LITERATU RE: 1600 TO 1914

The first explorers and settlers who came to North America from Europe wrote little beyond practical reports, sent back to the Old World, describing the continent's natural beauty, its unique plants and animals, and the customs of the dark- skinned inhabitants already there. They did not note the rich local folklore—an oral, not written, tradition—which was really the first American literature.

PRACTICAL BEGINNINGS

Leaders of the earliest permanent settlements, in the first years of the 1600s, kept detailed accounts of the lives of their little groups of colonists. Their purpose was not only to tell their friends back home what the new land was like; they also wanted to describe what was in effect a social experiment. Captain John Smith (1580- 1631), who organized the English colony of Jamestown (in what is now the state of

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as "Mark Twain," wrote in a distinctly American style—rich in metaphor, newly invented words and drawling rhythms. His Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been called the greatest novel in American literature.

Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum

Virginia), wrote books in which he outlined carefully the economic and political structure of his settlement. Farther north, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Governor William Bradford (1590-1657) recorded the experiences of the Pilgrims who had come from England and Holland seeking religious freedom. His history of the Plymouth plantation focused on their hardships, on their spiritual response to life in a remote wilderness, and on the religious meaning of those events. This account was written only for his own reflection.

For a long time, however, there was little imaginative literature produced in the colonies. At first, the settlers' waking hours were occupied nearly totally with efforts to ensure survival. Later, the community discouraged the writing of works such as plays because these weren't "useful" and were widely considered to be immoral. In the North, where the communities were run by the religious Protestants generally called Puritans, hard work and material prosperity were greatly valued as outward signs of God's grace. Making money was also important, for other reasons, to the merchants of the growing cities of New York and Philadelphia and to the farmers of large tracts of land in the southern colonies.

The population of the colonies increased rapidly, and by the middle of the 17th century these colonies were no longer crude outposts. In 1647, Massachusetts began to require towns of 50 families or more to establish elementary schools. Excellent colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary were founded throughout the colonies for training religious leaders. In 1640, the Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in America; by the early 1700s, newspapers were appearing. As the latest books arrived on ships from Europe, colonists involved themselves in various European religious and political controversies. Puritan sermons, such as those of Increase Mather and his son Cotton in the late 1600s, or of Jonathan Edwards in the mid-1700s, were often highly intellectual discussions of theology, responding to arguments in the English church. These were not inevitably dry, sterile lectures. Edwards' famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," for example, was full of imagery and passion.

METAPHYSICAL POETS

The Puritan notion that God should be seen in every phase of daily life also gave rise to poetry. Anne Bradstreet published a volume of fine poems, chiefly religious meditations, in 1650. Edward Taylor, who wrote at about the same time but did not publish his poems during his life, used imagery in the same bold, witty, original way as did English religious poets John Donne and George Herbert. These writers were known as the "Metaphysical" poets. Taylor's poems belong to the literary tradition of the individual focusing on his interior life. Anne Bradstreet's poems represent yet another important element of American literature: From the beginning, women were active literary figures in the New World.

ENUGHTENMENT INFLUENCES

As a philosophical movement called the Enlightenment swept over Europe in the 18th century, its rational logic and its ideas on human rights were eagerly adopted in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a printer and publisher in Philadelphia, was a model Enlightenment figure. He was an author, scientist, inventor, common-sense philosopher, and a statesman and diplomat in his later years, during the colonies' fight for independence. Franklin's Autobiography, written about his life from 1731 to 1759, displays worldly wisdom and wit, along with satire and a practical dose of advice on daily living.

By the mid-1700s, the colonies had enough printing presses to publish a great number of newspapers and political pamphlets, most of them echoing the ideology of the Enlightenment. These political writings helped arouse the colonists to wage war against the British government that ruled them. In 1776, the colonists' position was formally stated in the Declaration of Independence, which was chiefly the work of a wealthy young Virginia landowner and lawyer, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Although he wasn't a writer by profession, Jefferson was a brilliant thinker, and the strong, clear, fervent language of the Declaration makes it a prose masterpiece. After the colonies won their independence from Britain in 1783, Jefferson campaigned for Constitutional provisions protecting individual rights, which were embodied in the Bill of Rights (the Constitution's first 10 Amendments). He also served as the new country's third president.

With independence, energies that had gone into fighting the war were channeled instead into building the new United States. That included the development of a "native" culture. Colonists had imported new plays and novels from Europe before the war; now they hoped for American writers to give them similar literature, dealing with American subjects. A new literature could not, of course, spring up overnight. What often happened was that American writers strained to copy British works. The first American plays were mostly romantic melodramas, usually set during the recent war. The first novelists generally imitated popular European novels. Many women wrote sentimental love stories modeled upon British novelist Samuel Richardson's (1689-1761) Pamela and Clarissa. American author Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) wrote a sprawling satire, Modern Chivalry, which was similar to the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote, except that it was set on the American frontier. Charles Brockden Brown's (1771- 1810) Wieland and Ormond were imitations of the suspenseful "Gothic" novels then being written in England.

The leading poet of the early republic was Philip Freneau (1752-1832), a personal friend of many important leaders of the American Revolution. Freneau's early poems were glowingly patriotic, either celebrating American victories or commenting passionately upon the issues facing the new democracy. After the turn of the century, however, he wrote instead about nature, following the trend in Europe, where the "Romantic" movement was just beginning.

AMERICAN STYLES

Freneau was perhaps the first professional writer in America, but his fame did not spread beyond his native shores. In 1819, however, a cultured young New Yorker named Washington Irving (1783-1859) published The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, a volume of stories that was read just as eagerly in Europe as in the United States. Irving was known in New York as part of a circle of literary men-about-town called "the Knickerbocker Wits," but his travels in Europe and his friendship with major literary figures abroad had given him a more cosmopolitan viewpoint. The Sketch Book contains such classic American stories as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." To Europeans, these tales from the New World seemed exotic, yet they were written with a European polish and humor.

Only two years after The Sketch Book, another American writer began to attract attention—James Fenimore Cooper (1789- 1851). His books included a series of frontier novels, such as The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, and several gripping sea novels. Cooper used the "exotic" settings of the new continent, but he went beyond that to create a distinctively American style of hero—an uneducated man, close to nature, who survived on his instincts, honesty and common sense.

In 1828, Noah Webster published an American dictionary, defining what made the English language spoken in America different from British English. The election of frontier hero Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1829 symbolized to many the achievement of a real democracy, and political cartoons and satiric humor blossomed in newspapers. The spread of public schools through the states ensured a large reading public. Educator William Holmes McGuffey's (1800-1873) publishing of a series of primers, which were widely used in those schools, ensured that the general population shared a common store of literary material—poems, moralistic tales and quotations from literature. After 1836, more than 120 million copies of the "McGuffey Readers" were printed, and they influenced generations of Americans.

TRANSCENDENTALISTS

The country was expanding westward, but in the older cities of the northeastern states—still referred to as "New England"—the influence of early Puritan teachings remained strong. However, sue! authoritarian religious organizations inevitably produce dissenters. In 1836, an ex-minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) published a startling book called Nature. In this volume, Emerson claimed that by studying and responding t nature individuals could reach a higher spiritual state without formal religion. For the next several years, Emerson's essays made him extremely influential, not only upon other thinkers and writers, but upon the general population as well, thanks to ; growing popular lecture circuit that brought controversial speakers to small towns across the country. In effect, Emerson's lectures were like sermons, with their direct, motivating language. In his poetry Emerson developed a free-form, natural style, using symbols and imagery drawn from nature. His work had an immense impact on other poets of the time.

A circle of intellectuals who were discontented with the New England establishment soon gathered around Emerson. They were known as "the Transcendentalists," based on their acceptance of Emerson's theories about spiritual transcendence. One of Emerson' most gifted fellow-thinkers was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).

Thoreau was passionate about individuals' learning to think for themselves and being independent, both traditional American values. He carried out this idea by going to live by himself for two years in a simple cabin beside a wooded pond, where he survived essentially by his own labors and meditated in solitude. The book he wrote about this experience, Walden, was published in 1854, but many of its statements about the individual's role in society— simply put, that the dictates of an individual's conscience should take precedence over the demands, even the laws, of society—sound radical even today

POWER OE IMAGINATION

While these New England intellectuals presented perspectives of literature and life other writers were concentrating upon human imagination and emotion rather th the intellect. A young Virginian, Edgar Allan Рое (1809-1849), was publishing poems of musical language and extravagant imagery, which made him a worthy rival < the European Romantic poets. Brilliant but unstable, Рое earned his living as a journalist, often writing devastating reviews of other writers' work. In 1835, h also began writing bold, original short stories, such as "The Pit and the Pendulum and "The Fall of the House of Usher." These suspenseful, sometimes terrifying tales plunged deep into human psychology and explored the realms of science fiction and the mystery story long before such genres were recognized.

Meanwhile, in 1837, a young writer in New England named Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) published a volume called Twice-Told Tales, stories rich in symbolism and peculiar incidents. Although he knew

the Transcendentalists, Hawthorne did not share their beliefs. His way of rebelling against the traditional New England outlook on life was to write imaginative "romances," stories and novels which were not necessarily realistic but which were designed to explore certain moral themes such as guilt, pride and emotional repression. His masterpiece was The Scarlet Letter, a novel published in 1850. Set in the Puritan past, it is the stark drama of a woman harshly cast out from her community for committing the sin of adultery.

Hawthorne's writing had a profound impact upon another writer, originally from New York, who was living at the time in New England. Herman Melville (1819- 1891), whose wealthy father had gone bankrupt, had worked at many jobs before signing on in 1839 for the first of several sea voyages. Seven years later, he began writing accounts of his adventures on the open seas and in exotic ports, which won him instant success. Yet Melville longed to write something more serious. Inspired by Hawthorne's example, he began writing novels which were fundamentally allegories on politics and religion. The public rejected them, however, and, discouraged, Melville published little except poetry for the rest of his life. Ironically, the very books that proved unacceptable during his lifetime are the ones most admired today. Moby Dick, published in 1851, uses a story of a whaling voyage to explore profound themes such as fate, the nature of evil, and the individual's struggle against the universe. It is considered an American masterpiece.

nEW VISIONS OF AMERICA

Рое, Hawthorne and Melville all struggled to find their individual voices, and through them American literature began to acquire its own personality. One more figure emerged in the 1850s to assert a truly American voice, one that celebrated the American landscape, the American people, their speech and democratic form of government. His name was Walt Whitman (1819-1892), and like so many other of these writers, he had had to work hard for a living as a schoolteacher, printer and journalist. In 1848, he took a trip to the southern city of New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, that great waterway flowing through the heart of the country. There Whitman gained a new vision of America and began writing poetry that would embody this vision. In 1855, he published a ground-breaking book called Leaves of Grass. Readers were amazed by the free-flowing structure of this poetry, with its long irregular lines. Like Melville in Moby Dick, Whitman ventured beyond traditional forms to meet his need for more space to express the American spirit. Some readers were disturbed by Whitman's egotism (one main poem in Leaves of Grass is called "Song of Myself'), but Whitman dwelt on himself simply because he saw himself as a prototype of "The American." Startling as this poetry was, it won Whitman admirers across America and in Europe. Throughout the rest of his life, he kept rewriting and republishing editions of Leaves of Grass. He celebrated a sweeping

panorama of the American landscape and sang almost mystically of the rhythms of life uniting all citizens of the democracy.

The most popular poet in America at this time, however, was a much more traditional writer—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Although his style was conservative, with strict meter and rhymes, his themes were deliberately American, and he was intent upon giving American history the dignity of classical mythology. The same year that Whitman .first published Leaves of Grass, Longfellow published The Song of Hiawatha, a long epic poem about a young warrior of an American Indian tribe.

Longfellow was one of a popular group called the "Fireside Poets" because they often depicted the lives of simple New Englanders in gentle, nostalgic verse. Although they came from old New England families—a sort of American "aristocracy"—Longfellow and his circle were dedicated to America's democratic ideals.

PEFORM AND LIBERATION

New England intellectuals had, in fact, a tradition of involvement in liberal reform. In the 1850s, this took the form of a movement to end the institution of slavery, which by that time was practiced chiefly in the southern states. In 1852, a New England woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, an antislavery novel that galvanized political opinion across the nation. Sentimental and melodramatic as it was, Uncle Tom's Cabin portrayed black slaves as sympathetic, suffering figures, and created an image of the cruel slaveowner in the character of Simon Legree. Largely as a result of this best-selling novel, the slavery question became a passionately debated political issue. Eventually the Southern states determined to secede from the Union and to establish themselves as an independent country in order to preserve their way of life, which included an agrarian economy based in great part on slave labor. The result of Northern reaction to this secession was the Civil War (1861-1865), fought to preserve the Union. One consequence of the South's defeat in that war was the abolition of slavery in the United States.

REGIONALISM

In many ways, this bloody, divisive war dimmed American optimism, and for a time writers retreated from national themes. The country had been growing; as pioneers settled new territories in the West, writers now focused on the differences between the various regions of the United States rather than on a single vision of the expanding country. One of the most important leaders of this "regionalism" movement was William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who in 1866 became editor of the influential Atlantic magazine. Howells published stories from all over the United States, and in his literary reviews he praised writers who described local life realistically. In New England, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) and

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) wrote fine novels and stories about small-town life. Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) wrote colorful stories about the South, such as his "Uncle Remus" stories, in which the strong southern accent was written in dialect. The central part of the country, the wide plains and rolling farmlands of the Midwest, were depicted in John Hay's Pike Country Ballads and Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster. And the raw mining camps and settlements of the far West were brought to life by storytellers such as Bret Harte, in "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and a newspaper correspondent named Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast. He grew up in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River and received only a basic public school education. He began working in a printer's shop when he was still a boy, and this experience led to a series of newspaper jobs in the Midwest and the West. Twain was a new voice, an original genius, a man of the people, and he quickly won readers. He captured a peculiarly American sense of humor, telling outrageous jokes and tall tales in a calm, innocent, matter-of-fact manner. He sometimes used local dialect for comic effect, but even his normal prose style sounded distinctively American—rich in metaphor, newly invented words and drawling rhythms.

Twain had a cynical streak that matched the country's skeptical post-Civil War mood. He soon developed beyond merely "regional" stories and turned to comic novels. His shrewd social satire was most apparent in books such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but perhaps his greatest book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). This is the story of a boy running away from home and steering a raft down the Mississippi River, but it is more than that. The people the boy meets cover the entire spectrum of humanity, and his voyage down the river becomes a metaphor for a journey through life. Funny, powerful, humane and laced with social commentary and criticism, Huckleberry Finn has been called the greatest novel in American literature.

HIDDEN POETS

While prose fiction in the United States was developing in vital and imaginative ways, poetry seemed to recede as an art form. The poetic giants, Longfellow and Whitman, both died in the 1880s, as did two poets who have been admired by later generations, but who were barely known while they lived. One was southerner Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), who mourned the romantic ideal of the "Old South," which he felt had been shattered by the Civil War. Lanier held strong theories about poetry's relationship to music, and his rhythmic, singing verse reminded many people of the poetry of Edgar Allan Рое. The other unrecognized poet was Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a shy, brilliant New England woman who lived almost as a recluse in her family home. After a batch of her poems were rejected by one editor, she wrote only for herself, or sent verses as gifts to friends and relatives. They were typically short, reflective poems, with regular meter and rhyme and fresh, closely observed images. Although at first they appear to be traditional love poems or religious meditations, upon closer reading Dickinson's poems reveal a religious skepticism and psychological shrewdness that is surprisingly modern.

A NEWWAVE

As the wounds of the Civil War slowly healed, many Americans became discontented with the growing materialism of society in the United States. Henry Adams (1838-1918), a thoughtful historian and social critic, wrote two social novels in the 1880s (although today they are not as well read as his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams). Henry James (1843-1916), an American who lived in Europe, examined American society by observing the divergence between American and European culture in novels like The American and Portrait of a Lady. In 1888, one of the most widely read American books was Edward Bellamy's (1850-1898) Looking Backward, a portrait of an imaginary future society which embodied all of Bellamy's ideas for social, economic and industrial reorganization. These books signalled a return to social discussion in fiction.

"Regional" writers began to drop their narrow provincial focus, while still using realistic descriptions of everyday life. As they concentrated increasingly upon the grimmer aspects of reality and a deterministic view of life, they were called "naturalists," linking them to European naturalists such as French novelist Emile Zola. Again, William Dean Howells led the American realistic movement, both with his magazine criticism and with his own novels, such as The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), a probing but sympathetic portrait of an American businessman.

In 1881, Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) published Main-Travelled Roads, a gritty portrayal of the farming communities of the upper Midwest, where he had grown up. It went beyond regionalism to condemn the economic system that, in his opinion, kept these people poor. Stephen Crane's (1871- 1900) Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, in 1893, and Theodore Dreiser's (1871-1945) Sister Carrie, in 1900, were considered shocking because they described young urban women who fell into sexual sin. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) was set during the Civil War. By limiting itself to a young soldier's confused impressions of battle, it became the first impressionistic novel in America. Frank Norris' McTeague (1899) was the story of a dentist's despairing life; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) exposed the horrible lives of meat-packing factory workers. Jack London's Call of the Wild (1903), the tale of a sled dog, was set in the snowy wilderness of the Northwest, where the discovery of gold had caused a rush of greedy prospectors. In this novel and other celebrated tales set in Alaska and in the South Pacific, London expressed his sense that primitive urges underlie all of life, reducing even humans to the level of animals.

While these controversial books disturbed the reading public, other writers were quietly exploring the fate of the individual. After the turn of the century, Henry James, still living in Europe, wrote three brilliant novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, in which he plunged deep into the characters and personalities of his subjects. These were chiefly wealthy, cultured Americans living in Europe, but, like the lower-class characters of the naturalists' novels, James' people were trapped in their environment, struggling to find happiness. James' interest was psychological rather than social, however. Recording the most minute details of perception, he drew his readers close to his characters' mental and emotional processes. His writing style became increasingly complex, but this focused attention away from action and setting and onto what the characters were feeling.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was one of James' close friends and literary followers. She came from a socially prominent New York family and had married into an equally important Boston family. This high-toned social circle disapproved of her writing, but eventually she defied her peers and produced insightful novels and stories. One of her finest books, The House of Mirth (1905), tells the tragic story of a fading beauty hunting desperately for a rich husband. Wharton exposed her upper-class world as only an insider could, but her characters were her main interest.

SYMPATHETIC VIEWS

Three other women, in different parts of the country, were also writing sympathetic psychological studies. Though influenced by regionalism, they didn't emphasize setting so much as they did their characters, individuals who often felt out of place in their environments. Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) is set in the heart of the South, in New Orleans; Ellen Glasgow's The Voice of the People (1900) is a realistic portrait of provincial Virginia society; and Willa Cather's О Pioneers! (1913) depicts life on the sweeping plains of midwestern Nebraska. Glasgow and Cather went on to write several novels and establish themselves as major American writers, but Chopin stopped writing after her book was condemned by literary critics.

By the first decade of the 20th century, even writers of popular fiction were concentrating their attention upon the lower levels of society. One of the most successful of these writers was O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862-1910), who churned out hundreds of clever magazine stories, usually with an ironical surprise ending. Midwesterners Ring Lardner (The Love Nest and Other Stories) and Booth Tarkington (Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons), were less sentimental and more satirical than O. Henry, but they too wrote humorous popular fiction about the unglamorous lives of everyday people.

American literature entered the 20th century not as optimistic or patriotic as it had been a century earlier, yet full of democratic spirit. There were some voices still to be heard, however. Black Americans were just beginning to make their mark in literature in the wake of the Civil War's having freed them from slavery. One gifted black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), published a few volumes of poetry during the 1890s which were discovered and admired by white readers. Most of his poems, however, used the black dialect of folklore for humorous effect; only a few poems express the painful struggle of his short life. In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois (1869-1963) published Souls of Black Folk, a series of sketches of the common lives of his people which was the first glimpse many white Americans had had of the social condition of blacks since slavery. In 1912, poet James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) wrote a novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which also depicted blacks building a new culture after slavery. But it would still be a few years before black literature would burst into flower.

Similarly, technical innovations in both poetry and prose were just getting under way, perhaps as a reaction to the plain style of the realists and naturalists. In 1909, an American woman named Gertrude Stein, who had settled abroad in Paris, France, published an experimental work of prose called Three Lives that would influence an entire generation of younger writers. In 1912, in the major midwestern metropolis of Chicago, Harriet Monroe founded a magazine called Poetry, through the pages of which she would discover and encourage a whole group of masterful new poets. But these were still underground currents in 1914, when war broke out in Europe—a war so devastating that the entire world was swept up in it.

Suggestions for Further Reading Brooks, Van Wyck.

The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981 (cl936).

Chase, Richard.

The American Novel and Its Traditions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, (cl957).

Ellmann, Richard, ed.

The New Oxford Book of American Verse.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Litz, A. Walton, ed.

Major American Short Stories.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Parrington, Vernon L.

Main Currents in American Thought: An

Interpretation of American Literature from the

Beginnings to 1920. 3 volumes.

San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955-1958.

LITERATURE: 1914 TO 1990

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 1717