American Literature: Prose

In the early 1800s America faced a difficult challenge: how to create its own culture. The religious and political writers of the 17th and 18th centuries offered some guidance. Cotton Mather, for example, had argued for the uniqueness of America's mission. But none of those writers could satisfy the growing American appetite for prose fiction focused on American issues and grown from American imaginations. Calls for an American literature began during the Revolution and became more frequent and urgent as independence was assured.

Over the course of the 19th century the country progressed from an agricultural economy concentrated on the Eastern seaboard to an industrialized nation that spanned the continent. With the dramatic changes in the nation came dramatic changes in its literature. When the century opened, only a handful of novels had been written, but by mid-century American fiction rivaled the best in the world. Biography and history remained strong; religious writing, on the other hand, had substantially declined in importance.

A. Manifestations of Nationhood

Among the first manifestations of nationhood was the recognition that America had its own language and that American English differed from British English. Pioneering lexicographer Noah Webster led a call for uniquely American traditions in language and literature, and he undertook the massive project of developing an American dictionary. He had already advocated changes in American spellings of English words in such writings as Dissertations on the English Language (1789). Webster published his first dictionary in 1806. The first edition of his major work, American Dictionary of the English Language, came out in 1828. What made this work radical was his insistence on defining words based not only on traditional English usage but also on American variations in usage, called Americanisms, and his inclusion of at least 5000 new words not previously recognized by English dictionaries.

1. History

Gaining independence also provided the United States with a history of its own. Samuel Miller's A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803) and Mercy Otis Warren's History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) were both substantial histories of 18th-century America, including the Revolution. Many of the histories of America from the early and mid-1800s achieved additional drama through their authors' interpretations of the growing greatness of the nation. Foremost among these patriotic and romantic histories was the monumental ten-volume History of the United States (1834-1876) by George Bancroft, who is often called the father of American history.

2. Early Fiction: Irving

Local histories, like general histories, were also of interest in the early part of the century. History of New York (1809), by Washington Irving but ostensibly written by Irving's famous comic creation, the Dutch American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker, offered a surprising twist on standard local history. A satire on the exaggeration and earnestness often found in local histories, this work seemed to reflect America's desire to break away from established forms of writing and to engage more fully in the world of imaginative literature.

Literary magazines proliferated in the early 1800s, bearing witness in yet another way to a public appetite for fiction. Port Folio was founded in Philadelphia in 1801 and discussed both politics and literature. From 1807 to 1808 Irving and James Kirke Paulding published the literary magazine Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others, which was devoted to satirical writings.

Through his satires, sketches, and short stories, Irving was one of the most influential American authors of the first half of the 19th century. Among Irving's best-known legends is “Rip Van Winkle,” in which a man from New York's Catskill Mountains falls asleep before the beginning of the Revolution and wakes up after it is over to find his world happily transformed. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” an awkward and naive schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane is driven from his small New York town by a faked headless horseman. First published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), this story and others like it provided American legends and helped shape an American folklore.

3. Westward Expansion

Travel narratives became increasingly popular, especially as the country expanded westward. With the Louisiana Purchase, the United States took possession of a vast, unmapped territory. Early accounts of expeditions made in the name of future national expansion include Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and Through the Western Parts of Louisiana (1810) by explorer Zebulon Pike, and History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri (1814). The latter work, which emphasizes the idea of the explorer as hero, was compiled by diplomat Nicholas Biddle from the notes of the expedition.

America's westward expansion also generated a sizable collection of political prose, especially in light of manifest destiny—a belief that the country's territorial expansion was not only inevitable but also divinely ordained. The term manifest destiny was coined by writer John Louis O'Sullivan in "Annexation," an article that argued for the annexation of Texas and appeared in the July-August 1845 issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Other articles in that issue acknowledged that as the United States expanded, Native American cultures were being lost.

With westward expansion came displacement of Native Americans. From the early 1800s on, anguished speeches were presented by Native American leaders who faced a bleak future. Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, delivered one such speech to the Iroquois nation in 1806. Other speeches addressed to American officials in Washington, D.C., pointed to the destruction of Native American cultures as the United States expanded.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnologist and geologist, preserved a great deal of information about Native Americans in the Great Lakes region. He married a Native American, immersed himself in Native American cultures, and studied several tribal languages. From the 1820s to the 1850s Schoolcraft wrote at length on Native Americans. Although his writings gave a white man's views of native peoples, they preserved many materials, including a collection of Ojibwa and Ottawa legends and myths in Algic Researches (1839). One of Schoolcraft's most important works was the monumental study Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (6 volumes, 1851-1857), which later writers used as source material about Native Americans.

4. Biography

Biography and autobiography served the new nation's sense of its history and its need for heroes in the 1800s. In some cases these genres worked explicitly, as did some histories, to develop a mythic stature for American heroes, and biography began to merge with legend. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were favorite figures for legendary biography. Boone was introduced to audiences by John Filson's history, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, in 1784. His character was further developed by Timothy Flint, whose Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone (1833) portrayed Boone as a hero similar to the fictional character Natty Bumppo, created by James Fenimore Cooper. Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834), attributed to Crockett, mythologized another early frontier hero.

The Native American experience also began to be told in autobiography. William Apes was the first Native American to produce extensive writings in English. In A Son of the Forest (1829) he described his conversion to Christianity and his participation in the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain.

The greatest development in 19th-century American biography was the slave narrative. The tensions produced by slavery in America had already become apparent by the Revolution, but they heightened considerably in the 1800s, right up until the American Civil War (1861-1865). Frederick Douglass created a masterpiece of the genre with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a work that he revised and enlarged several times for later editions. While describing his life as a slave and his struggle toward freedom, Douglass emphasized the primary role that literacy played in opening opportunities for African Americans. He represented his ability to write his own story as the ultimate act of a free man. Harriet Jacobs offered a different but no less horrifying portrayal of the evils of slavery in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). In the book, Jacobs told of the sexual abuse experienced by young female slaves. Prior to the Civil War, former slaves who wished to tell their stories found access to publishers through connections with white abolitionists. Douglass's text included a preface, written by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, that encouraged the reader to trust the author. Another important work about the situation of black Americans was The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) by Martin Robison Delany. In this work Delany argued for a separatist state for blacks; some historians now consider him to be the first black nationalist.

B. American Romanticism

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, romanticism was the dominant literary mode in Europe. In reaction to the Enlightenment and its emphasis on reason, romanticism stressed emotion, the imagination, and subjectivity of approach. Until about 1870 romanticism influenced the major forms of American prose: transcendentalist writings, historical fiction, and sentimental fiction.

1. Transcendentalism

In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts, and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson's essay Nature (1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His other key transcendentalist works include The American Scholar (1837), a volume in which he addressed the intellectual's duty to culture, and "Self-Reliance" (1841), an essay in which he asserted the importance of being true to one's own nature.

Henry David Thoreau, a friend and protégé of Emerson's, put transcendentalist ideas into action. Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is his journal of a two-year experiment in living as simply and self-reliantly as possible in a small hut that he built on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord. His essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849) is a statement against government coercion that records his short stay in jail after he refused to pay a tax in support of the Mexican War (1846-1848). In this essay Thoreau asserted that each individual indirectly supported the wrongs of a nation—for example, slavery or war—simply by paying taxes and voting for government representatives. To express disapproval of government policies, he advocated passive resistance, or nonviolent protest through noncompliance.

Other influential transcendentalists included educator and philosopher Bronson Alcott, whose interests centered on education reform, and social reformer Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was a major early work of American feminism. Along with Emerson and critic and reformer George Ripley, Fuller founded The Dial in 1840. This periodical was dedicated to publishing the verse and philosophical writings of the transcendentalists.

2. Historical Fiction: Cooper, Hawthorne, and Others

The self-confidence and nationalism of the newly created United States of America energized fiction as well as nonfiction. Historical fiction took off first, influenced by Sir Walter Scott, an enormously popular British writer who established the genre. Historical fiction was an expression of romanticism in its probings of human nature and emotions and its romanticizing of the American past and the American frontier. The first generations of Puritans in New England, the Salem witchcraft trials, white conflicts with Native Americans, and the American Revolution provided popular subjects for American historical fiction. One of the earliest examples of the genre was Samuel Woodworth's The Champions of Freedom (1816). James Fenimore Cooper was the first American master of the form, however.

In Cooper's first published novel, Precaution (1820), he consciously imitated British fiction of the time, especially the novels of Jane Austen. With The Spy (1821), however, Cooper began his career as a specifically American novelist. This best-seller is set in New York during the American Revolution and has as its main character a spy working for General George Washington. The Pioneers (1823) is one of a series of five novels called the Leather-Stocking Tales. Over the course of the Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper developed one of America's first fictional heroes, the white frontiersman Natty Bumppo. In the tales, Bumppo bridges Native American and white cultures through his friendships, while articulating the consequences of further white settlement for Native Americans. Staking a claim for the importance of American history and landscape as an imaginative resource, Cooper continued to write until his death in 1851, profoundly influencing the direction of American prose. Another author who contributed to American historical fiction before mid-century was Lydia Maria Child. Her novel Hobomok (1824) focuses on the relationship between a white woman and a Native American man.

New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was also a master of historical fiction. Influenced to some extent by transcendentalism, Hawthorne's views of the movement were mixed. His novel The Blithedale Romance (1852) is loosely based on a transcendentalist experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. Still, Hawthorne's work, with its deep ethical concern about sin, punishment, and atonement, is less optimistic than most transcendental writing. Hawthorne was a descendant of one of the judges at the Salem witch trials, and he set many of his works in Puritan New England and during early crises in American history. The Scarlet Letter (1850), a story of rebellion within an emotionally constricted Puritan society, is an undisputed masterpiece in its powerful psychological insights. Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) collects some of his best short stories and sketches, including “Roger Malvin's Burial” and “Young Goodman Brown.”

The first African American to publish a novel was William Wells Brown, who combined historical fiction, national legend, and the increasingly divisive subject of race. His novel Clotel (1853) is the fictional account of a child born to Thomas Jefferson and a slave. It was intended to point out the distance between American ideals of liberty and the actual living conditions of American slaves, who also were sons and daughters of that promised liberty. Harriet E. Wilson was the first African American woman to publish a novel. Our Nig (1859) focuses on the injustices faced by free blacks in the North, a topic not readily acknowledged at the time.

3. Good and Evil: Melville and Poe

Herman Melville became a close friend of Hawthorne's after Melville moved to Massachusetts in 1850. Melville, who was born in New York City, worked on a number of ships after his father's financial ruin and death and based several novels on his voyages. Redburn (1849) was inspired by his first voyage as a cabin boy on a ship to Liverpool, England, and White-Jacket (1850) by his last voyage. He also worked on several whaling ships and witnessed the violence of life at sea. These tales of exotic travel adventures brought Melville early success. Ironically, Melville's popularity dropped after the publication of the book now considered a masterpiece of American fiction, Moby Dick (1851). Far removed from his earlier travel narratives, Moby Dick was dedicated to Hawthorne, and like Hawthorne's work was darkly metaphysical, symbolic, and complex. The story of the captain of a whaling boat, Ahab, and his relentless hunt for one whale, Moby Dick is also about the mysterious forces of the universe that overwhelm the individual who seeks to confront and struggle against them. Written in a powerful and varied narrative style, the book includes a magnificent sermon delivered before the ship's sailing, soliloquies by the ships' mates, and passages of a technical nature, such as a chapter about whales.

While transcendentalism was fundamentally optimistic, celebrating human creativity and the beauty of nature, Hawthorne and Melville demonstrated that asking questions about the nature of the universe could lead to answers illuminating the darker side of life. In the depths of the imagination, they saw hints of unfathomable evil rather than rays of divine light. Edgar Allan Poe was another writer who inverted transcendentalist promises. In his disturbing prose and poetry, Poe explored the nature of humanity and frightened readers with what he found. His tales are obsessed with death, madness, and violence. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) ranks among the triumphs of romantic horror. Poe also invented the detective story with such works as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). In Poe's longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), a sea journey to the South Pole suggests other, more primal journeys—to the center of the mind, to the source of all evil, and toward an all-encompassing void.

4. Sentimental Fiction: Stowe

The sentimental novel is a major form of American fiction that grew out of the responses of white writers to the abuses of slavery. The most famous and historically most significant work of American sentimental fiction is Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental fiction aimed to arouse pity for the oppressed and offered a natural form for novelists writing about the evils of slavery. In Stowe's novel and in novels that followed in this tradition, pity for the oppressed did not necessitate revolutionary change but rather called for an outpouring of Christian love. Sentimental fiction elicited this “Christian” sympathy from Northern white women in particular by demonstrating how the slave system violated the most basic bonds of humanity, such as that between mother and child.

Some sentimental fiction focused on gender by showing the dangers faced by young women, who might be driven to compromise their morals as a result of extreme poverty or the loss of their family and subsequent loss of social position. One such novel was Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850).

C. The Civil War and After

President Abraham Lincoln is credited with having humorously described Stowe as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." Uncle Tom's Cabin was powerful as propaganda and expressed the deep antislavery feelings of the North. Lincoln himself was among the greatest American orators of the 19th century and can be included in the roster of significant American writers because of the measured succinctness of his prose. Moved to despair by the tragic conflict of the Civil War (1861-1865), he turned American oratory away from the ornate rhetoric of statesman Daniel Webster to the inspirational simplicity of his 1863 Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address in 1865. Few other American public figures have equaled Lincoln's command of forceful, precise, and inspiring prose.

Two movements became increasingly important in American fiction after the Civil War: regionalism and realism. As the country expanded in area and population, regional differences became more apparent and of greater interest, especially to people in the established cultural centers of the East. Increasing urbanization and the expansion of the railroads had made more of the country accessible. Regional literature would do the same. Realism emerged as a literary movement in Europe in the 1850s. In reaction to romanticism, it emphasized the everyday and through detailed description re-created specific locations, incidents, and social classes. Like regionalism, it reveled in the particular.

1. Regionalism

Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. With increasing urbanization and more accessible transportation, small, rural communities became a subject of literary interest. As early as 1820 America had developed a taste for fiction with specific, localized settings and topics. Toward mid-century, regional voices had emerged from newly settled territories in the South and to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. In many of these works local dialects, sayings, and spellings were used for humorous effect. Among the successful publications of early regionalists were Georgia Scenes (1835) by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, an anthology called The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Sketches (1845), and Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845) by Johnson Hooper, which was set in Alabama.

Mary Wilkins Freeman, best known for A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), and Sarah Orne Jewett, best known for Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), both wrote about rural northern New England. The first audiences for their stories were not their own communities, however. The stories found their readership among the urbane readers of New York City's Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Boston's Atlantic Monthly magazine.

Tales of the West also became a popular form of regional writing and created frontier outlaws and heroes, such as Billy the Kid. These tales were especially suited to the short-story form. Foremost among writers who contributed to legends about the West was Bret Harte, especially in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), a collection of stories about California. Beginning in 1860 the publishing house of Beadle and Adams introduced dime novels—inexpensive tales with exciting plots intended for popular consumption. The first dime novels were set during key events of early American history such as the Revolutionary War, but plots soon incorporated frontier lore, conflicts between cowboys and Indians, and the taming of the West for white settlement. Dime novels may be seen as precursors of the Western, a genre that would reach the height of its popularity in the first half of the 20th century.

In the second half of the 19th century, issues specific to the industrial city also engaged writers of fiction, who portrayed the sometimes hidden struggles of city life. “Life in the Iron Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861. It was an important early realist representation of the long hours, drudgery, and bleak future of factory workers. Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) by Edward Bellamy compared an egalitarian and socialist vision of America as it might be in the year 2000 to the very real miseries of urban life in the 1880s.

Kate Chopin built her reputation on regionalist stories of Louisiana, for example, in the collection Bayou Folk (1894). She is, however, best remembered for writing one of the first important feminist novels, The Awakening (1899). The book realistically depicts Creole life in Louisiana as it tells the story of a young woman in a stultifying marriage who discovers a new sense of self when she takes a lover.

2. Realism and Naturalism: Twain, Crane, and Others

Realism entered American literature after the Civil War, soon followed by naturalism, an extreme form of realism. Naturalism had an outlook often bleaker than that of realism, and it added a dimension of predetermined fate that rendered human will ultimately powerless.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, is sometimes called a regionalist for his vivid portrayals of Southern character and dialect. However, he also ranks among the great American realists because he scrupulously included so many sides of life in his works and refused to make the horrifying look palatable. He published from 1865 until 1910, but his literary fame was firmly rooted in the 19th century and its crises of racism, class conflicts, and poverty. Twain's works also include some of the best American humor, starting with the short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which was published in a newspaper in 1865. Twain's best-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are seemingly simple stories that also offer searing indictments of corruption at all levels of society. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer celebrated boyhood at the same time that it cleverly revealed the workings of small-town America—small-minded at times, generous in spirit at other times. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered Twain's masterpiece. In it, the boy Huck Finn learns about human nature's evil side as well as its kind side. As a result of his close friendship with a black man who is escaping slavery, Huck also must confront the conflict between individual intuition about what is right and the prevailing views of society on the subject.

In both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Twain's genius comes through in his realistic depiction of the psychology and the moral development of his two young characters. Both works are similar in this way to Little Women (1868-1869), a novel by Louisa May Alcott that records the moral and intellectual coming of age of four young women. Alcott was the daughter of transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. Her still-popular novel is one of a series of works that show her serious concern with childhood and adolescence.

In addition to Twain, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris are notable late-19th-century American writers in the realist or naturalist traditions. Howells, a noted literary critic and novelist, was a friend of Twain's and along with him pioneered realism in American literature. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howell's best-known novel, is the study of a self-made businessman who is ultimately ruined financially by his determination not to compromise his integrity.

Despite an early death at the age of 29, Crane published several brilliant although grim stories. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the story of a doomed young woman's life in a New York City slum, is so bleak that Crane had difficulty finding a publisher. His second work, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is an intense examination of the psychology of fear and the state of the human mind during war; it met with immediate success. Norris's best-known works were McTeague (1899), a portrait of the effects of greed, and The Octopus (1901), which depicts the conflict between farmers and the railroad over land and power in California. His works reflect his concern with social and economic forces and their effect on human lives.

A less well-known writer in the realist tradition at the end of the century was Frances E. W. Harper, an African American woman born free in the former slave state of Maryland. An early black activist, Harper was a successful and frequent public speaker on behalf of the rights of blacks and of women. Her novel Iola Leroy, or The Shadows Uplifted (1892) tells the story of a woman of mixed racial ancestry who is freed from slavery, serves as a nurse during the Civil War, and is eventually reunited with her family after the war.

Prose

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: The 1500s and 1600s,

Ⅲ.Toward Independence: The 1700s,

Ⅳ.Nationhood: The 1800s ,

Ⅴ.Modernism: The 1900s,

Ⅵ.Current Trends

Poetry

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: 1600s Through the American Revolution (1775-1783),

Ⅲ.The 19th Century,

Ⅳ.The 20th Century.

Drama

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: 1600s and 1700s,

Ⅲ.Nationhood: The 1800s,

Ⅳ.The Modern Era: The 1900s