Part 1 The Colonial period 1650-1765

POLITICS AND SOCIETY LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

160 First permanent British sectlement
7 in Jamestown, Virginia.
161 John SMITH: A Description of New England.
6
162 Pilgrim Fathers found Plymouth
0 Colony.
162 John SMITH: General History of Virginia.
4
163 Beginning of the great migration Beginning of John VWINTHROP's Journat
0 of Puritans to Massachusetts. and of William BRADFORD's History of
Boston founded. Plymouth Plantation.
163 First American public school in
5 Boston.
163 Roger Williams founds
6 Providence.
Harvard college founded
164 Bay Psalm Book (first book published in the
0 Colonies).
165 Anne BRADSTREET: The Tenth Muse
0 (published in London).
165 First Quakers in Massachusetts.
6
166 Michael WIGGLESWORTH: Day of Doom.
2
166 New Amsterdam (New York)
4 taken from the Dutch.
167 Marquette and Jolliet explore
3 Mississippi River region.
167 King Philip's ar overcomes Indian
5 resistance.
167
6
168 La Salle descends Mississippi to Mary RowLANDSON: Narrative of Captivity.
2 Gulf of Mexico. William Penn
founds Philadelphia for Quakers.
168 New England Primer.
3
169 First newspaper in Boston.
0
169 Plymouth Colony absorbed by
1 Massachusetts.
169 Salem witch trials.
2
170 French settlement at Detroit Yale
1 College founded.
170 Cotton MATHER: Magnalia Christi
2 Americana. College of William and Mary
designed by Sir Christopher Wren.
170 Beginning of the Boston Newsletter.
4
171 New Orleans founded by the
8 French.
172 French expansion west and south
0 of Louisbourg.
173 First art exhibition in Boston.
0
173 Benjamin FRANKLIN: Poor Richard's
2 Almanack (uncil 1757).
173 Beginning of the Great
6 Awakening (until 1756)
174 Ohio Company created.
9
175 Franklin's experiments with
2 electricity.
175 Beginning of the French and Jonathan EDWARDS: Freedom of Will
4 Indian War.
176 First musical society in South Carolina
1
176 End of the war: Treaty of Paris.
3
Literature and Society
One consequence of Puritanism and its powerful ministry is often thought to be hostility
to the arts . Yet the paradox is that New England was perhaps the most significant centre
of artistic creation in the colonial period . In the end , this is not surpris ing , given the
bookishness of the Puritan colonies the strength of an educated ministry , and the preoc
cupation with typology and with writing the provi dential record . Puritanism , certainly ,
had been protest against elaboration in English Protestantism and it maintained a similar
standard in the matter of cultural expression : the important issue was " use the social
and religious value of artistic expression Yet this could be resolved : indeed , the
typologizing disposition , and the concern with conscience and self - knowledge , led to
a serious exploration of writ ten forms . Indeed , even the criterion of " use " some times
seems perfunctory . It was a common Puritan practice to anagrammatize names , the
intent be ing didactic and moral , an eliciting of providential meanings . But the
anagrams were clearly enjoyed with a metaphysical and cryptogrammatic satisfaction
Similarly , Nathaniel Ward ( 1578-1652 ) , the author of The Simple Cobler of
Aggawam ( 1647 ) , condemned in the Puritan fashion , frivolous elaboration in women's
dress , by which ladies " disfigure themselves with such exotick garbes , as not only
dismantles their native lovely lustre , but transclouts them into gant bar - geese , ill -
shapen shotten shell - fish , Egyptian Hi eroglyphicks , or at the best into French flurts of
the pastery , which a proper Englishwoman should scorn with her heels ... " This sounds
strict , but Ward evi dently enjoys the elaboration of his own language . In an aga nf wit ,
he is conscious of wit , and he continue , charmingly : " We have about five or six of
them in our Colony : if I see any of them accidentally , I can not cleanse my phansie of
them for a month after . I have been a solitary widdower almost twelve years ... " The
Puritan imagination could generate many of the riches it seemed to condemn .

Thus aesthetic satisfactions apparently denied in one area could freely emerge
elsewhere . The theatre was.proscribed ; but theatricality is rife throughout Puritan
expression . Edward Johnson ( 1598-1672 ) produced his Wonder - Working Providence
of Sion's Saviour in New England during the 1650s ; [ ... ] it is [ ... ] an elaborately
dramatized epic , in which theemigrants are directly addressed by Christ's voice, and the
reader is specifically alerted to the symmetri- cal tableaux of the departure from
England: Passe on and attend with teares, if thou hast any, the following discourse...
both of them had their farther speech strangled from the depth of their inward dolor, with
breast-breaking sobs, till leaning their heads on each others shoulders, they let fall the
salt dropping dewa of vehement affectiona, atriving to exccede one another... And
another kind of theatricality surely accounts for part of the success of New England's
best-selling poem, Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom (1662): So at the last,
whilst Men sleep fast in their security Surpriz'd they are in such a snare as cometh
suddenly. For at midnight brake forth a Light, which turn'd the (night to day, And
speedily an hideous cry did all the world (dismay... The affective power that many
Puritan writers display was not cultivated for its own sake, though it may have been
appreciated as such. Its "use" lay in the affect on an audience - particularly, the audience
of that key form of Puritan expression, the sermon. Edward Johnson describes Thomas
Shepard, with obvious approval, as a "soule ravishing Minister". The best sermons
combine this eloquence with a highly determinate structure of doctrine and propositions,
uses and applications. The experience intended by these preachers can be defined by
contrast with their English contemporary Sir Thomas Browne, writing in Religio Medici:
"I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!" The Puritan
would not indulge the sublime, would not seek to lose himself. On the contrary, within
the articulated form of the sermon, and the process of its argument, he was always
placed. The animus against elabora- tion indeed shows in comments on early Puritan
writing. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) looked back to sermon by John Cotton, wherein
sinning more to preach Self than Christ, he used such Florid Strains, as extremely
recommended him unto the most, who relished the Wisdom of Words above the Words
of Wisdom; Though the pompous Elo- quence of that Sermon, afterwards gave such a
distaste unto his own Reverend Soul, that with a Sacred Indig- nation he threw his Notes
into the Fire...

But by the time this was written (1695) such a re- action was out of date. Cotton Mather
himself used a far more "florid" style than his father Increase or grandfather Richard.
 Verse was subject to much the same criteria as prose. It attracted no special odium, but
was widely practised as one among other forms of expression. Edward Johnson,
celebrating the death of a Puritan worthy, can break into verse as a kind of mnemonic:
"For future Remembrance of him mind this Meeter." The major poets, Anne Bradstreet
(c. 1612-1672) and Edward Taylor (c. 1642-1729), turned the procc- dures we have
described to their own advantage. Both attempted extended forms that correspond with
the rationally systematic structure of the sermons (and ultimately, by analogy, with the
providential order): Bradstreet's "Contemplations", or Taylor's "Gods De- terminations
touching his Elect". Bradstreetr wrote charming personal poems on her husband or fam-
ily which nevertheless manage the exemplary trans- formation of private feeling into
public type. Taylor, too, could typify an intimate or trivial situation, as here, through the
rhetoric of vision:

Lord cleare my misted sight that I

May hence view thy Divinity.

Some spaikes whereuf tuu up dust hasp

Within this little downy Wasp... 4 The Colonial Perlod

Leaving England after the Restoration, Taylor continued the witty and meditative
tradition of Eng- lish Metaphysical poetry in a Puritan context. The Preface to "Gods
Determinations" shows some of his range, from typically curious and intricate detail:
Who Lac'd and Fillitted the earth so fine, With Rivers like green Ribbons Smaragdine?
[emerald]

Who made the Sea's its Selvedge [border], and it locks Like a Quilt Ball within a silver
Box? Who spread its Canopy? Or curtains Spun? Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the
Sun? - to close verbal play on just two words, making it "all" out of nearly "nothing": ol!
wlaat a miglıt is this! winsc single frowu Doth shake the world as it would shake it
down? Which All from Nothing [fetched], from Nothing, AlL Hath All on Nothing set,
lets Nothing fall. Gave All to nothing Man indeed, whereby Through nothing man all
might him Glorify. The complexity of the Puritan mind led, in fact, not to a denial of art,
but to a set of complex typo- logical, symbolistic and metaphysical usages which passed
on into the American literature of later times.

E CRASNOW and P HAFFENDEN, in Introduction to American Studies. Longman M.

Bradbury and H. Temperley, 1981.
Major Trends in Literature
The most typical forms of Puritan literature are historical works, biographies, sermons
and poetry.

Historical works

They aimed at recording the life of the Puritans, their journey to America, and the major
events, as well as the everyday chronicle, of their life in the New World. Therefore, they
often much resemble mere annals. A few major works of this type: William
BRADFORD, History of Plymouth Plantation. Edward JOHNSON, History of New
England. Cotton MATHER, Magnalia Christi Americana. Underlying all these writings,
one always finds the idea of Providence; the world which is described is always seen as
a reflection of the divine order so that constant analogies are drawn between the beauty
of nature and the skill of the Architect who created it.

Biographies and Diaries

These were important works for the Puritans in so far as they constituted the best way of
Illustrating the working of grace in men. As P. MILLER and T. JOHNSON explain in
their book, The Puritans, "The ways of grace were manifold and no two men ever
underwent the crisis in a perfectly similar fashion; in order that we might know the
nature and manifestations of the disease, it was necessary to peruse the records of those
who had undergone it, and to keep a full medical chart upon our own pulse and
temperature. The art of biography as understood by the Puritans was the preparation of
case histories. And every man who was concerned about his own plight should take
down a daily record of his fluctuations and his symptoms, so that he could view himself
with the complete objectivity demanded for accurate diagnosis of his spiritual health or
sickness." Here are some examples of such writings: Thomas SHEPARD,
Autobiography. Increase MATHER, The Life and Death... of Richard Mather. Samuel
SEWALL, Diary.

Sermons and Theological Works

Sermons were by far the most common sort of literature in these Colonial communities
totally controlled by the church. Dozens of ministers published the sermons that they had
written, the best known being those of Nathaniel WARD, John COTTON, Thomas
HooKER, Increase and Cotton MATHER, and Jonathan EDWARDS. Meant to convince
the congregation and to be later discussed and reflected upon, they had to be clear and
well-constructed and were usually written in the plain and straightforward style which is
so often considered characteristic of Purictan writing. But the influence of the Bible
often made for eloquence and sometimes even rhetorical ingenuity and extravagance.

Poetry

In spite of the Puritans' admiration for the classics and poets like MILTON, poetry was
often distrusted for appealing too much to the senses and the imagination, so that verse
tended to be Imitative (of Virgil, Horace, Spenser, or Sidney for instance) rather than
original.

Three poets stand out, however: Anne BRADSTREET, Michael WIGGLESWORTH,

and Edward TAYLOR.
Part 2 The Rise of a National literature 1765-1865
POLITICS AND SOCIETY LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
1765 Stamp Act.
1767 Townshend Tax Acts.
1768 British troops sent to Boston.
1773 Boston Tea Party.
1775 Beginning of the war for
American Independence.
Fighting at Lexington, Concord,
Bunker Hill.
1776 Declaration of Independence. Thomas PAINE: Common Sense
1778 Alliance with France.
1781 Surrender at Yorktown.
1782 ST JOHN DE CRÈVECEUR: Letters
from an American Farmer.
1783 Treaty of Paris ends the war.
1787 Constitutional Convention Alexander HAMILTON
1788 meets in Philadelphia. James MADISON
Constitution ratified. John JAY The Federalist
1789 George Washington becomes
first US President.
1791 Bill of Rights adopted.
1794 Benjamin FRANKLIN: Autobiography.
1795 Philip FRENEAU: Poems.
1803 Louisiana Purchase
1804 . Lewis and Clark expedition.
1806
1809 Washington IRVING: The
Knickerbocker's History of New York.
1812 War with Great Britain.
1815
1817 William Cullen BRYANT: Thanatopsis.
1819 Washington IRVING: The Sketch Book.:
1823 Monroe Doctrine proclaimed James Fenimore COOPER: The
Pioneers.
1825 Thomas COLE launches the Hudson
River School.
1826 James Fenimore COOPER: The Last of
the Mohicans.
1827 J. James AUDUBON: Birds of America.
James Fenimore COOPER: The Prairle.
1833 Foundation of the American
Antislavery Society.
1836 Ralph Waldo EMERSON: Nature.
1838 Beginning of the Underground Alexis DE TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy
Ralway. in America.
1840 Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of the Grotesque.
1841 Ralph Waldo EMERSON: Essays.
1845 Annexation of Texas. Edgar Allan PoE: The Raven and Other
Poems. F. DOUGLASS: The Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
1846 War with Mexico. Henry Wadsworth LONGFELLOW:
1847 Evangeline.
1848 James Russell LOWELL: The Biglow
Papers; A Fable for Critics.
David Henry THOREAU: Civil
Disobedience.
1849 California Gold Rush.
1850 California joins the USA. Nathaniel HAWTHORNE: The Scarlet
Letter.

1851 Herman MELVILLE: Moby Dick.

Nathaniel HAWTHORNE The House of
the Seven Gables.
1852 Harriet Beecher STOWE: Uncle Tom's
Cabin.
1854 Henry David THOREAU: Walden.
1855 Walt WHITMAN: Leaves of Grass (first
 edition).
1859 John Brown's raid on Harper's
Ferry.
1860 Lincoln elected President.
1863 Secession of Southern States;
beginning of the Civil War.
1861 Emancipation Proclamation.
Surrender of Lee at
Appomattox.
1865 Abolitlon of slavery.
Assassination of Lincoln.

Literature and Society

When the American revolution broke out, there was already enough of a literary culture
in Ameria to encourage the growth of a national literature. In 1764, seven Colleges had
already be founded in the Colonies (Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, the University of
Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Brown), mainly teaching Latin, Greek, philosophy
and mathematics. Literary societies and circulating libraries were appearing everywhere
to cater to the needs of a growing reading public. And yet, the Federal period was not a
time for artistic development. The reason for the paucity of literary production is partly
to be found in the social and religious background of the time. The Enlightenment was
an age of rationality and order which saw the gradual dedine of the preceding Calvinist
beliefs. Most of the architects of the new republic were deists who believed that God
was good and could be found in the contemplation of the natural universe. What
mattered was toleration, harmony and conformity to the laws of nature. The I7th
century's harsh doctrines of predestination, the conception of a wrathful God punishing
sinners in hell, were giving way to a distrust of superstition (expressed by Thomas
PAINE in The Age of Reason) and an optimistic belief that man was good and capable
of infinite improvement. It was a time when people believed in science and inquiry,
when men's ideals were becoming more social: what mattered was reason, ethics, and
how certain forms of government could help to serve men. These principles were
admirably embodied in the person of Benjamin Franklin.

One of the consequences in terms of art and literature was a fascination for balance and
restraint; hence the neo-classicism of the age and its preference for a clear, direct, and
measured style. Yet this interest revealed itself almost exclusively in political writings;
the forceful style so admired was used in pamphlets, papers, essays, rather than in more
introspective forms of literature. Indeed the Federal age did not favour the description of
emotions and inner conflicts. Literature was not turned towards the analysis of the self,
but towards more rational aims. Drama was not even encouraged, usually being
considered improper and immoral.

By 1800, most of the books read in America were imported English books, mainly
novels (e.g sentimental and Gothic works) much enjoyed by the growing public of
women readers. This popularity of British literature was partly due to the lack of a
genuine copyright law in America, which made it much easier to publish pirated
edieions of English works and often obliged an Amerlcan author to pay for the
publication of his own work.

Washington ALLSTON (1779-1843), The Poor Author and Rich Bookseller, 1818.
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, Mass. Bequest of Charles Sprague Sargeare.
1927. Ph. Hachette. This painting illustrates the plight of 19th century American writers
with very little copyright protection.

The election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency, in 1828, marked the beginning of a
new era: the age of the Common Man. The frontier moving west, the expansion of the
continent according to what was still considered the will of God ("Manifest Destiny")
could only strengthen this rising belief in equality. The need to assert it may have been
all the stronger as it was felt to be threatened. The 19th century was a period of growing
industrialization. Inventions such as the steamboat, the cotton gin, railroads, the
telegraph, were rapidly changing the face of the country and urbanizing it. The poorer
districts of towns grew in size, a proletarian class appeared, the contrast increased
between the rich and the poor. Further, mechanization in the northern states made
slavery in the South all the more glaringly inhuman and unacceptable. In the face of such
injustice, the optimism of the new nation, combined with its faith in utility, threw the
country into a passion for reform. Humanitarianism became the key word and there
flourished all sorts of charities, utopian societies, crusades, and communal movements.

This background largely contributed to the growth of romanticism in America, wich its
faith in man, in intuition, and in the natural goodness of the world, with its rejection of
the corruption of civilization whose effects America was beginning to feel. These ideas
were chiefly voiced by EMERSON and THOREAU after 1830. Transcendentalism - an
appeal to the individual and to intuition as opposed to reason, science, and materialism –
had a tremendous impact on the literature of the time. It asserted a belief in the creative
powers of man's mind, encouraged the development of a national culture and of more
imaginative writings. Literature had mainly been subservient to religion during the
Colonial period, and to politics during the Federal age: it was at last being accepted and
even encouraged for its own sake. In keeping with the attacks of the Transcendentalists
on the spirit of conformity which often accompanies mass democracy, the new writers
were individualists, often almost prophecs (e.g. WHITMAN). In true romantic fashlon
they also sang the beauties of the land (like COOPER or BRYANT) Or, following the
English Gothic trend, appealed to feelings, emotions and the mysterious (e.g. Poe,
HAWTHORNE, or MELVILLE) and found a new interest in the study of ordinary men,
of the commen people: children, farmers, uneducated frontiersmen, or Indians. American
literature had found its identity.

Major Trends in Literature

The Federal Age

The Literature of Reason

It reflected the political and social concerns of the time. It comprised a variety of genres:
polieical books, pamphlets or documents (e.g. Thomas PAINE'S Common Sense, 1776
and The Age of Reason, 1793- 1795 or Thomas JEFFERSON'S Declaration of
Independence, 1776); essays (e.g Thomas JEFFERSON'S Notes on the State of Virginia,
1785); papers (e.g. Alexander HAMILTON, James MADISON and John JaY's The
Federalist, 1787-1788); autobiographies (e.g. Benjamin FRANKLUN'S Autobiography,
1771-1790) or letters and speeches.

The Preromantics

ST JOHN DE CRÈVECEUR's Letters from an American Farmer, 1782, heralded the

Romantic age with their optimism and idealization of America, their reverence for
nature and their sentimentalism and humanitarlanism. Phlip FRENEAU, the poet of
feelings and nature, in the tradition of the English graveyard poets, treated such themes
as melancholy and mutability (e.g. "The Power of Fancy", 1770; “The House of Night
AVision", 1779).

The Age of Romanticism

The Knickerbockers

So called because they formed a group around Washington Irving, Diedrich

KNICKERBOCKER being the name of the chronicler of his History of New York. The
chief common point shared by these writers was their desire to entertain the reader and
their interest in nature which is to be related to the popularity of the Hudson River
School in painting. Their most representative works were Washington IRVING'S Sketch
Book (1819-1820) and Tales of a Traveller (1824); James Fenimore COOPER'S
Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) and William Cullen BRYANT'S poems of nature
(e.g. Thanatopsis, 1815; A Forest Hymn, 1825; The Prairies, 1833).

The Transcendentalists

Rejecting Calvinism and the materialism of society, EMERSON and THOREAU

asserted their beliefs in deism, individualism and self-relance, and in the need for a
national literature. These ideas, most dearly expressed in EMERSON'S Nature (I1836)
or Self-Rellance (1841) and in THOREAU's Walden (1854) or Civil Disobedience
(1848), directly influenced three groups of writers:

- The writers of the "American Renaissance", HAWTHORNE, POE and MELVILLE,

whose symbolic and imaginative works are however more pessimistic, dealing with the
individual caught between his own values and those of society. (cf. Edgar Allan Poe's
Tales; Nathaniel HAWTHORNE'S The Scarlet Letter, 1850, or The House of the Seven
Gables, 1851; Herman MeLVILLE'S Moby Dick, 1851).

-Walt WHITMAN, the prophet and seer, the believer in democracy, in the vitality of
man and in the necessary emergence of an American poetry (Leaves of Grass, 1855).

- The Schoolroom or Household Poets, LONGFELLOW, LOWELL, and WHITTIER,

SO called because of the tremendous popularity of their works which were read at home
and in schools. They often used historical themes, folk materials, and traditional forms
such as the ballad (e.g. Henry VWadsworth LONGFELLOW's Evangeline, 1847, or The
Song of Hiawatha, 1855): John Greenl
Part 3 1865-1915
POLITICS AND SOCIETY LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
186 John Greenleaf WHITTIER: Snow-
6 Bound.
186 Reconstruction Act. Purchase of Alaska. Horatio ALGER: Rogged Dick.
7
186 Mark TWAIN: The Innocents
9 Abroad.
187 Battle of Little Bighorn. Mark TWAIN: The Adventures of
6 Tom Sawyer.
187 End of Reconstruction.
7
187 Edison invents incandescent lightbulb.
9
188 Henry ADAMS: Democracy. Joel
0 Chandler HARRIS: Uncle Remus.
186 Henry JAMES: The Portrait of a
1 Lady. Oliver Wendell HOLMES:
The Common Law.
188 New York Metropolitan Opera
3 House founded.
188 Mark TWAIN: The Adventures of
4 Huckleberry Finn.
188 First skyscraper built in Chicago. William Dean HowELLS: The Rise
5 of Silas Lapham.
188 Statue of Liberty dedicated. AFL Henry JAMES: The Bostonians.
6 (American Federation of Labor) founded.
188 Edward BELLAMY: Looking
8 Backwards.
189 Antitrust law. Emily DICKINSON: Poems.
0 Frontier declared closed. William JAMES: Principles of
Psychology.
189 Chicago World Exhibition. Stephen CRANE: Maggie.
3
189 Kate CHOPIN: Bayou Folk.
4
189 Stephen CRANE: The Red Badge
5 of Courage.
189 Klondike gold rush.
6 Beginning of motion pictures.
Jim Crow laws upheld by Supreme
 Court.
189 Spanish-American War Annexation of
8 Hawaii and the Philippines.
189 Frank NORRIS: McTeague.
9
190 Theodore DREISER: Sister Carrie,
0
190 Frank NORRIS: The Octopus.
1 Booker T. WASHINGTON: Up
from Slavery.
190 First aeroplane flight by Wright brothers. Henry JAMES: The Ambassadors.
3 Jack LONDON: The Call of the
Wild.
190 Edith WHARTON: The House of
5 Mirth. George SANTAYANA: The
Life of Reason.
190 San Francisco earthquake. Upton SINCLAIR: The Jungle.
6
190 Beginning of Prohibition in
some Henry ADAMS: The Education of
7 Southern states. Henry Adams. William JHEE:
Peak immigration year. Progmatism.
190 Ash Can School paintings
8 exhibited.
190 First Model T. Ford. NAACP founded. Robie House (Frank Lloyd
9 Wright). Jack LONDON: Martin
Eden. Gertrude STEIN: Three
Lives.
191 Ambrose BIERCE: The Devil's
1 Dictionary.
191 Theodore DREISER: The
2 Financier. Ezra PouND: Some
Imagist Poets.
191 Armory Show of Modern Art in
3 New York. Willa ĆATHER: O
Pioneers!
191 Panama Canal opens. Beginning of Robert FROST: North of Boston.
4 World War
Literature and society

For this new creature, born since 1900,... - the child of incalculable coal-power,
chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet
undetermined - must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At
the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would
know how to control unlimited power. He would think in com- plexities unimaginable to
an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier
society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth -
equally childlike - aud lhe wuuld unly wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and
so weak in force, should have done so much.

The Education of Henry Adoms, An Autobiography, I1907.

In fact, realism and romanticism were both ex- pressions of their time. In an article
defending Frank Norris, Howells said that his novels were a response to the needs of his
generation: "It is not for nothing that any novelist is born in one age."

[...] He was right in that America was altering with staggering rapidity. Between 1860
and 1900 its population soared from thirty-one to seventy-six million, and the balance
began to shift from rural to urban living. Towns appeared overnight, and grew to cities
within a decade. Chicago, the most spectacular example, was in 1833 a village of 350 in-
habitants. By 1870, the 350 had increased to aver 300,000; by 1880, to 500,000; and by
1890, to over a million. The human scale seenmed to vanish, as vast industrial
enterprises reared themselves, only to be swallowed up by still vaster ones, knit together
by complex financing from which the few enormously rich - Carnegie, Frick,
Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and their kind - apparently battened upon everyone else,
intensifying what Henry George (in his Prog- ress and Poverty, 1879) called "the
contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want." A help- less immigrant
proletariat was squeczing into the slums of New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, and
à dozen other cities. Many of these immigrants were now coming, for the first time, from
central and eastern Europe. Simple peasants from Italy, Jews from Polish ghettos, they
were ill-equipped to

face their new world. Emma Lazarus, in the sonnet carved on the pedestal of the Statue
of Liberty, spoke a welcome for Europe's tired and poor, the "huddled masses yearning
to breathe free." The concept of free immigration was magnificent, the reality inevitably
less so. Nor did the native-born accept the fact with equanimity. How could a united
nation emerge from such polyglot origins? Surely there must be a satura- tion point; had
it not been reached? Henry James, visiting his homeland in 1904-1905, after a long
absence, was jolted to the depth of his being by Ellis Island, the immigrants' dearing-
station, a "visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social." "This
affirmed claim of the alien, however immeasurably alien, to share in one's supreme rela-
tion," gave him an acute sense of "dispossession," and he could not help sighing for "the
luxury of some such close and sweet and whole national conscious- ness as that of the
Switzer and the Scot."

A fastidious person like James might think that little was left of the older, finer America.
The ideal of democracy was mocked when the nouveau-riche married his daughter into
the aristocracy of Europe, and the bewildered immigrant placed his vote in the keeping
of the ward-heeler. Nor was corruption con- fined to city politics: it thrived in state
legislatures and in the Federal Government itself. As for rural America, the farmer was
often as discontented as the urban poor whose ranks he swelled. Once the hero of
Jefferson, the virtuous husbandman, he was now the rube, the hick, the hayseed.
Agriculture over- extended itself as it reached into the rainshadow of the Rockies. Angry
and disappointed home- steaders found themselves prey to natural scourges - droughts,
locusts, prairie fires - and to man- made evils: exorbitant freight rates, low prices, tight
credit. In the 1890s Americans were told, too, that the frontier, the open zone of
unsettled land, no longer existed. Even when the Mississippi formed the western limit of
the United States, Jefferson had congratulated his fellow-citizens un "pusscasing a
chosen country, with room enough for our descend- ants, to the hundredth and
thousandth generation." But afler less tliau a Leutu y it might seem that there was no
more room; at any rate the idea of illimitable westward territory was gone.

Puzzled by the rapidity of the changes overtaking their land, Americans groped for
explanations and panaceas. Some were embodied in Utopian novels, of which Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000- 1887 is one of the few still remembered. [...]

Many thought that Science had found a key, in Darwin's theory of evolution. As
expounded and popularized by Herbert Spencer, it made an extraor- dinary impression
on the general public as well as on such young writers as Hamlin Garland, Jack London,
and Theodore Dreiser. It was not a comforting rev- clation for all of them, but at least it
seemed to fit the facts. In addition to providing a biological analogy for the struggle to
survive that went on in the business world and in the teeming city streets, it lifted a load
of guilt. Sins were no longer sins, if men's ac- tions were determined by heredity and
environment. Nor of course was it necessary to interpret Spencerian Darwinism as a
pessimistic and passive doctrine. If progress was ensured, it did not matter that the
method of improvement was predetermined; so long as the fittest did survive, and
perfection came about after trial and error, it was possible to accept Darwin- ism as a
scientific reinforcement of the poctic truth of Longfellow's "Excelsior"

Marcus CUNUIFE, The Literature of the United States. Pelican Books, 1954. © M.
Cunliffe |961, 1968, 1970.

Alfred STIEGLITZ (1864-1946), The Steerage, 1907. Philadelphis Museum of Art,

Phladelphia Pa. Given by C. Zigrosser, Ph. W. Brown, 1979. Ph Hachecte The works of
Alfred Stieglitz reflect the dual interest of the age- sentimentality and realism. It is
fitting too that the industrial boom of the late 19th century should be accompanied by the
development of a new form of art, photography, which because of technical
improvements quite popular by the end of the century. Stieglitz, who founded the
quarterly Camerawork, was one of the first to try and use photography to convey the
particular atmosphere of a situation at a given moment in time. His well-known
photograph Steerage, for instance, taken during America's peak immigration year, is a
moving and forceful record of immigration. Stieglitz also tried to explore other
photographic possibilities and was a pioneer in more "artistic" techniques based on
exposure or focusing devices which aimed at dramatic or moving effects that would
allow photography to : He also played an important role in the development of modern
art by championing the work of many painters and sculptors, and by organizing
exhibitions in his avant-garde "291" gallery in New York. in the 1870s and 1880s, had
become rival painting.

Major Trends in Literature

The decades that followed the Civil War were marked by a shift from romanticism to
realism.

- The sentimental and moralistic works which had dominated the previous age remained
popular until the 1890s. Many historical romances were published and carried on this
"Genteel Tradition", which also showed in the continuing fame of such poets as
LONGFELLOW and WHITTIER.

- But as early as the 1860s the desire to "mirror the unmitigated realities of life" (H.
JAMES) was beginning to be felt and took on a variety of forms in the following years.
116 • 1865-1915

Local Colour Fiction

It was the first manifestation of realism in America. It often combined sentimental plots
and an accurate description of regional America, with its manners and dialects. This
trend appears in the works of Bret HARTE (who depicted the sectlement of the West, its
mining towns, outlaws, gamblers and whores), Kate CHOPIN (wich her Louisiana
dialect stories about Creoles, Cajuns and Negroes), Joel Chandler HARRIS (the creator
of the uneducated but wise and humorous black slave, Unde Remus) and especially
Mark TWAIN and his portray of Mississippl life.
Psychological Realism

In the novels of Henry JAMES and Edith WHARTON it is inner life and human
relationships which are scrutinized. Realism and Naturalism The theoretician of the
movement which shaped late 19th-century literature was William Dean HOWELLS.
Though he had started to write in the sentimental tradition, he became increasingly
concerned with social problems, condemned the physical and moral evils resulting from
an industrial society, and advocated "the truthful treatment of material". The cynical and
brutal stories of Ambrose BIERCE also contributed to the development of realisn.

In the 1890s, a harsher, more pessimistic trend appeared: naturalism. The naturalists
attacked capitalism too, but also explained society in Darwinist terms: heredity and
environment determine men in a world where only the fittest survive. These ideas
dominate the works of Hamlin GARLAND, Stephen CRANE, Frank NORRIS,
Theodore DREISER, Jack LONDON, Upton SINCLAIR and Henry ADAMS.

One major poet, Emily DICKINSON, cannot be related to any of these trends and
remains outside the social and political concerns of her time.

"If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous; it
may not kill, but it will certainly injure.

(The true realist] cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing
unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world
beneath the diginity of his enquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the
unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by
realities, in which alone the truth lives.

I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first of all
applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it truet -
true to the

Literature and philosophy

The philosophy of William JAMES (1842-1910), the brother of the novelist Henry
James, is fundamentally linked to the ideas and literature of the late 19ch century. In his
book Pragmatism (1907) he developed the idea that theories can be judged only by their
consequences, that is by whether or not they are followed by satisfactory results when
tried. This was valid for any truth, scientific, metaphysical or religious. For instance, the
proof of religion was to be found in the sort of life that would ensue for the believer.
Pragmatism, he said, agreed "with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects, with
positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions".

This was a philosophy concerned with real life, a move from abstract thoughts towards
facts, action and practical experlence. In a world full of doubts, William James showed
that man could survive with purpose and without despair. Those who misunderstood
pragmatism saw it as a justification Literature and philosophy • 117

Part 4 1915-1945
POLITICS AND SOCIETY LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
191 Lusitania torpedoed. Edgar Lee MASTERS: Spoon River
5 Anthology.
191 Carl SANDBURG: Chicogo Poems.
6

191 USA declares war on Germany. T. S. EIOT: Prufrock.

7

191 End of World War I. Willa CATHER: My Antonia.

8

191 Sherwood ANDERSON: Winesburg

9 Ohio. H. L. MENCKEN: The
American Language.
192 18th Amendment (Prohibition). Sinclair LewIs: Main Street. Francis
0 League of Nations organized. Scott FITZGERALD: This Side of
Paradise.
192 Immigration quotas. Edwin A. ROBINSON: Collected
1 Einstein awarded the Nobel Prize for Poems.
physics.
 First radlo broadcast.
192 T. S. EuoT: The Waste Land. Sinclair
2 LEWIS: Bobbitt.

192 Wallace STEVENS: Hamonium.

3 Edna St Vincent MILLAY: The
Harp-Weaver. First issue of Time
magazine.
192 George GERSHWIN: Rhapsody in
4 Blue.

192 Theodore DRESER: An American

5 Tragedy. John Dos PAssos:
Manhattan Transfer. Francis Scott
FTZGERALD: The Great Gatsby.
Ezra PouND: Cantos l-XVI. Gertrude
STIN: The Making of the Americans.
First issue of The New Yorker.
192 Emest HEMINGWAY: The Sun Also
6 Rises.

Langston HUGHES: The Weary

Blues.
192 Sacco and Vanzetti executed.
7 Lindbergh's Transatlantic flight.

192 Stock Exchange collapses. beginning of William FAULKNER: The Sound

9 the Great Depression. and the Fury. Ernest HEMINGWAY:
A Farewell to Arms. Thomas
WOLFE Look Homeward, Angel.
193 Hart CRANE: The Bridge. Dashiell
0 HAMMETT: The Maltese Falcon.
Katherine Anne PORTER: Fluwering
Judas.
193 Eugene O'NEILL: Mourning
1 Becomes Electra. William
FAULKNER: Sanctuary.
193 Erskine CALDWELL: Tobacco
2 Road. William FAULKNER: Light in
August.
193 End of Prohibition. Erskine CALDWELL: God's Little
3 Beginning of the New Deal. Acre. Nathaniel WEST: Miss
 Drought in the South and Plains. Lonelyhearts.
193 Francis Scott FITZGERALD: Tender
4 is the Night. William Carlos
WILLIAMS: Collected Poems James
T. FARRELL: Studs Lonigan. Henry
MILLER: Tropic of Cancer.
193 Works Progress Administration George SANTAYANA: The Last
5 Puritan. Thomas WOLFE Of Time
and the River. HEYWARD &
GIRSHWIN: Porgy and Bess.
193 John Dos PAssos: U.S.A. Margaret
6 MITCHELL: Gone With the Wind.

193 Wallace STEVENS: The Man With

7 the Blue Guitar. John STEINBECK:
Of Mice and Men.
193 Thornton WILDER: Our Town. e e
8 cummings: Collected Poems,
193 John STEINBECK: The Grapes of
9 Wrath. Raymond CHANDLER: The
Big Sleep. Robert FROST: Collected
Poems.
194 Over 8 million unemployed. Ernest HEMINGWAY: For Whom
0 the Bell Tolls. Carson MCCULLERS:
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Richard WRIGHT: Native Son.
194 Bombing of Pearl Harbor. USA declares
1 war on Japan, Germany and Italy.
194 RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN:
3 Oklahoma! T.S. EUOT: Four
Quartets.
194 End of World War II. USA drops atomic Richard WRIGHT: Black Boy.
5 bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Literature and Society

"You are all a lost generation." Gertrude STEIN

The horrors of the war, with its heavy toll of human lives and the disillusion that
followed the spiritual and moral mobilization which had accompanied the conflict
emphasized the pessimism of a post-war generation that had lost its values. Cynical and
devoid of faith, "all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken" as Scott
Fitzgerald wrote, the young intellectuals often sought refuge abroad or found in drinking
or death an answer to their despair.

The major social and economic events of these years help to explain the spiritual and
moral uncertainties of the new school of writers who looked at America with such a
critical and enquiring mind. The growth of nationalism or "Americanism" brought about
a restriction of immigration which was accompanied by a wave of intolerance: not only
the Ku Klux Klan's defence of "pure" Americans, or the deportation of aliens suspected
of being radicals, but also literary and scientific censorship (e.g. the teaching of
Darwinism was forbidden in several Southern states). The 1920 "bone-dry" law
encouraged moonshining and bootlegging; speakeasies and hip-flasks flourished all over
the country and contributed to the change of morals. Confident that they were the most
advanced civilization in the world, the nation worshipped free enterprise and material
success, convinced, like President Coolidge, that "the business of America [was]
business". Prosperity and the "Big Boom" easily developed in a country where
consumption was helped by advertising, high wages, and the new possibility of paying
by instalments. The Ford "Tin Lizzy", the radio, and the movies radically changed the
habits of Americans. New possibilities of entertainment were inseparable from a sudden
zest for exotic and thrilling sensations; prizefights and dance contests drew large crowds
of people. This was also a reflection of the changing code of manners. The typical
"flapper" girl bobbed her hair, wore short skirts, drank, smoked, and danced
outrageously, embodylng the emancipation of women ab Yrell as dre Iew interest In
Freudian theorles condemming restraint and inhibitiuns.

It was understandable that such excess should have estranged writers from society and
fed their creative imagination with the themes of disillusion, failure and revolt. The
devastating attacks against conformity and provincialism in Sinclair LEWis'S works, the
sterile lives of HEMINGWAY'S hard-drinking expatriates, the savage satire of
American ideals and values in H. L. MENCKEN'S essays, the emptiness of the Jazz Age
described by FITZGERALD, the decadent South of FAULKNER'Ss novels, the
portrayal of small town grotesque and maladjusted people in the work of Sherwood
ANDERSON - all reflect the spirit of allenation expressed by T. S. ELIOT In The Waste
Land and the writers' violent reaction to what they saw as a chaotic and meaningless
world. The deferred hopes of black artists found similar expression during the Harlem
Renaissance, a literary movement led by W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee CULLEN,
Langston HUGHES and Jean TOOMER who fiercély and defiantly asserted their
"individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame". With the 1929 Stock Exchange
collapse, the longest and wildest party in American history came to an end, giving way
to a mood of fear and social awareness. The severe drought in the "Dust Bowl", the
sharp rise of unemployment (from 4 million in 1930 co 8 million in 1940), the financial
panic and bankruptcies, together with the fear caused by the growth of Fascism in
Europe, contributed to a sudden interest in reform and the "common man". The
communist and socialist parties flourished; commitment and responsibility became key
words. This concern was reflected in the New Deal and the shift it brought about from
free enterprise to an increasingly powerful Federal government which, it is interesting to
note, was very active in encouraging the development of literature and the arts (cf. the
photographic records of the Farm Security Administration, the Federal Theatre Project,
the Federal Music Project, ctc.). This new social consciousness is obvious in the best
works of the time, with their proletarian characters replacing the disenchanted heroes of
the previous decade: the Okies' migration to California in The Grapes of Wrath, the life
of poor Southern whites in CALDWELL's novels, the misery of a Chicago lower-middle
class youth in James T. FARRELL'Ss Studs Lonigan, John Dos PAssos' "collective
novels", Archibald MACLEISH's committed poetry. When the United the Second
VWorld Wa experience of two deca enter of complacency and depression, of selfishness
and commitment, had left the country disillusioned and sceptical and had thus already
paved the way for the more detached and ironic outlook that was to characterize the next
generation of writers.

Major Trends in Literature

Poetry

Two currents appear in poetry:

-The poets of the native tradition who insisted on the "Americanness" of poetry. They
often used direct language and traditional forms but were modernists in their sceptical,
ironic and pessimistic view of life. These poets were often deeply marked by their
regional background: New England for Edwin Arlington ROBINSON and Robert
FROST, Chlcago and Illinois for Carl SANDBURG, Vachel LINDSAY and Edgar Lee
MASTERS.

- From Imagism to Symbolism. The father of modernism and technical experiments was
Ezra POUND and his imagist movement, advocating concentrated and controlled poems
based on rhythm and striking imagery. His influence was enormous on Hart CRANE,
Archibald MACLEISH, William Carlos WILLIAMS, Wallace STEVENS, Marianne
MoORE and especially T. S. EuoT, whose Waste Land epitomized man's alienation
from moral and spiritual values in a chaotic and sterile world.

The Lost Generation

To the previous tradition of realism, these writers (among them Gertrude STEIN, Ernest
HEMINGWAY, Francis Scott FITZGERALD, Sherwood ANDERSON, Thomton
WILDER, Sinclair LeWis, Thomas WOLFE, Henry MILLER, Nathaniel WEST) added
their own feeling of loss and failure. Their works are also characterized by experiments
in style and form which were for them a way of escaping their inner emptiness: under
the influence of movies and of cubism, techniques of collage, discontinuity and
flashbacks became common; many writers developed the stream-of-consciousness
introduced by Joyce, while Gertrude Stein's theories about expressing the "complete
actual present" through repetition and a series of instantaneous visions helped to renew
the language of fiction.

The literature of social commitment

It mainly flourished in the 1930s, after the Great Depression, and is best illustrated by
the novels of James T. FARRELL, John Dos Passos, John STEINBECK and Erskine
CALDWELL. The rise of Southern literature Impoverished but proud, the South had
resented "Reconstruction" and felt the need to assert its own identity, looking backwards
to its genteel traditions though conscious of the need to redefine itself. The tragic and
frustrated beings that appear in the novels of Eudora WELTY, Katherine Anne
PORTER, and especially William FAULKNER, reflect the Southern universe haunted
by original sin and a prey to vlolence and perversion.

The Harlem Renaissance

This literary movement expressed the nationalistic aspirations of the urban blacks who
looked back to Africa to assert their own identity while attacking the values and
prejudices of white America. Its best-known representatives were Langston HuGHESs,
Jean TooMER, Claude MCKAY, Countee CULLEN, Arna BONTEMPS, and Richard
WRIGHT.

The theatre

One witnesses the emergence of an American theatre. Its most notable representative
was Eugene O'NEILL.
Part 5 since 1945
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
194 Robert Penn WWARREN: All the King's Men.
6 William Carlos WILLIAMS: Paterson.

194 Truman Doctrine and Marshall Tennessee WILLIAMS: A Streetcar Named

7 Plan. Desire.

194 Ezra PouND: The Pisan Cantos. Norman

8 MAILER: The Naked and the Dead.

194 Establishment of NATO. John HAWKES: The Cannibat. Arthur

9 MILLER: Death of a Salesman,

195 Beginning of the Korean War. Ray BRADBURY: The Martian Chronicles.
0

195 J. D. SALINGER: The Catcher in the Rye.

1 William STYRONE Lie Down in Darkness.
Carson MCCULLERS: The Ballod of the Sad
Café.
195 Wave of anti-communism, Archibald MACLEISH: Collected Poems.
2 "un-American" activitles Ralph EuisON: Invisible Man. Ernest
investigated. HEMINGWAY: The Old Man and the Sea.
195 The Rosenbergs executed for James BALDWIN: Go Tell it on the Mountain.
3 espionage. End of the Korean Arthur MILLER: The Crucible. Charles
War. OLSON The Maximus Poems. Theodore
ROETHKE: The Waking. Karl SHAPIRO:
Poems. J. D. SALINGER: Nine Stories.
195 School segregation declared Wallace STEVENS: Collected Poems.
4 unconstitutional.

195 Flannery O'CONNOR: A Good Man is Hard to

5 Find.

Montgomery bus boycott led John BARTH: The Floating Opera. Allen
195 by Martin Luther King. GINSBERG: Howl. John BERRYMAN:
6 Homage to Mistress Brodstreet.

195 School desegregation enforced lack KEROUAC: On the Road. Isaac Bashevis
7 in Little Rock, Arkansas. SINGER: Gimpel the Fool. Leonard
BERNSTEIN: West Side Story. Bernard
MALAMUD: The Assistant.
195 J. K. GALBRAITH: The Edward ALBEE The Zoo Story. Truman
8 Affluent Society. Launching of Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany's. Vladimir
the first US earth satellite. NABOKOv: Lolita.
Alaska became 49th state.
195 Hawaii became 50th state. Robert LOWELL: Life Studies. William
9 BURROUGHS: The Naked Lunch, James
PURDY: Malcolm.
196 John UPDIKE: Rabbit, Run. Wright MORRIS
0 Ceremony in Lone Tree. John BARTH: The
Sot-Weed Factor.
196 Kennedy called for a "New James BALDWIN: Nobody Knows My Name.
1 Frontier". Bay of Pigs Joseph HELLER: Cotch-22.
invasion.
196 Edward ALBEE: Who's Afraid of Virginia
2 Woolf? Ken KESEY: One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest. Katherine Anne PORTER: Ship
of Fools.
196 Civl Rights March on
Kurt VONNEGUT: Cat's Cradle. Bernard
3 Washington. Assassination of MALAMUD: Idiots First. Gwendolyn
President Kennedy. Betty BROOKS: Selected Poems. Mary
FRIEDAN: The Feminine MCCARTHY: The Group.
Mystique.
196 Beginning of race riots in large Robert LOWELL: For the Union Dead. Saul
4 cities. BELLOW: Herzog. Hubert SELBY: Lost Exit
to Brooklyn. John BERRYMAN: Dream
Songs. John HAWKES: Second Skin. Richard
BRAUTIGAN: A Confederate General from
Big Sur.
196 US support of South Vietnam.. Jerzy KOSINSKI: The Painted Bird. Sylvia
5 PLATH: Ariel. Flannery O'CONNOR:
Everything that Rises Must Converge. Norman
MAILER: An American Dream.
196 Theodore ROETHKE: Collected Poems.
6 Truman CAPOTE: In Cold Blood.

196 William STYRON: The Confessions of Nat

7 Turner. Richard BRAUTIGAN: Trout Fishing
in America. William GASS: In the Heart of the
Heart of the Country.
196 Student protest on several Eldridge CLEAVER: Soul on Ice. John
8 campuses. Robert Kennedy UPDIKE: Couples. Tom WOLFE: The Electric
and Martin Luther King Kool-Aid Acid Test.
assassinated.
196 US moon landing. Vladimir NABOKOV: Ada. Philip ROTH:
9 Portnoy's Complaint. Kurt VONNEGUT:
Slaughterhouse Five.
197 Eudora WLTY: Losing Battles. John
0 HAWKES: The Blood Oranges.

197
1

197 Beginning of Watergate

2 scandal.

197 US armed forces withdrew Thomas PYNCHON: Gravity's Rainbow. Gore

3 from Vietnam. VIDAL: Burr. Erika JONG: Fear of Flying.

197 Resignation of President Nixon Philip ROTH: My life as a Man.

4 as a result the Watergate
scandal.
197 Celebration of the Alex HALEY: Roots. Robert Penn WARREN:
6 Bicentennial. Selected Poems.

197 James PURDY: Narrow Rooms. John

8 IRVING: The World According to Garp.

197 Norman MAILER: The Executioner's Song.

9

198 Joyce Carol OATES: Bellefleur.

0

198 John IRVING: The Hotel New Hampshire.

1

198 John UPDIKE: Rabbit is Rich.

2 Sylvia PLATH: Collected Poems.

198 241 marines killed in Lebanon. Alice WALKER: The Color Purple. Norman
3 Highest unemployment figure Mailer: Ancient Evenings.
since 1941.
198 Iran-Contra scandal. Truman CAPOTE: Answered Prayers.
6

198 Joseph BRODSKY is awarded the Nobel Prize

7 for Literature.

198 Toni MORRISON: Beloved.

8

198 Paul AUSTER: Moon Palace.

9

199 John UPDKE: Rabbit at Rest.

0

199 US-led forces invade Iraq

1

199 Richard FORD: Independence Day

5

200 Philip ROTH: The Human Stain

0

200 Terrorist attacks against World

1 Trade Center and Pentagon.
200 War against Iraq.
3
200 Cormac MCCARTHY: The Road.
6
200 Obama becomes the first
8 African-American to be
elected President; beginning of
financial crisis
201 Don DELILLO: Point Omega
0
201 Louise ERDRICH: The Round House
2
201 Jonathan FRANZEN: Purity
5
201 Bob Dylan is awareded the nobel prize for
6 literature
Literature and society

European writers take strength from German phenomenology and from the conception
of entropy in modern physics in order to attack a romantic idea of the Self, triumphant in
the nineteenth century but intolerable in the twentieth. The feeling against this idea is
well-nigh universal. The First World War with its millions of corpses gave an aspect of
the horrible to romantic over-valuation of the Self. The leaders of the Russian
Revolution were icy in their hatred of bourgeois individualism. In the communist
countries millions were sacrificed in the building of socialism, and almost certainly the
Lenins and the Stalins, the leaders who made these decisions, serving the majority and
the future, believed they were rejecting a soft, nerveless humanism which attempted in
the face of natural and historical evidence to oppose progress.

A second great assault on the separate Self sprang from Germany in 1939. Just what the
reduction of millions of human beings into heaps of bone and mounds of rag and hair or
clouds of smoke betokened, there is no one who can plainly tell us, but it is at least plain
that something was being done to put in question the meaning of survival, the meaning
of pity, the meaning of justice and of the importance of being oneself, the individual's
consciousness of his own existence.

It would be odd, indeed, if these historical events had made no impression on American
writers, even if they are not on the whole given to taking the historical or theoretical
view. They characteristically depend on their own observations and appear at times
obstinately empirical.

But the latest work of writers like James Jones, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John
O'Hara, J. F. Powers, Joseph Bennett, Wright Morris and others shows the individual
under a great strain. Labouring to maintain himself, or perhaps an idea of himself (not
al- ways a clear idea), he feels the pressure of a vast public life, which mitting him to be
a giant in hatred or fantasy. In these circumstances he grieves, he complains, rages, or
laughs. All the while he is aware of his lack of power, his inadequacy as a moralist, the
nauseous pressure of the mass media and their weight of money and orgamay dwarf him
as an individual while pernization, of cold war and racial brutalities.

Adapting Gresham’s theorem to the literary situation one might say that public life
drives private life into hiding. People begin to hoard their spiritual valuables. Public
turbulence is largely coercive, not m's theorem to the literary situpositive. It puts us into
a passive position. There is not much we can do about the crises of international politics,
the revolutions in Asia and Africa, the rise and transformation of masses. Technical and
political decisions, invisible powers, secrets which can be shared only by a small elite,
render the private will helpless and lead the individual into curious forms of behaviour in
the private sphere. Public life, vivid and formless turbulence, news, slogans, mysterious
crises, and unreal configurations dissolve coherence in all but the most resistant minds,
and even to such minds it is not always

a confident certainty that resistance can ever have a positive outcome. To take narcotics
has become in some circles a mark of rebellious independence, and to scorch one's
personal earth is sometimes felt to be the only honourable course. Rebels have no
bourgeois certainties to return to when rebellions are done. The fixed points seem to be
disappearing. Even the Self is losing its firm outline. [...] There are modern novelists
who take all of this for granted as fully proven and implicit in the human condition and
who complain as steadily as they write, viewing modern life with a bitterness to which
they themselves have not established clear title, and it is this unearned bitterness that I
speak of. What is truly curious about it is that often the writer automatically scorns
contemporary life. He bottles its sinks artistically. But, seemingly, he does not need to
study it. It is enough for him that it does not allow his sensibilities to thrive, that it
starves his instincts for nobility or for spiritual qualities. But what the young American
writer most often appears to feel is his own misfortune. The injustice is done to his talent
if life is brutish and ignorant, if the world seems overcome by Spam and beer, or covered
with detergent lathers and poisonous monoxides. This apparently is the only injustice he
feels. Neither for himself nor for his fellows does he attack power and injustice directly
and hotly. He simply defends his sensibility. Perhaps the reason for this is the prosperity
and relative security of the middle class from which most writers come. In educating its
writers it makes avail- able to them the radical doctrines of all the ages, but these in their
superabundance only cancel one another out. The middle-class community trains its
writer also in passivity and resignation and in the double enjoyment of selfishness and
goodwill. They are taught that they can have it both ways. In fact they are taught to
expect to enjoy everything that life can offer. They can live dangerously while managing
somehow to remain safe. They can be both bureaucrats and bohemians, they can be
executives but use pot, they can raise families but enjoy bohemian sexuality, they can
observe the laws while in their hearts and in their social attitudes they may be as
subversive as they please. They are both conservative and radical. They are everything
that is conceivable. They are not taught to care genuinely for any man or any cause. [...]
I would like now to list the categories suggested by my reading of current novels: the
documentation of James Jones, the partially Christian approach of Powers, the
sensibility of Updike, and the grievance of Philip Roth. I do not retract my earlier
statement that in American novels- for I have decided rather arbitrarily to limit myself to
examining these- the tone of complaint prevails. The public realm, as it encroaches on
the private, steadily reduces the powers of the individual; but it cannot take away his
power to despair, and sometimes he seems to be making the most of that. However, there
are several other avenues commonly taken: stoicism, nihilistic anger, and comedy. Saul
BELLOW, Some Notes on Recent American Fiction, Encounter, 1963. Reprinted in The
Novel Today, ed. by M. Bradbury, Collins Publishers.
Major Trends in Literature
The postwar period is so close to us and is characterized by such a proliferation of
writers, movements, and experiments that it would be dangerous to establish too strict a
classification. We can simply mention a few general directions which have appeared
since 1945.

The Beat writers

They rejected organized authority and the traditional American values, anything
"square", in order to search for love, self-exploration and immediate experience. The
different meanings of the word "beat" (which refers to "beaten" - for this generation felt
defeated by society and spiritually exhausted - to the rhythm or beat of jazz, and to the
search for beatitude) explain the attitude and the quest of such poets as Allen
GINSBERG, Charles OLSON, Gregory CORSO, and Lawrence FERLINGHETTI. This
movement is also reflected in the novels of Jack KEROUAC and William
BURROUGHS, and in some of Norman Mailer's works as well as in the plays, or rather
“happenings", of John CAGE.

The revival of Southern

Ilterature After World War II, a new generation of Southern writers carried on the
tradition introduced by William FAULKNER and Katherine Anne PORTER. In the
poems of Allen TATE, in the plays of Tennessee WILLIAMS, and in the novels of
Robert Penn WARREN, William STYRON, Carson MCCULLERS, Eudora WELTY,
Flannery O'CONNOR, and Joyce Carol OATES, one finds most of the elements
characteristic of Southern literature: the difficulty of communication, the exploration of
ethical problems (many of these writers are Catholic), grotesque characters and gothic
backgrounds.
The protest and antl-success novel

Many of the novels written in the 50s and 60s showed heroes who were maladjusted,
caught between different cultures, searching for their own identity. These were often the
works of minority writers, Black and Jewish mainly: Richard WRIGHT, James
BALDWIN, Saul BELLOW, Bernard MALAMUD, Bruce FRIEDMAN, and Philip
ROTH.

The Formallsts

A number of writers searched for aesthetic and stylistic perfection, though this formalist
trend was often a way of hiding their doubts and anguish. This aestheticism appears in
the novels and stories of Truman CAPOTE, influenced by the style of The New Yorker,
in the lexical inventiveness and brillance of John UPDIKE'S works, and especially in the
dazzling wit and virtuosity of Vladimir NABOKOov's novels.

Non-fiction

novels and documentaries Non-fiction novels are a form of fictionalized journalism

linked to the "new journalism" (in which the reporter's self intrudes on the factual
writing, allowing both point of view and fictional techniques to enter journalism): the
novelist becomes reporter, historian and witness at the same time. The best examples of
this new type of writing can be found in Truman CAPOTE'S In Cold Blood as well as in
most of Norman MAILER'S works.

The novellsts of the absurd

In the 1960s and 1970s, many writers presented the vision of a chaotic and meaningless
universe through works of fiction which often used burlesque and farce to mock the
conventional novel. This constituted a sort of renaissance of fiction at a time when many
writers felt that the traditional novel had exhausted itself. One can find an illustration of
this trend in the novels of Joseph HELLER, Kurt VONNEGUT, Thomas PYNCHON,
John BARTH, Richard BRAUTIGAN, Donald BARTHELME, James PURDY, Robert
CoovER, and Ishmael REED.

Poetry

Besides the above-mentioned trends, a few groups stand out in poetry:

- the Black Mountain poets, following Charles OLSON, Robert CREELEY, Denise
LEVERTOV, and Robert DUNCAN, experimented with form and technique in the
1950s.

- the San Francisco poets were attracted to Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, one of the Beat
poets, in the late 1950s. Its best-known members were Robert DUNCAN (also a Black
Mountain poet) and Brother ANTONINUS.

- the New York School was a group of poets (Kenneth KoCH, Frank O'HARA, John
ASHBERY) more influenced by the European avant-garde, surrealism and the absurd
trend in literature.

- the Confessional or Post-romantic poets: Robert LOWELL, Theodore ROETHKE,

Sylvia PLATH, William STAFFORD, W. D. SNODGRASS, James WRIGHT, W. S.
MERVIN, and Anne SEXTON.

Drama

- The decade that followed the war was dominated by two very similar playwrights:
Tennessee WILLIAMS and Arthur MILLER.

- In the early 60s the European theatre of the Absurd influenced Edward ALBEE and a
number of Off-Broadway productions. As this form of theatre became fashionaband thus
more conventional, a reaction appeared in the form of experimental "Off-Off-Broadway"
plays, often close to happenings and relying on the participation of the audience. 270 •
Since 1945 DFA