middlebrow cu lture
and serious high art, as in the case of Kay Boyle a nd
Raymond Chandler.
Though modernism began as a self-consciously
international and apolitical aesthetic, many Americ an
modernists attempted to use the movement to promote
national literary and political ambitions. The Unite d 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 Stravinsky’s 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 pe riod.
But some writers employed modernist principles to w rite
ambitious American works; Hart Crane’s The Bridge and
William Carlos Williams’s Paterson were poetic
examples, as was John Dos Passos’s 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 s pecific
locale and idiom. When modernism was used for polit ical
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 vitali ty of black
culture or upbeat assessments of racial justice rat her
than angry denunciations of the status quo. And
modernists like Marianne Moore, H.D., Katherine Ann e
Porter, and Nella Larsen depicted women’s thoughts and
experiences without explicitly advocating feminist
positions.
A last major development was the maturity of Americ an
drama during the interwar years thanks to experimen ts 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 tou r the
rest of the United States. In reaction to these lar gely
commercial and conservative ventures, Susan Glaspel l
and others formed the Provincetown Players in 1915 to
premier small, experimental works. Smaller houses l ike Glaspell’s often showed changes before Broadway, as
O’Neill with elements of German Expressionism, Maxw ell
Anderson with blank verse, George Kaufman with joke y
domestic farces, and Rogers and Hammerstein with
musical comedies. Many of these experiments
incorporated earlier vaudevillian and burlesque son gs
and dances, as well as new formal and stylistic
conventions. As many modernists realized the potent ial of
plays to speak to a larger audience, drama moved in to
the literary mainstream.
Overview: Overview: Overview: Overview: Since 1945 Since 1945 Since 1945 Since 1945
After World War II, the United States emerged as th e
strongest world power and assumed the role of speak ing
on behalf of liberal democratic ideals. Having foug ht until
Germany and Japan had unconditionally surrendered, the
triumphant Allies attended to their war-ravaged eco nomic
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, we akened
by the German assault of 1941, eventually could not
sustain the investment necessary to vie militarily with the
Americans. The Cold War (1946–89) between the United
States and the USSR involved an ideological struggl e
between capitalist and communist states worldwide,
which erupted into proxy fights in Korea and Vietna m, but
eventually confirmed American military preeminence. At
home, these political struggles resulted in three m ajor
aesthetic reactions. First, the period immediately
following World War II was characterized by cultura l
conformity and nationalist ambition, as artists res ponded
to the Cold War by closing ranks and writing on beh alf of
an assumed collective identity. Second, in the 1960 s and
1970s, the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy
administration along with the turmoil of the Vietna m War
prompted cultural introspection, as more and more a rtists
rejected conformity and searched for ways to repres ent
previously excluded minority voices. Third, from the
1980s to the present, artists consolidated the prog ress
made in the previous years, until diversity and inc lusivity
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 polit ical
unity. The war effort had shifted industrial product ion to
military ends and recruited women to replace factor y
workers fighting overseas. When those workers came

10 10 10 10 “An Overview of American Literature”
home, many women found returning to domesticity onl y
temporarily acceptable. Similarly, African American s who
had been drafted into a fully integrated army found their
return to second-class citizenship difficult to acc ept. But
for the majority of the 1950s, most Americans dedic ated
themselves to stability at home in order to bolster the
American cause abroad. During the Cold War, America n
competition with the Soviet Union took the form of
political “containment” of the Russians, Chinese, a nd their
satellite states through international organization s like the
United Nations (for the Korean War) and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (in the case of the Eas tern
European Warsaw Pact). Once the USSR developed
nuclear weapons, both sides formulated policies tha t
favored deterring their adversaries economically ra ther
than deploying the weapons. In light of the struggl e
between capitalist and socialist economies, America ns
treated materialism (which valued wealth as a good in
itself) as patriotic. The G.I. Bill, which granted c ollege
educations to returning soldiers, ensured a highly skilled
workforce, and the developing network of American-
owned international corporations resulted in prospe rity
and the creation of a managerial class. Interstate
highways connected suburbs with urban hubs to allow
businessmen to shuttle between work and home, but t his
increased mobility underscored the homogeneity of t hese
interchangeable zones of commerce.
The literature of the 1950s reflects the cultural
preoccupations of stability and conformity as it re sponded
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, cl ass,
ethnicity, or regional identity. Such striving for
representativeness derived in part from the grand
ambitions of modernist novelists like Ernest Heming way,
whose lingering macho challenge to write the “Great
American Novel” pushed writers to universalize or
generalize so that their works could speak to any r eader.
Other novelists were inspired by William Faulkner to use
regional specificity to make major statements about race,
history, and national identity. By the end of the d ecade,
fiction writers began to suspect that novelistic
conventions were inadequate to the task of represen ting
essential Americana, much less contemporary reality .
The “Death of the Novel” controversy, as it was call ed,
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. Po etry followed a course similar to that of prose in these years.
Starting with finely wrought, intricate, personal l yric
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 poetry’s break with modernist form
are Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), with its wandering, oral
rhythms and energetic rejections of conformity, and
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), featuring a less
difficult, more direct style and an autobiographica l
intensity. Ginsberg’s and Lowell’s works helped pre pare
for the “confessional” poetry of the 1960s, which s tressed
the distinctiveness rather than the representativen ess of
the lyric voice.
The inevitable collision of conformity and individua lity was
foreshadowed in the election of John F. Kennedy in 1 960.
Kennedy’s “New Frontier” challenged the prosperous a nd
complacent to provide for the underprivileged and s ocially
marginalized through the desegregation of the South and
government programs like the Peace Corps. Many of
Kennedy’s civil and voting rights proposals were re alized
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 intelle ctual
unrest over the Vietnam War resulted in urban and
campus violence, but also gave rise to movements fo r the
betterment of women, blacks, and Native Americans. The
feminist movement, which encouraged women to
promote their collective legal, political, and cult ural
interests, made strides in equality for women not s een
since suffrage; similarly, the civil rights movemen t made
advances in awareness and combating racial
discrimination, unfinished business since Reconstru ction
one hundred years earlier. But the good will earned by
the Great Society was largely squandered by escalat ion
in Vietnam under Johnson and Nixon and the
government’s often deceitful handling of informatio n
about Southeast Asia. Cynicism and activism in
universities resulted in riots on campuses and deat hs at
Kent State and Jackson State in 1970; unrest did no t
cease until Nixon resigned in 1974 under threat of
impeachment for abuse of power during the Watergate
scandal and American troops withdrew from Vietnam i n
1975.
The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertaint ies of
the 1960s were mirrored in the literature of the de cade, in
which writers came to terms with changing attitudes

11 11 11 11 “An Overview of American Literature”
toward social involvement, government and corporate
power, individual and minority rights, drug use, an d
technological advances like television and consumer air
travel that lent themselves to a global perspective but
disrupted normal ways of thinking about time and sp ace.
The Death of the Novel debates in fiction and the
increasingly provisional, momentary nature of poetr y
emphasized the fragility of language. In literary t heory,
the school of deconstruction, starting in about 196 6,
examined the fundamentally unstable quality of all
utterances and how any statement depends on often
unspoken and arbitrarily constructed assumptions. S till,
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 represente d
world. Others, like those in the “Minimalist” schoo l of
prose fiction, labored to create a rigorously belie vable
and philosophically acceptable aesthetic. While som e
mainly white voices responded to the 1960s by
accounting for their aesthetic privilege, others to ok the
decade as an opportunity to add their voices to Ame rican
ideas of distinctive identity. Large platforms like literary
feminism and the Black Arts Movement allowed indivi dual
authors to render particular experiences without ha ving to
feel they spoke for their race, ethnicity, or gende r: 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 h istorical
and cultural contexts did not exist to combat linge ring
stereotypes, the 1960s saw a parallel movement of
critical writings to supplement creative works by N ative
authors.
After the Vietnam War, Americans voted on their cyn icism
about government intervention and nostalgia for
traditional values by electing Ronald Reagan presid ent in
1980. Reagan presided over the demise of the Soviet
Union thanks to a massive buildup in American milit ary
spending that the Russians could not match. His
economic policies hearkened back to the personal qu est
for wealth of the 1950s rather than the social acti vism of
the early 1960s. Under Reagan and Clinton, industri es
downsized and were made more efficient for competit ion
in a globalized marketplace. Instead of a monolithi c
communist threat, the United States faced a success ion
of smaller challenges in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and
Iraq that it could dispatch handily. The new shape o f
American influence materialized with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; instead of
large states, Americans now face radical fundamenta list
cells, and U.S. culture has only begun to respond t o this
antagonist.
As the Cold War ended, writers worked to broaden th e
cultural achievements of the 1960s, widening the sc ope
of American experience and casting diversity and pl urality
as aesthetic ideals. African American women like Ton i
Morrison, Lucille Clifton, and Rita Dove wrote in n ational,
racial, and ethnic terms; likewise, Sherman Alexie and
Louise Erdrich succeeded in writing in the often ig nored
or suppressed tradition of Native American literatu re.
Immigrant writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Jhu mpa
Lahiri augmented national dialogues of assimilation and
ethnic identity for Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and
Indian Americans. Perhaps the most telling emblem o f
this contemporary acceptance of new perspectives in to
conceptions of American experience is the Internet.
Online, new hypertext realities need only be imagin ed to
exist virtually, all users may join online communit ies, and
writing exists in open-ended and interactive relati onships
with its readers.