A Survey of English- American Literature

Mr. Philip G. Nonales

AMERICAN LITERATURE
A. Early American and Colonial Period to 1776
Early Literature
o American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics
(always songs) of Indian cultures. There was no written literature among the more than
500 different Indian language and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the
first Europeans arrived.
o Tribes maintained their own religions– worshipping gods, animals, plants, sacred persons.
Systems of government ranged from democracies to councils of elders to theocracies.
These tribal variations enter into the oral literature as well.
o Indians stories are characterized by the following:
 Reverence for nature as a spiritual as well as physical mother
 Nature is rendered alive and endowed with spiritual forces
 Main characters may be animals or plants, often totems associated with a tribe, group,
or individual
 Accounts of migrations and ancestors abound, as do vision or healing songs and
trickster’s tales.
o The songs of poetry, like the narratives, range from the sacred to the light and humorous.
There are lullabies, war chants, love songs, and special songs for children’s games, gambling,
various chores, magic, or dance ceremonies.
o Examples of almost every oral genre can be found in American Indian literature: lyrics,
chants, myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes, incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and
legendary histories. Certain creation stories are particularly popular.

B. The Literature of Exploration

1. Christopher Columbus the famous Italian explorer, funded by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand
and Isabella, wrote the ‘Epistola,’ printed in 1493 which recounts his voyages.
2. Captain John Smith led the Jamestown colony and wrote the famous story of the Indian
maiden, Pocahontas.
o Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American historical imagination. The
story recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter of chief Powhatan, saved Captain
Smith’s life when he was a prisoner of the chief. Later, when the English persuaded
Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them as a hostage, her gentleness, intelligence, and
beauty impressed the English and, in 1614, she married John Rolfe, an English
gentleman.
o The marriage initiated an eight-year peace between the colonists and the Indians, ensuring
the survival of the struggling new colony.

C. Colonial Period in New England

1. William Bradford (1590-1657) was elected governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony shortly after the Separatists landed.
o He was a deeply pious, self-educated man who wished to “see with his own eyes the
ancient oracles of God in their native beauty.”
o He wrote Plymouth Plantation (1651) and the first document of colonial self-governance
in the English New World, the ‘Mayflower Compact’.
2. Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) wrote the first published book of poems by an American
which was also the first American book to be published by a woman.
o She wrote long, religious poems on conventional subjects, but she is well loved for her
witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to her husband
and children.
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o She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book, The Tenth Muse Lately
Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney,
and other English poets as well.
o She often uses elaborate conceits or extended metaphors. “To My Dear and Loving
Husband” (1678) uses the oriental imagery, love theme, and idea of compassion popular
in Europe at the time but gives these a pious meaning at the poem’s conclusion.
3. Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729) was an intense, brilliant poet, teacher and minister who sailed
to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of England.
o Modest, pious, and hard working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was
discovered only in the 1930s.
o He wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval “debate,” and a 500-page
Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best works, according
to modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory Meditations.
4. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was molded by his extreme sense of duty and by the rigid
Puritan environment, which conspired to make him defend strict and gloomy Calvinism from
the forces of liberalism springing up around him. He is best known for his frightening,
powerful sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”.

D. The American Enlightenment

Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality
as the natural rights of man. Thus, the 18 th century American Enlightenment was a movement
marked by
o An emphasis on rationality rather than tradition,
o Scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and
o Representative government in place of monarchy.
1. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was America’s “first great man of letters,” who embodied
the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality.
o Writer, printer, publisher, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was the most famous
and respected private figure of his time. He was the first great self-made man in America,
a poor democrat born in an Aristocrat Age that his fine example helped to liberalize.
o Franklin’s Autobiography is, in part, another self-help book. Written to advice his son, it
covers section describing his scientific scheme of self-improvement. Franklin lists 13
virtues, some of which are temperance, silence, resolution, industry, sincerity, justice, and
moderation.
o He was an important figure at the 1787 convention at which the U.S. Constitution was
drafted. In his later years, he was president of an antislavery association. One of his last
efforts was to promote universal public education.
2. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is known for his political pamphlets. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the first three months of its publication. It is still
arousing today- “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
3. Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the poet of the American Revolution who incorporated the
new stirrings of European Romanticism in his lyric like “The Wild Honeysuckle” (1786),
which evokes a sweet-smelling native shrub. Not until the “American Renaissance” that
began in the 1820s would American poetry surpass the heights that Freneau had scaled 40
years earlier.
4. Washington Irving (1789-1859) became a cultural and diplomatic ambassador to Europe,
like Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
o With the help of friends, he was able to publish his Sketch Book (1819-1820)
simultaneously in England and America, obtaining copyright and payments in both
countries. The Sketch Book of Geoffrye Crayon (Irving’s pseudonym) contains his two
best-remembered stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hallow”.
5. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrote the Leather Stocking tales in which he
introduced his renowned character Natty Bumppo, who embodies his vision of the frontier
man as a gentleman, a Jeffersonian “natural aristocrat.”
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o Natty Bumppo is the first famous frontiersman in American literature and the literary
forerunner of countless cowboy and backwoods heroes.
o He is the idealist, upright individualist who is better than the society he protects. Poor and
isolated, yet pure, he is a touchtone for ethical values and prefigures Herman Melville’s
Billy Budd and Mark Twain Huck Finn.
6. Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) is the first African-American author who wrote of religious
themes. Just like that of Philip Freneau, her style is neoclassical.
o Among her best-known poems is “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His
Works,” which confronts white racism and asserts spiritual equality.
o Wheatley was the first to address such issues confidently in verse, as in “On Being
Brought from Africa to America”.

E. The Romantic Period, 1820-1860

o The Romantic Movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England,
France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by
publishing Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism in America coincided with the period of
national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice.
o Romantic ideas centered on art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of
nature, and metaphors of organic growth.
o Art rather than science, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored
the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay “The Poet”
(1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era,
asserts:
For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in
avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is
only half himself; the other half is his expression.
o The development of the self became a major theme: self-awareness a primary method.
The idea of “self”- which suggested selfishness to earlier generations- was redefined.
New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-realization,” “self-
expression,” “self-reliance.”
o As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology.
Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened
psychological states. The “sublime”- an effect of beauty in grandeur, produced feelings of
awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.
o Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for the most American poets and creative
essayists. Americas’ vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The
Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy.

Transcendentalists
o The Transcendentalists movement was a reaction against 18 th century rationalism and a
manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of the 19th century thought.
o The movement was based on the belief in the unity of the world and God.
o The doctrine of self- reliance and individualism develop through the belief in the
identification on the individual soul with God.
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) - had a romantic belief in intuition and flexibility.
o In his essay “Self- Reliance,” Emerson remarks: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds.”
o He calls for the birth of the American individualism inspired by nature.
o Most of his major ideas- the need for a new national vision, the used of a personal
experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation- are
suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836).
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2. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote Walden, Life in the Woods (1854), which was the
result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin
he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson.
o In Walden, Thoreau not only tests the theories of the Transcendentalism, he re-enacts the
collective American experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier.
o He also wrote “Civil Disobedience,” with its theory of the passive resistance based on the
moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws. This was an inspiration for
Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian Independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle
for the black Americans’ civil rights in the 20th century.
3. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a part-time carpenter and a man of people, whose brilliant
innovative work expressed the countries democratic spirit.
o Whitman was largely self- taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing
the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of
the English.
o His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains
“Song of Myself,” the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American.
4. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a radical individualist. She was born and spent her life in
Amherst, Massachusetts - a small Calvinist village.
 She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing
seasons of the New England countryside. She wrote 1,775 poems but only one was
published in her lifetime.
 Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than
Whitman’s. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things
with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style.
 She sometimes shows terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark
and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave.
 She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is
amazingly wide.
 Her poems are replete with odd capitalizations and dashes.

The Brahmin Poets

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was responsible for the misty, ahistorical,
legendary sense of the past that merged American and European traditions.
o He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in the European meters
“Evangeline” (1847), “The Song on Hiawatha” (1855), and “The Courtship of the Miles
Standish” (1858).
o Although conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mark the long poems,
haunting short lyrics like “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1854), “My Lost Youth”
(1855), and “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” (1880) continue to give pleasure.
2. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was a physician and professor of anatomy physiology
at Harvard. Of the Brahmin poets, he is the most versatile. His works include collections of
humorous essays (e.g., The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table, 1858), novels (Elsie Venner,
1861) biographies (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1885), and verses (The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or,
The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay).

The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Fiction

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) set his stories in Puritan New England. His greatest
novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850) has become the classic portrayal of Puritan America.
o It tells of the passionate, forbidden love affair linking a sensitive, religious young man,
the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and the beautiful townsperson, Hester Prynne.
o Set in Boston around 1650 during early Puritan colonization, the novel highlights the
Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt and confession, and spiritual
salvation.
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o In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he again returns to New England’s history. The
crumbling of the “house” refers to a family in Salem as well as to the actual structure. The
theme concerns an inherited curse and its resolution through love.
o As one critic noted, the idealistic protagonist Holgrave voices Hawthorne’s own
democratic distrust of old aristocratic families: “The truth is, that once in every half-
century, at least, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and
forget about its ancestors.”
o These themes, and his characteristic settings in Puritan colonial New England, are
trademarks of many of Hawthorne’s best-known shorter stories: “The Minister’s Black
Veil,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.”
2. Herman Melville (1819-1891) went to sea when he was just 19 years old. His interest in
sailors’ lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his early novels grew out
of his voyages.
o Melville had a wide, democratic experience and he hated tyranny and injustice.
o His first book, Typee, was based on his time spent among the supposed cannibalistic but
hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific.
o Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is Melville’s masterpiece. It is the epic story of the whaling
ship Pequod and its “ungodly, god-like man,” Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for
the white whale Moby-Dick, leads the ship and its men to destruction. It is realistic
adventure novel that contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling,
throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic
catalogues and descriptions of whales and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but
these carry symbolic connotations. In chapter 15, “The Right Whale’s Head,” the narrator
says that the Right Whale is a Stoic and the Sperm Whale is a Platonian, referring to two
classical schools of philosophy.
3. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1949) refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction.
o Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular
today.
o His famous works are “The Cask of Amontillado,” “include Masque of the Red Death,”
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Purloined Letter,” and the “Pit and the Pendulum.”
o He also wrote poetry like “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and “The Bell.”
4. Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883) epitomized the endurance of the women reformers.
o Born a slave in New York, she escaped from the slavery in 1827, settling with a son and
daughter in the supportive Dutch-American Van Wagener family, for whom she worked
as a servant.
o She worked with a preacher to convert prostitutes to Christianity and lived in a
progressive communal home. She was christened “Sojourner Truth” for the mystical
voices and visions she began to experience. To spread the truth of these visionary
teachings, she sojourned alone, lecturing, singing gospel songs, and preaching
abolitionism through many states over three decades.
5. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
which became the most popular American book of the 19 th century. Its passionate appeal for
an end to slavery in the United States inflamed the debate that, within a decade, led to us the
U.S. Civil War (1861-1865).
o Uncle Tom, the slave and the central character, is a true Christian martyr who labors to
convert his kind master, St. Clare, prays for St. Clare’s soul as he dies, and is killed
defending slave women.
o Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons but mainly because it
divides families, destroys normal parental love, and is inherently un-Christian.

F. The Rise of Realism: 1860-1914

1. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910)
o Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the
Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri.
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o Ernest Hemingway’s famous statement that all of American literature comes from one
great book, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author’s towering
place in the tradition.
o Twain’s style is vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a
new appreciation of their national voice.
o Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a
story of death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for
Huck; in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of his slave-
owning society. It is Jim’s adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities of human
nature and give him moral courage.
2. Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remembered as a local colorist and author of adventurous stories
such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” set along the
Western mining frontier.
3. Henry James (1843-1916) wrote that art, especially literary art, “makes life, makes interest,
and makes importance.”
o With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest American novelist of the second
half of the 19th century.
o James is noted for his “international theme” --- that is, the complex relationships between
naive Americans and cosmopolitan Europeans, which he explored in the novels The
American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881).
4. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) descended from a wealthy family in New York society and saw
firsthand the decline of this cultivated group and, in her view, the rise of boorish, nouveau-
riche business families. This social transformation is the background of many of her novels.
o The core of her concern is the gulf separating social reality and the inner self. Often a
sensitive character feels trapped by unfeeling characters or social forces.
o Edith Wharton had personally experienced such entrapment as a young writer suffering a
long nervous breakdown partly due to the conflict in roles between writer and wife.
o Wharton’s best novels include The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country
(1913), Summer (1917), The Age of Innocence (1920), and the beautifully crafted novella
Ethan Frome (1911).
5. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and
plays.
o Crane saw a life at it’s awest, in slums and on battlefields. His short stories- in particular,
“The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”- exemplified
that literary form.
o He wrote a haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage which was published in
1895, before he died, at 29, having neglected his health.
o Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the best, if not the earliest,
naturalistic American novels. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl
whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love and eager her violent home
life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her.
When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but
soon commits suicide out of despair.
o Crane’s earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing,
earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.
6. Jack London (1876-1916) is naturalist who set his collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf
(1900), in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. His best-sellers The Call
of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) made him the highest paid writer in the United
States of his time.
7. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) his 1925 work An American Tragedy, explores the dangers
of the American Dream.
o The novel relates, in great detail, the life of Clyde Griffiths, who grows up in great
poverty in a family of wandering evangelists, but dreams of wealth and the love of
beautiful women.
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o An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that afflicted
many poor and working people in America’s competitive, success-driven society. As
American industrial power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy in newspapers and
photographs sharply contrasted with the drab lives of ordinary farmers and city workers.
o Muckraking novels used eye-catching journalistic techniques to depict harsh working
conditions and oppression. Populist Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) exposed big
railroad companies, while socialist Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) painted the
squalor of the Chicago meat-packing houses. Jack London’s dystopia The Iron Heel
(1908) anticipates George Orwell’s 1984 in predicting a class war and the takeover of the
government.
8. Willa Cather (1873-1947) grew up on the Nebraska prairie among pioneering immigrants-
later immortalized in O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), and her well-known story
“Neighbour Rosicky” (1928).
o During her lifetime, she became increasingly alienated from the materialism of modern
life and wrote alternative visions in the American Southwest and in the past.
o Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) evokes the idealism of two 16 th-century priests
establishing the Catholic Church in the New Historian desert.
9. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was a poet, historian, biographer, novelist, musician, essayist,
but a journalist by profession.
o To many, Sandburg was a latter-day Walt Whitman, writing expansive, evocative urban
and patriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes and ballads.
o He travelled about reciting and recording his poetry, in a lilting, mellifluously toned
voiced that was a kind of singing. At heart, he was totally unassuming, notwithstanding
his national fame. What he wanted from life, he once said, was “to be out of jail …to eat
regular …to get what I write printed, …a little love at home and a little nice affection
hither and yon over the American landscape, …(and) to sing every day.”
10. Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1g935) is the best U.S. poet of the late 19 th century.
Unlike Masters, Robinson uses traditional metrics. Robinson’s imaginary Tilbury Town, like
Masters’s Spoon River, contains lives of quiet desperation.
o Some of the best known of Robinson’s dramatic monologues are “Luke Havergal”
(1896), about forsaken lover; “Miniver Cheevy” (1910), a portrait of a romantic dreamer,
and “Richard Cory”(1896), a somber portrait of a wealthy man who commits suicide.

G. Modernism and Experimentation: 1914-1945

1. Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United
States’ traumatic “coming of age,” despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively
brief (1917-1918).
2. John Dos Passos expressed America’s postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers
(1921), when he noted that civilization was a “vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its
crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression.”
3. In the postwar “Big Boom,” business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their
wildest dreams. The middle-class prospered.
4. Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in love with other modern entertainments. Dancing
movie-going, automobile touring and radio were national crazes. American women, in
particular, felt liberated.
5. Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of
evolution) became popular.
6. Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans of
the 1920s were “the lost generation”- so named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein.
Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity.
7. The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States.
Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable
to harvest, transport or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms.
8. In literature-
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o Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No
longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use
a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the
story itself.
oHenry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with
fictional points of view (some are still doing so). James often restricted the information in
the novel to what s single character would have known. Faulkner’s novel The Sound and
the Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a
different character (including a mentally retarded boy).
oTo analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of “new criticism” arouse in the
United States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted the “epiphany”
(moment in which a character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, a term
derived from a holy saint’s appearance to mortals); they “examined” and “clarified” a
work, hoping to “shed light” upon it through their “insights.”

H. Poetry (1914-1945) Experiments in Form

1. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was one of the most influential American poets of this century.
o Pound’s interest and reading were universal. His adaptations and brilliant, if sometimes
flawed, translations introduced new literary possibilities from many cultures to modern
writers.
o His life-work was The Cantos, which he wrote and published until his death. They
contain brilliant passages, but their allusions to works of literature and art from many eras
and cultures make them difficult.
o Pound’s poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh rhythms, and muscular,
intelligent, unusual lines, such as, in Canton LXXXI, “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon
world,” or in poems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as “In a Station of the Metro”
(1916):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
2. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the importance
of literary and social tradition for the modern poet. He received the best education of any
major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton
College of Oxford University.
o He studied Sanskrit and Oriental Philosophy, which influence his poetry.
o Like his friend Pound, he went to England early and became a towering figure in the
literary world there.
o As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the “objective correlative,”
which he described, in The Sacred Wood, as a means of expressing emotion through “a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that would be the “formula” of that particular
emotion.
o Poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) embody this approach,
when the ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks to himself that he has “measured out his life
in coffee spoons,” using coffee spoons to reflect a humdrum existence and a wasted
lifetime.
3. Robert Frost (1874-1963) read an original work at the inauguration of President John F.
Kennedy in 1961 that helped spark a nation interest in poetry.
o He wrote of tradition farm life, appealing to nostalgia for the old ways.
o His subjects are universal- apple picking, stone walls, fences, country roads.
o He rarely employed pedantic allusions or ellipses. And he combines sound and sense in
his frequents use of rhythm that also appealed to the general audience.
o Frost’s work is often deceptively simple. Many poems suggest a deeper meaning. For
example, a quiet snow evening by an almost hypnotic rhythms scheme may suggest the
not entirely unwelcome approach of death.
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4. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a double life, one as an insurance business executive, and
another as a renowned poet. His associates in the insurance company did not know that he
was a major poet.
o Some of his best known poems are “Sunday Morning,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,”
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “The Idea
of Order at Key West.”
o Stevens’s poetry dwell upon themes of the imagination, the necessity for aesthetic form,
and the belief that the order or not art corresponds with an order in nature. His vocabulary
is rich and various: He paints lush tropical scenes but also manages dry, humorous, and
ironic vignettes.
o Some of Stevens’s poems draw upon popular culture, while other poke fun at
sophisticated society or soar into an intellectual heaven. He is known for his exuberant
word play: “Soon, with a noise like tambourines/ Came her attendant Byzantines.”
5. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) championed the use of colloquial speech; his ear for
the natural rhythms of American English helped free American poetry from the iambic meter
that had dominated English verse since the renaissance.
o His sympathy for ordinary working people, children, and every day events in modern
urban setting make his poetry attractive and beauty in everyday objects.
o Williams cultivate a relaxed, natural poetry was to capture an instant of time like an
unopposed snapshot- a concept he derived from photographers and artists he met at
galleries like Stieglitz’s in New York City.
o He termed his work “objectivist” to suggest the importance of concrete, visual objects.
His work often captured the spontaneous, emotive pattern of experience, and influenced
the “Beat” writing of the early 1950s.
6. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), commonly known as e. e. cummings, wrote
attractive, innovate verse distinguished for its humor, grace, celebration of experimentation
with punctuation and visual format on the page.
o A painter, he was the first American poet to recognize that poetry had become primarily a
visual, not an oral, art;
o His poems used much unusual spacing and indention, as well as dropping all use of
capital letters.
o He used colloquial language and took creative liberties with layout. For instance, his
poem “In Just” (1920) invites the reader to fill in the missing ideas.
7. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a talented poet of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
o He embraced African- American jazz rhythms and was one of the first black writers to
attempt to make a profitable career out of his writing.
o Hughes incorporated blues, spirituals, colloquial speech, and folkways in his poetry.

I. Prose Writing, 1914-1945: American Realism

1. F. Scoot Fitzgerald (1896-1940) in known for his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a
brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made
man.
o The protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in
terms of personal fulfillment and love.
o Tender Is the Night (1934) talks of a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his
marriage to an unstable woman.
o The Beautiful and the Dammed (1922) continued to explore the self-destructive
extravagance of his times.
2. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) the most popular American novelist of this century. His
sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense, he is universal.
o The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who
heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the
next year, he received the Nobel Prize.
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o Discouraged by a troubled family background, illness, and him the belief that he was
losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in 1961.
o Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the “lost generation” of cynical survivors. His
characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual,
they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.
3. William Faulkner (1897-1961) experimented with narrative chronology, different points of
view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and
demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complication subordinate
parts.
o Created an imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in numerous
novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations.
o His best works include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two
modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families
under the stress of losing a family member;
o Faulkner’s themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the
past, race, and the passions of ambition and love.
4. Sinclair Lewis (1885-1952) became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1930.
o Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) satirized monotonous, hypocritical small-town life in
Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. His incisive presentation of American life and his criticism of
American materialism, narrowness, and hypocrisy brought him national and international
recognition.
o In 1926, he was offered and declined a Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925), a novel
tracing doctor’s efforts to maintain his medical ethics amid greed and corruption.
5. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) combines realism with romanticism that finds virtue in poor
farmers who live close to the land.
o Steinbeck set much of his writing in the Salinas Valley near San Francisco.
o His fiction demonstrates the vulnerability of such people, who can be uprooted because of
political unrest and economic depression.
o He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963.
o His best-known is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which
follows the travails of a poor Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the depression
and travels to California to seek work. Family members suffer conditions of feudal
oppression by rich landowners.
6. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an outwardly exemplary life, attending Smith College on
scholarship, graduating first in her class, and winning a Fulbright grant to Cambridge
University in England.
o She married poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had two children and settled in a country
house in England.
o Unresolved psychological problems, clearly reflected in her novel The Bell Jar (1963),
ruined her life.
o Some of these problems were personal, while others arose from repressive 1950s attitudes
toward women. Among these were the belief – shared by most women themselves – that
women should not show anger or ambitiously pursue a career, and instead find fulfillment
in tending their husbands and children.
o According to Robert Lowell, “Plath’s early poetry is well-crafted and traditional, but her
late poems exhibit a desperate bravura and proto-feminist cry of anguish.”
7. Richard Wright (1908-1960) was born into a poor Mississippi sharecropping family that his
father desert when the boy was five.
o He was the first African- American novelist to reach a general audience, even though he
had barely a ninth grade education.
o His harsh childhood is depicted in one of his best books, his autobiography, Black Boy
(1945).
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o He later said that his sense later said that his sense of deprivation, due to racism, was so
great that only reading kept him alive.
o His outspoken writing blazed a path for subsequent African- American novelists.
8. Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) is known as one of the lights of the Harlem Renaissance.
She first came to New York City at the age of 16- having arrived as parts of a travelling
theatrical troupe.
o She uses colorful language in comic or tragic stories from the African- American oral
tradition.
o Hurston was an impressive novelist. Her most important work, Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937), is a moving, fresh depiction of a beautiful mulatto woman’s
maturation and renewed happiness as she moves through three marriages.
o A forerunner of the women’s movement, Hurston inspired and influenced such
contemporary writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison through books such as her
autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).

J. 20th Century American Drama

1. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is the first American playwright to be honored with the Nobel
Prize for literature in 1936.
o O’Neill’s earliest dramas concern the working class and poor, but his later works explore
subjective realms, such as obsessions, sex and other Freudian themes.
o His play Desire under the Elms (1924) recreates the passions hidden within one family.
o The Great God Brown (1926), a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces the tangled loves of
one woman.
o O’Neill continued to explore the Freudian pressures of love and dominance within
families in a trilogy of plays collectively entitled Mourning Becomes Electra (1931),
based on the classical Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles.
2. Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is known for his plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our
Teeth (1942), and for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927).
o Our Town has all the elements of sentimentality and nostalgia- the archetypal traditional
small country town, the kindly parents and mischievous children, the young lovers.
o It shows Wilder’s innovative elements such as ghosts, voices from the audience, and
daring time shifts.
3. Arthur Miller (1915) - is New York-born dramatist, novelist, essayist, and biographer.
o Arthur Miller reached his personal pinnacle in 1949 with Death of a Salesman, a study of
man’s search for merit and worth in his life and the realization that failure invariably
looms.
o Miller also wrote All My Sons (1947) and The Crucible (1953) which are both political
satires.
4. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) focused on disturbed emotions and unresolved sexuality
within families- most of them southern.
o He was known for incantatory repetitions, a poetic southern diction, weird Gothic
settings, and Freudian exploration of sexual desire.
o One of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams explained that
the sexuality of his tormented characters expressed their loneliness.
o Williams wrote more than 20 full-length dramas, many of them autobiographical.
o He became famous for his The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947).

K. The Affluent but Alienated 1950s

o The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology in everyday life left
over from the 1920s—before the Great Depression.
o World War II brought the United States out the Depression, and the 1950s provided most
Americans with time to enjoy long- awaited material prosperity.
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o Business, especially in the corporate world, seemed to offer the good life (usually in the
suburbs), with its real arid symbolic marks of success- house, car, television, and home
appliances.
o Loneliness at the top was dominant theme. The 1950s actually was a decade of subtle and
pervasive stress. Novels by John O’Hara, John Cheever, and John Updike explore the
stress lurking in the Shadows of seeming satisfaction.
o Some of the best works portray men who fail in the struggle to succeed, as in Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day (1956).
o Some writers went further by following those who dropped out, as did J.D. Salinger in
The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952), and Jack Kerouac
in On the Road (1957.
o Philip Roth arrived with a series of short stories reflecting his own alienation from his
Jewish heritage (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959).
o The fiction of American Jewish writers Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Isaac Bashevis
Singer- are most noted for their humor, ethical concern, and portraits of Jewish
communities in the Old and New Worlds.
1. Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1984) is known for his one highly-acclaimed book the Invisible
Man (1952).
o The story of a black man who lives a subterranean existence in a hole brightly illuminated
by electricity stolen from a utility company. The book recounts his grotesque,
disenchanting experiences.
o The novel attacks society for falling to provide its citizens-black and white- with viable
ideals and institutions for realizing them.
o It embodies a powerful racial theme because the “invisible man” is invisible not in
himself but because others, blinded by prejudice, cannot see him for who he is.
2. Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) created fiction organized around a single narrator
telling the story from a consistent point of view.
o Her first success, the story “Flowering Judas” (1929), was set in Mexico during the
revolution.
o Often she reveals women’s inner experiences and their dependence on men.
o Porter’s story collection includes Flowering Judas (1930), Noon Wine (1937), Pale Horse,
Pale Rider (1939), The Learning Tower (1944), and Collected Stories (1956).
o Though not a prolific writer, Porter nonetheless has influenced other writers like Eudora
Welty and Flannery O’Connor.
3. Eudora Welty (1909)-was born in Mississippi to a well-to-do family of transplanted
northerners.
o Welty modeled after Katherine Ann Porter, but she is more interested in the comic and
grotesque characters.
o Like the late Flannery O’Connor, she often takes subnormal, eccentric, or exceptional
characters for subjects.
o Her much-anthologized work “Why I work at the P.O.,” shows a stubborn and
independent daughter who moves out of her house to live in a tiny post office.
o Her collections of stories include The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), The
Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), and Moon Lake (1980). Welty has also written novels
such as Delta Wedding (1946), which is focused on a plantation family in modern times,
and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972).
4. Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) lived a life cut short by lupus, a deadly blood disease.
o Still, she refused sentimentality, as evident in her extremely humorous yet bleak and
uncompromising stories.
o Unlike Porter, Welty, and Hurston, O’Connor most often held her characters at arm’s
length, revealing their inadequacy and silliness.
o The uneducated southern characters that people her novels often create violence through
superstition or religion, as we see in her novel Wise Blood (1952), about a religious
fanatic who establishes his own church.
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o The black humor of O’Connor links her with Nathanael West and Joseph Heller. Her
works include short story collections (A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965); the novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960);
and a volume of letters, The Habit of Being (1979). Her Complete Stories came out in
1971.
5. Soul Below (1915-) is of Russian-Jewish background. In college, he studied anthropology
and sociology, which greatly influence his writing even today.
o He has expressed a profound debt to Theodore Dreiser for his openness to a wide range of
experience.
o He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976.
o Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) is a brilliant novella often used as part of the high school
or college curriculum because of its excellence and brevity. It centers on a failed
businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, who tries to hide his feelings of inadequacy by presenting
a good front. The novella begins ironically: “when it came to concealing his troubles,
Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought…”
o Seize the Day sums up the fear of failure that plagues many Americans.
6. J.D. Salinger (1919- ) achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel The
Catcher in the Rye (1951).
o The novel centers on sensitive 16-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding
school for the outside world of adulthood, only to became disillusioned by its materialism
and phoniness.
o When asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers “the catcher in the rye,” In his
vision, he is a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of innocence.
o His other works include Nine Stories (1953), Fanny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High
the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1963), a collection of stories from The New Yorker.
7. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was the son of an impoverished French-Canadian family; Jack
Kerouac also questioned the values of middle-class life.
o Kerouac’s best- known novel, On the Road (1957), describes “beatniks” wandering
through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty.
o The Dharma Bums (1958) also focuses on peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and
their infatuation with Zen Buddhism.
o Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City Blues (1959), and volumes about his
life with such beatniks as experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet Allen
Ginsberg.
8. John Barth (1930- ) is more interested in how a story is told than in the story itself. Barth
entices his audience into a carnival fun-house full of distorting mirrors that exaggerated some
features while minimizing others.
o Realism is his enemy. Many of his earlier works were in fact existential.
o In Lost in the Funhouse (1968), 14 stories those constantly refer to the processes of
writing and reading. Barth’s intent is to alert the reader to the artificial nature of reading
and writing, and to prevent him or her from being drawn into the story as if it were real.
9. Norman Mailer (1923- ) follows in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway. His ideas are bold
and innovative.
o He is the reverse of a writer like Barth, for whom the subject is not as important as the
way it is handled. Unlike the invisible Pynchon, Mailer constantly courts and demands
attention.
o A novelist, essayist, sometime politician, literary activist, and occasional actor, he is
always on the scene. From such “New Journalism” exercises as Miami and the Siege of
Chicago (1968), an analysis of the 1968 U.S. presidential conventions, and his
compelling study about the execution of a condemned murderer, The Executioner’s Song
(1979), he has turned to writing such ambitious, heavyweight novels as Ancient Evenings
(1983), set in the Egypt of antiquity, and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), revolving around the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
10. Toni Morrison (1931- ) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
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o She treats the complex identities of black people in a universal manner. In her early work
The Bluest Eye (1970), a strong-willed young black girl tells the story of Pecola
Breedlove, who survives an abusive father. Pecola believes that her dark eyes have
magically become blue, and that they will make her lovable.
o Some of her novels include: Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981) and
Beloved (1987).
11. Alice Walker (1944- ) is an African-American and the child of a sharecropper family in rural
Georgia, graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where one of her teacher was the
politically committed female poet Muriel Rukeyser.
o Walker uses heightened, lyrical realism to center on the dreams and failures of accessible,
credible people.
o Her work underscores the quest for dignity in human life. A fine stylist, particularly in her
epistolary dialect novel The Color Purple, her work seeks to educate. In this, she
resembles the black American novelist Ishmael Reed, whose satires expose social
problems and racial issues.
o Walker’s The Color Purple is the story of the love between two poor black sisters that
survives a separation over years, interwoven with the story of how, during that same
period, the shy, ugly, and uneducated sister discovers her inner strength through the
support of a female friend. The theme of the support women give each other recalls Maya
Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), which celebrates the
mother-daughter connection, and the work of white feminists such as Adrienne Rich.