AMERICAN

LITERATURE
Prepared by
Mr. Paul Michael Perez
Timeline of the American Literature
Five Periods:
• The Colonial and Early National Period (17th
Century-1830)
• The Romantic Period (1830-1870)
• Realism and Naturalism (1870-1910)
• The Modernist Period (1910-1945)
• Postmodernism/Contemporary Period
(1945-present)
The Colonial and Early National Period (17th Century-1830)

• As early as 1600, the first European settlers of North America wrote about their
experiences starting. This was considered the earliest American literature and was
characterized as practical, straightforward, often derivative of the Great Britain literature,
and future-centered.

• The American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction written by British settlers
who occupied the continent that was discovered by Christopher Columbus, which would
later on become the United States of America.

• When the United States declared its independence in 1776, much new writing addressed
the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was
being published overseas in Great Britain.

• A truly American literature began to emerge by the first decades of the 19th century.
Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels
published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and
explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner.
The Colonial and Early National Period (17th Century-1830)

Histories of Virginia (1608 and 1624) by John Smith (died 1631) - this account was written
based on his life experiences as an English explorer and president of the Jamestown Colony.

Nathaniel Ward (c. 1578-1672) and John Winthrop (1588-1649; right photo) wrote books on
religion, which focused about the colonial America.

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) - this
was said to be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it
was published in England.

The Federalist Papers (between 1787 and 1788) by Alexander Hamilton (1755/57-1804),
James Madison (1751-1836), and John Jay (1745-1829)- this greatly influenced the political
direction of the United States.

Autobiography (between 1770’s and 1780s) by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) (basically

telling his American life story)

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) by Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784; right
photo), an African woman enslaved in Boston - the first African American book.

Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was another notable poet and journalist of the era.
The Colonial and Early National Period (17th Century-1830)

The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown (1765-1793) - the

first American novel

The Interesting Narrative (1789), an autobiography by Olaudah Equiano

(1745-1797) - one of the earliest slave narratives and a forceful
argument for abolition

Washington Irving (1783-1859) published the collection of short stories

and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20). It
included The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, two of the
earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrote novels of adventure about

the fictional frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the
Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the
American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.
The Romantic Period (1830-1870)

• Romanticism is a way of thinking that emphasizes and embraces individualism and a

person’s emotional experience over reason. This also shows appreciation of the wildness
of nature over human-made order. A worldwide view which emerged in the Western
Europe in the late 18th century, the Americans embraced romanticism in the early 19th
century.

• In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after
1830, each exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American
society.

• The Transcendentalists also emerged during this era. They developed an elaborate
philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified whole. Transcendentalists’ concepts
include: a) Nature is the Truth; b) Nature is God and God is Nature; and c) be self-reliant
and stand up for what you believe.

• During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by
and about enslaved and free African Americans were written.
The Romantic Period (1830-1870)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 1849), one of the well-known and genius writers of the Romantic
period. He was often tormented and struggled against writing conventions—during the 1830s
and up to his mysterious death. His works include:
● The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) - a detective story
● The Raven (1845) - a poem about a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is
intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme.
● Horror short story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
● Horror short story The Cask of Amontillado (1846)

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose
to depict everyday life in the Northeast.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882; top left photo) and Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809-1894; bottom left photo) were the most prominent of the upper-class Brahmins, who
filtered their depiction of America through European models and sensibilities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882; right photo) wrote influential essays, while Henry David
Thoreau (1817-1872) wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by a small glacial lake
Walden Pond.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.
The Romantic Period (1830-1870)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) published short stories, most notable among them the
allegorical Young Goodman Brown (1835). He crossed paths with the Transcendentalists in the
1840s before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was
also a strong influence on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s
early life of traveling and writing.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused
the traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse, and his frankness in
subject matter and tone repelled some critics. His book Leaves of Grass (1855) became a
landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.

William Wells Brown (1814?-1884) published Clotel (1853) which is considered the first Black
American novel. He also wrote The Escape (1858), the first African American play to be
published.

In 1859, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911; left photo) and Harriet E. Wilson
(1828?-1863?) became the first black women to publish fiction in the United States.
The Romantic Period (1830-1870)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (serially published 1851-1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896), is credited with raising opposition in the North to slavery.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886; photo below) lived a life quite unlike other writers
of the Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion. Only a handful of her
poems were published before her death, and she was a woman working at a
time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a
Romantic vision, and are also sharp-edged and emotionally intense. Five of
her notable poems are:
● I’m Nobody! Who are you?
● Because I could not stop for Death
● My Life had stood –a Loaded Gun
● A Bird, came down the Walk
● Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
Realism and Naturalism (1870-1910)

• The Civil War in the United States caused an immense human cost. The said was had
recorded that more than 2.3 million soldiers fought in the war. As a result of it, an
estimated number of 851,000 people died in the years 1861 to 1865.

• Realism became the literary movement of most writers. The literature that had
emerged in the following decades was characterized by its detailed, realistic, and
unembellished vision of the world as it truly was.

• Naturalism is also a literary movement that emerged during the period but this was
distinctly marked with an intensified form of realism. This movement had drawn
inspiration from 19th century French who sought to document, through fiction, the reality
that they saw around them, and particularly centered on the middle-class and working
class who were living in cities.

• After the Civil War, writing has become the means of self-expression of the Americans.
Realism and Naturalism (1870-1910)

Samuel Clemens (pseudonym: “Mark Twain;” 1835-1910) was a

typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer
before he became a writer in 1863. His celebrated short story The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865) made him
famous. Twain deployed his writing style marked with humor and
realism about American people. Some of his notable works include:
● The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
● The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
● The Innocents Abroad (1869)
● Roughing It (1872)
● Life on the Mississippi (1883)
● Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn (1880)
● The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899)
Realism and Naturalism (1870-1910)

Sister Carrie (1900), a work by naturalist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

is the most important American naturalist novel.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of

Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane (1871-1900; top right photo), and
McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank
Norris (1870-1902; bottom right photo), are novels that vividly depict
the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.

African-American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) wrote

poetry in black dialect such as “Possum” and “When de Co’n Pone’s
Hot” that were popular with his White audience and gave them what
they believed was reality for Black Americans. Dunbar also wrote
poems not in dialect such as “We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy”
that exposed the reality of racism in America during Reconstruction
and afterward.
Realism and Naturalism (1870-1910)

Henry James (1843-1916) had the same views with the

realists and naturalists but his writing style and use of
literary form created an aesthetic experience aside from
merely documenting the truth. His writing shows
features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism
and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable novels
are:
● The American (1877)
● The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
● What Maisie Knew (1897)
● The Wings of the Dove (1902)
● The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Modernist Period (1910-1945)

• Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the 20th
century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress.

• The devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering in
Europe and the United States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling within
modernism, a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But
this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and
beliefs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period
proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American literature.
•
• A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be
centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward
civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the
prospect of change.

• Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century.
Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and
enduringly American.
The Modernist Period (1910-1945)

The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940; left photo))- skewered the American
Dream

Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright (1908-1960) - exposed and attacked American racism.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
- articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great
Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

William Faulkner (1897-1962) used his stream-of-consciousness technique in writing

monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound
and the Fury (1929).

Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck (1902-1968)-
depicted the realistically difficult lives of migrant workers who belong to the working class.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965; right photo) was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by
choice. His fragmentary, multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist
poem, but his was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.
The Modernist Period (1910-1945)

Robert Frost (1874-1963) and Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) evocatively described

the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.

The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937) produced a rich oterie of poets, among

them Countee Cullen (1903-1946), Langston Hughes (1902?-1967), Claude
McKay (1889-1948), and Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875-1935).

Harriet Monroe (1860-1936) founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and

made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but
for the English-speaking world.

During the 1920s, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Marianne Moore
(1887-1972), and E.E. Cummings (1892-1964) expressed a spirit of revolution
and experimentation in their poetry.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston - tells the story
of a Black woman’s three marriages.
The Modernist Period (1910-1945)

Long Day’s Journey into Night (written 1939–1941, performed

1956) by American playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) -
this was the high point of more than 20 years of his creativity
that began with Beyond the Horizon (1920) and concluded
with The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946).

During the 1930s, Lillian Hellman, (1905-1984), Clifford Odets

(1906-1963), and Langston Hughes (1902?-1967) wrote plays
that exposed injustice in America.

In his writings, Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) presented an

influential and realistic vision of small-town America in Our
Town (first produced in 1938).
Postmodernism/Contemporary Period (1945 to Present)

• The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the
Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics for more than four
decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just
some of the influences shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century.

• The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil rights
movement and the women’s movement. Prior to the last decades of the 20th century, American
literature was largely the story of dead White men who had created Art and of living White men doing
the same.

• By the turn of the 21st century, American literature had become a much more complex and inclusive
story grounded on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by
people of different backgrounds and open to more Americans in the present day.

• During the Post-War period, the American novels had taken several forms. Writers and writings
varied and were classified as realist, metafictional, post-modern, absurdist, autobiographical,
short, long, fragmentary, feminist, stream of consciousness—these and dozens more labels.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Period (1945 to Present)

African Americans’ literary contributions was shaped in many ways by Richard

Wright (1908-1960), whose autobiography Black Boy (1945) was published. He left
the United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and
discrimination he faced as a Black man in America; other Black writers
working from the 1950s through the 1970s also wrestled with the desires to
escape an unjust society and to change it.

Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) - a novel about an unnamed black
man adrift in, and ignored by, America.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality
throughout his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his
most accomplished and influential.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) (first performed in 1959) - it

is a play about the effects of racism in Chicago.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) became the first African American poet to win a
Pulitzer Prize in 1950.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Period (1945 to Present)

The Black Arts movement (1960-1975) was grounded in the tenets of black
nationalism and sought to generate a uniquely black consciousness. One of those
with lasting expressions is The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm
X (1925-1965; top left photo) and Alex Haley (1921-1992; bottom left photo).

The first novel of Toni Morrison (1931-2019), The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a
writing career that would put the lives of Black women at its center. She received a
Nobel Prize in 1993.

In the 1960s, Alice Walker (born 1944) began writing novels, poetry, and short
stories that reflected her involvement in the civil rights movement.

Having a lasting influence on American poetry during this period, the Beat
movement (1950-1960) had been a short-lived movement in the history of the
evolution and development American literature. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
wrote Howl (1956), a poem that pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic
conventions that had come to dominate American poetry. Raucous, profane, and
deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for poetry during the second
half of the 20th century and beyond.
Postmodernism/Contemporary Period (1945 to Present)

In the early decades of the contemporary period, American

drama was mainly dominated by Arthur Miller (1915-2005),
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), and Edward Albee (1928-2016).
By the 1970s, the face of American drama had begun to change,
and it continued to diversify into the 21st century.
● Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) questioned the
American Dream through the destruction of its main
character.
● Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and
frustrations.
● Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered
what might have been a benign domestic situation into
something vicious and cruel.