American Literature

B

Postrevolutionary Period

During the administration of President George Washington one literary centre of the new nation was Hartford, Connecticut, where a group of young writers, including the clergyman Timothy Dwight and the poets John Trumbull and Joel Barlow, became known as the Hartford Wits. They wrote in many forms, including the epic, but only their lighter verse is still read. Of greater later significance was the emergence at this time of the American novel, as exemplified by The Power of Sympathy (1789), a sentimental work by the writer William Hill Brown, and Modern Chivalry (1792-1815) by the poet and novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a realistic and satirical account of frontier manners. The romances of the novelist and journalist Charles Brockden Brown, which were popular in Europe, included Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). Strange compounds of Gothic terror and pseudo-science, they are precursors to the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

IV

The 19th Century

The years from 1815 to 1861 have been called the “First National Period”. The phrase is useful, for imaginative energies, gathering force after the War of 1812, reached a climax in the 1850s, when many novelists, poets, and essayists produced their most important work. In American history the Civil War was a dividing line between the mixed economy of the ante-bellum period and the more industrial post-war period. Most of the leading pre-war writers lived on, but gave way to a new generation of writers with different literary and social concerns.

A

Early 19th Century

The literary task before the young nation was to prove that it had attained cultural independence. Proof was sought in opposite ways. Anticipating the position later developed by the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poet Walt Whitman, some writers argued that a radical political experiment should be matched by a radically new literature. Others, however, especially in Boston, thought that American writers should seek to meet European standards. Although little literature of lasting value was produced in Boston in the opening decades of the epoch, The North American Review, long an influential literary quarterly, was founded there in 1815. In New York, the main centre of those who wanted to create a new literature, the first three important creators of an indigenous but still cosmopolitan American literature worked: Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper.

The writing of Washington Irving is alert to changing national conditions. In A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) he gave New York its legendary father, travestied conventional histories with consummate skill, and rivalled Franklin in urbanity. In The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), particularly in the story of Rip Van Winkle and the legend of Ichabod Crane, Irving further enriched American mythology. Although distinctly American, Irving’s writing preserved the style of 18th-century English prose, especially perhaps that of the British writer Oliver Goldsmith, whose biography Irving wrote in 1849. Like Goldsmith, he turned to history, interpreting the Spain of Ferdinand V and Isabella I in The Alhambra (1832). With diminished success he wrote about the Far West, as in A Tour of the Prairies (1835). His work also includes substantial biographies of Christopher Columbus (1828) and George Washington (5 vols., 1855-1859).

William Cullen Bryant, although born in New England, went to live in New York in 1825, where his best-known poem, “Thanatopsis” (1817), had already established his fame. In his long career he wrote verse and fiction, books of travel, an important work on the theory of poetry, and faithful translations of Homer. He edited the New York Evening Post from 1829 to his death in 1878, defending the Abolitionists in the newspaper’s pages.

James Fenimore Cooper was the first American author after Franklin to achieve a worldwide reputation. The Leatherstocking series of novels (The Pioneers, 1823; The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; The Prairie, 1827; The Pathfinder, 1840; The Deerslayer, 1841), following the pattern of the “Waverley” novels of Sir Walter Scott, form a prose epic of the conquest of America. Endless forests and lonely waters, hunters, Native Americans, and hostile Europeans provided a setting for the exploits of the hero, the wilderness scout Natty Bumppo. Cooper also wrote sea novels, of which The Pilot (1823) is the most famous. Social, political, economic, and religious issues in American life are evident in his work, as in the trilogy known as the Littlepage Manuscripts (1845-1846). Europeans such as the French novelist Honoré de Balzac and, later, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence readily acknowledged his power.

Among those who wrote with a greater consciousness of European traditions were the Cambridge poets, so called because of their attachment in one way or another to Harvard College. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an aristocrat and the best-known member of this cosmopolitan group, appealed to the religious, patriotic, and cultural yearnings of the middle class. He translated works from many European languages (such as The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols., 1865-1867), wrote short poems of religious and moral sentiment, and became the foremost American writer of sonnets of the century. In a series of narrative poems on American themes, for example, Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), Longfellow sought to dignify and elevate life in the New World.

The literary reputation of the doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes has faded; nevertheless, in verse and prose, especially in the 12 essays titled The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), he helped liberate the American mind from the tyranny of the Puritan theologians. The poet and critic James Russell Lowell, once regarded as an American counterpart to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is important historically. His lively Biglow Papers (first series, 1848; second series, 1867), his great patriotic document known familiarly as “The Harvard Commemoration Ode”, and his collection of critical essays, such as Among My Books (first series, 1870; second series, 1876), broadened and enriched the national mind. Associated peripherally with the Cambridge group was the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who wrote the well-known poem “Snow-Bound” (1866) and many religious lyrics, and who vigorously denounced the slave-holders in poems such as “Massachusetts to Virginia” (1843).

During the early and mid-19th century, with the intensification of the slavery issue in the United States, most of the writing produced by black Americans was concerned with dramatizing the immorality and agony of slavery and refuting the romanticized, ante-bellum vision of slavery as presented by a host of white Southern writers of the so-called plantation tradition. Important works concerned with the question of slavery are the three autobiographies of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, written at different times in his life. The first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published in 1845 just after Douglass had escaped from slavery in Maryland. This was followed by enlarged versions in 1855 (My Bondage and My Freedom) and in 1881 (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, final revised 1882). Another important work is The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), by Martin Robinson Delany, who is now considered by some historians as the first major black nationalist.

The historian, novelist, and playwright William Wells Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834, wrote the first novel by an African-American, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853, London). The theme of Clotel, miscegenation, or racial intermarriage, thereafter was dealt with frequently by other 19th-century authors who, like Brown, were torn between their African heritage and a need for roots in the United States.

The first novel to be written by an African-American woman was Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), which told the story of a young, mixed-race girl’s violent treatment at the hands of a rich white northern family. The novel makes it clear that racism was not confined to the slave societies of the South.

Looking back at the 19th century, modern readers generally read the writers whom critics have suggested offer more radical solutions to cultural problems. Foremost were the essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both Transcendentalists, and the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In his famous address “The American Scholar” (1837) Emerson did more than repudiate a genteel cosmopolitanism; he proclaimed a philosophy of idealistic individualism that is evident in the book Nature (1836), the “Address at Divinity College” (1838), the Essays (first series, 1841; second series, 1844), and Representative Men (1850). Although philosophies similar to his had been developed in Germany and in Great Britain, Emerson wrote with an American perspective.

Thoreau’s writings may have been less broad in range than Emerson’s, but Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is presently more widely read than anything of Emerson. Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849) has had worldwide political influence, and “Life Without Principle”, compounded from passages in Thoreau’s journal and published posthumously in 1863, has been seen as one of the great statements of the idea that without integrity the individual perishes. Emerson disliked slavery, but Thoreau actively opposed it, and Thoreau’s writings are still used to controvert the kind of slavery that reduces human beings to parts of a machine.

Hawthorne’s reputation and that of his fascinating novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) is secure, but critics continue to study and interpret his character and his literary purpose. Many 19th-century readers took him at his own ironic valuation as a dreamy romantic; later knowledge has altered the picture of the dreamer into that of the sardonic commentator on public event and private character and master of the psychological novel. The enigma of good and evil is central to many stories in the collections Twice-Told Tales (first series, 1837; second series, 1842) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846); as it is to the novels The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860).

More drastic has been the modern re-evaluation of Herman Melville. Known originally as the man who lived among the cannibals, from the adventures recounted in his first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), he puzzled his contemporary readers with the romance Mardi (1849) and still more with Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (1851); while Pierre: or the Ambiguities (1852) was a complete failure. Forgotten in the second half of the 19th century, Melville was discovered again during the 20th. As with Hawthorne, the problem of evil is central to Melville’s work, most explicitly so in the short novel Billy Budd (not pub. until 1924); but this conception of evil is so shrouded in myth and allegory that critics disagree about its personal significance, in terms of the writer’s life and about its broader meaning.

The poet, critic, and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe was one of the major figures of the first half of the century. Although a southerner, Poe was not preoccupied with the life and history of the South. Poe simultaneously inhabited the world of journalism and a weird and lonely universe of his own imagining, characterized by relentless logic and a haunting sense of anguish. In his criticism Poe was capable of extreme partiality and extreme severity. His poetry profoundly affected the development of French Symbolist verse, and his short stories, such as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), are among the most significant stories of Romantic horror. He launched the American detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Purloined Letter” (1844), and other tales.

The opposite of Poe in virtually every respect, the poet Walt Whitman, after much unsuccessful writing, produced in 1855 the first version of Leaves of Grass, which he continued to expand until 1882. To this volume all else that he wrote—Drum-Taps (1865), Democratic Vistas (1871), Specimen Days & Collect (1882), and much more—is subsidiary. Of his books he wrote, “Who touches this touches a man”, and the man was bombastic, affirmative, self-involved, yet mystical and sensitive. Whitman’s exuberance dictated the creation of a new, unrestrained verse form focusing on the beliefs, ideas, and experiences of the common man. The long, rhythmic lines, the heaping up of details, the affirmation of mystic identity with all that exists were intended to celebrate the spiritual strength in the democracy of “powerful uneducated persons”.

In recent years there has been a re-evaluation of popular American writing, especially by women. Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) are now considered to be representative of a domestic and sentimental female culture that dramatized women’s complicated place in society. While valued as child carers and moral guardians they were often denied employment, educational, and democratic rights open to men.

B

The American Civil War and the Later 19th Century

President Abraham Lincoln humorously described Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), as “the little woman who caused this big war”. A powerful work, it expressed the deep antislavery feeling of the North. Lincoln himself can be included in the roster of significant American writers because of the measured succinctness of his occasional prose. Profoundly moved by the tragic conflict of the Civil War, he turned American oratory away from the ornate rhetoric of the statesman Daniel Webster to the inspirational simplicity of his address at Gettysburg (1863) and of his second inaugural address (1865). No other American public figure has quite equalled Lincoln’s command of forceful, accurate, and inspiring prose.

After the war, many new writers emerged, especially in fiction. Among the forces that brought about change in American literature at that time were the increasing concentration of publishing houses in a single city, New York; new schemes for the manufacture, sale, and distribution of printed matter; the effectiveness of the state school systems, which created a larger reading public; the wider teaching of English literature and of foreign languages and literatures; and the increasing effectiveness of literary periodicals. The decades following 1870 were the golden age of the American magazine; the single instance of the prestigious and influential Atlantic Monthly magazine, founded in 1857, four years before the Civil War, is interesting. James Russell Lowell, its editor, appealed for stories emphasizing what came to be known as local colour, and local colour dominated the writing of the 1870s and the 1880s.

From the South, fiction by the authors George Washington Cable (Old Creole Days, 1879), Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings, 1880), and the painter and writer Francis Hopkinson Smith, author of Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891), presented a sentimental picture of life in the Confederacy. The name of Kate O’Flaherty Chopin, a Louisiana-born author, may be added here or to the late 19th-century Realists discussed below. Her last novel, The Awakening (1899), realistically depicts Creole life and a woman’s struggle for both independence and fulfilment.

Best known of a group of able women who wrote of New England life, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote many short stories about Maine people, such as those collected in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). California was the setting of the stories of Bret Harte, whose The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870) has been called the “father of Western local-colour stories”.

Local colour also appeared in poetry; the works of Joaquin Miller and James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote about the Midwest, are characteristic of this trend.

From 1865 to 1910 poetry largely was in a state of decline. The taste of the period was summed up in the standard collection An American Anthology, 1787-1899 (1900) by the conservative critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. Of more interest to modern readers are the works of the leading southern poet Sidney Lanier, whose best-known poems are “The Marshes of Glynn” (1879) and “The Revenge of Hamish” (1878); the philosopher George Santayana, who also wrote exquisitely crafted poetry (Sonnets and Other Verses, 1894); or Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose Lyrics of a Lowly Life (1896) brought him national attention. Emily Dickinson, now recognized as a unique genius and the most important poet of the period, was unknown to her contemporaries. The first collection of her poetry (Poems, 1890) was not published until four years after her death and was little read before the 1920s.

C

Humour

American humour can be studied as a special manifestation of the national literature. It has fluctuated between humour of the people and urbane humour. Humour of the people tends to retain the qualities of popular speech, as in Lowell’s The Biglow Papers. Even before Lowell, however, the humorists of the south-western frontier, such as the clergyman and writer Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, author of the sketches Georgia Scenes (1835), had followed this lead. In the mid-century and after, popular idiom and spelling were used as humorous devices in lectures and newspaper columns. Representatives of this later phase were the humorists Josh Billings (Josh Billings, His Sayings, 1865), Petroleum V. Nasby (The Nasby Papers, 1864), and Artemus Ward (Artemus Ward, His Book, 1862). Using illiterate speech, these authors not only satirized the eternal human follies but also powerfully influenced public opinion and political events. The genre was continued later by Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley's Opinions, 1901).

Out of this tradition emerged the most powerful literary personality of the postbellum era, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to the world as Mark Twain. His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), retains the characteristics of the oral tale; successes such as The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883) waver between journalism and literature; but with the novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Twain transcended his own tradition of satire and created two master pictures of life on and along the Mississippi River. The genius of Twain was that he understood the moral realism of childhood. In this connection both works may be compared and contrasted with Little Women (1868-1869) by Louisa May Alcott. This still enormously popular novel is one of a series of works by Alcott that show her serious concern with childhood and adolescence. Twain’s later fictional works such as The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), the compelling The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and philosophical works such as What is Man? (1906) express the pessimism already evident in The Gilded Age (1873).