Acknowledging its background
The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)
The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This was the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and focused on the future. In its earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction written by British settlers who populated the colonies that would become the United States.
John Smith
John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the earliest works of American literature.
John Winthrop
Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.
A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain. By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. 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 Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)
Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of nature over human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849. Poe invented the modern detective story with “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).
Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)
The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the grim realities of a devastating war, they became writers’ primary mode of expression.
Samuel Clemens
Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting on politics in the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing.
Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them, particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.
The Modernist Period (1910 to 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.
The 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.
Benjamin Franklin was America’s scientist, inventor, politician, philanthropist and business man. He is best known as one of our Founding Fathers and the only one who signed all three documents that freed America from Britain: The Declaration of Independence. The American Constitution and The Treaty of Paris. Franklin was born in a middle class family on January 17, 1706 in the City of Boston, he was the 15th of 17 children and the youngest son. With only 2 years of formal education he rose to the highest level of society. However he was rooted in reality and always acknowledging his background and, as in the opening of his will and testament, referring himself as “B.F. of Philadelphia, Printer”. He had the talent of being at ease with any company, from tradesmen to scholars, merchants and the European elite.
When I was a Child of seven Years old, my Friends on a Holiday fill’d my little Pocket with Halfpence. I went directly to a Shop where they sold Toys for Children; and being charm’d with the Sound of a Whistle that I met by the way, in the hands of another Boy, I voluntarily offer’d and gave all my Money for it. When I came home, whistling all over the House, much pleas’d with my Whistle, but disturbing all the Family, my Brothers, Sisters & Cousins, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth, & laught at me so much for my Folly that I cry’d with Vexation; and the Reflection gave me more Chagrin than the Whistle gave me Pleasure. As I grew up, came into the World, and observed the Actions of Men, I thought I met many who gave too much for the Whistle. If I knew a Miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable Living, all the Pleasure of doing Good to others, for the sake of Accumulating Wealth, Poor Man, says I, you pay too much for your Whistle. When I saw a beautiful sweet-temper’d Girl, marry’d to an ill-natured Brute of a Husband; What a Pity, says I, that she should pay so much for a Whistle! In short, I conceiv’d that great Part of the Miseries of Mankind, were brought upon them by the false Estimates they had made of the Value of Things, and by their giving too much for the Whistle.
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