American literature

late writings described conflicts and interaction with the Indians, as seen in writings by Daniel Gookin, Alexander Whitaker, John Mason, Benjamin Church, and Mary Rowlandson. John Eliot translated the Bible into the Algonquin language.

Cotton Mather theologian and historian wrote the history of the colonies with a view to God’s activity in their midst and to connecting the Puritan leaders with the great heroes of the Christian faith. His best-known works include the Magnalia Christi Americana, the Wonders of the Invisible World and The Biblia Americana.

Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield represented the Great Awakening, a religious revival in the early 18th century that emphasized Calvinism.

William Bartram described the Southern landscape and the Indian tribes he encountered.

As the colonies moved toward independence from Britain, an important discussion of American culture and identity came from the French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, whose Letters from an American Farmeraddresses the question “What is an American?” by moving between praise for the opportunities and peace offered in the new society.

black literature, through the poet Phillis Wheatley and the slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

Samson Occom published his A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul and a popular hymnbook, Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, “the first Indian best-seller”

 

The Revolutionary period also contained political writings, including those by colonists Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, John Dickinson, and Joseph Galloway, the last being a loyalist to the crown. Two key figures were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanacand The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense and The American Crisis writings are seen as playing a key role in influencing the political tone of the time.

Revolutionary War, poems and songs such as “Yankee Doodle” and “Nathan Hale” were popular.

Major satirists included John Trumbull and Francis Hopkinson. Philip Morin Freneau also wrote poems about the War.

The first book published in North America that promoted Newton and natural theology was Mather’s The Christian Philosopher (1721)

Cadwallader Colden The History of the Five Indian Nations, published in 1727 was one of the first texts critical of the treatment of the Iroquois in upstate New York by the English.

In the post-war period, Thomas Jefferson autobiography, his Notes on the State of Virginia.

The Federalist essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jaypresented a significant historical discussion of American government organization and republican values. Fisher Ames, James Otis, and Patrick Henry are also valued for their political writings and orations.

The First American Novel

Among the first American novels are Thomas Attwood Digges‘ “Adventures of Alonso”, published in London in 1775 and William Hill Brown‘s The Power of Sympathy published in 1791.

Susanna Rowson is best known for her novel, Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, published in London in 1791. reissued in Philadelphia under the title, Charlotte Temple a seduction tale, written in the third person, which warns against listening to the voice of love and counsels resistance.

Hannah Webster Foster‘s The Coquette: Or, the History of Eliza Wharton was published in 1797 and was also extremely popular.[5] Told from Foster’s point of view and based on the real life of Eliza Whitman, the novel is about a woman who is seduced and abandoned. Eliza is a “coquette” who is courted by two very different men: a clergyman who offers her a comfortable domestic life and a noted libertine. Unable to choose between them, she finds herself single when both men get married. She eventually yields to the artful libertine and gives birth to an illegitimate stillborn child at an inn. The Coquette is praised for its demonstration of the era’s contradictory ideas of womanhood.

Charles Brockden Brown is the earliest American novelist whose works are still commonly read. He published Wieland in 1798, and in 1799 published Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn. These novels are of the Gothic genre.

The first writer to be able to support himself through the income generated by his publications alone was Washington Irving.  first major book in 1809 entitled A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty.

Of the picaresque genre, Hugh Henry Brackenridge published Modern Chivalry. Tabitha Gilman Tenney wrote Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventure of Dorcasina Sheldon in 1801; Royall Tyler wrote The Algerine Captive in 1797.

Other notable authors include:

Unique American style

Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper. Irving wrote humorous works in Salmagundi and the satire A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker(1809).

Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo (which includes The Last of the Mohicans)

Edgar Allan Poe began writing short stories – including “The Masque of the Red Death“, “The Pit and the Pendulum“, “The Fall of the House of Usher“, and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson work influenced the writers who formed the movement now known as Transcendentalism.

Thoreau wrote Walden, a memoir that urges resistance to the dictates of society. Thoreau’s writings demonstrate a strong American tendency toward individualism.

Alexis de Tocqueville‘s two-volume Democracy in America described his travels through the young nation, making observations about the relations between American politics, individualism, and community.

The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and his paper The Liberator, along with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin.