American Literature

Introduction

Benjamin Franklin

Toni Morrison

American literature has a relatively short but colorful history. The first widely read American author was Benjamin Franklin, whose witty aphorisms and sound advice written in the yearly journal Poor Richard’s Almanack helped shape ideas of what it means to be an American. Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) was the first American to gain an international literary reputation. James Fenimore Cooper’s verbal landscapes in his Leatherstocking Tales captured the nation’s vast beauty. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson broke from poetic tradition and brought a sense of individuality to the nation’s literature. Mark Twain still captivates readers with his unique—and uniquely American—humor and insight. The modernists of the 1920s and 1930s produced such talents as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Today, writers like Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy continue to make American literature relevant and exciting.

Essential Facts

1. “A penny saved is a penny earned” and “God helps those who help themselves” are just two of Benjamin Franklin’s famous pieces of advice.
2. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is credited, in part, with igniting the Civil War and ending slavery. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln purportedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!”
3. Criticism of the United States has formed its identity as much as celebration has. The authors John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos stand out for their keen perception of U.S. society.
4. Robert Frost is the most anthologized American poet of the twentieth century.
5. American literature in the twentieth-first century continues to include more ethnically diverse authors, including Amy Tan, Alice Walker, N. Scott Momaday, and Oscar Hijuleos.