literature written in the English language by inhabitants of the U.S.; it includes the literature written by residents of the 13 original colonies.

COLONIAL AND PREREVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

The first American literature is generally considered certain accounts of discoveries and explorations in the New World that frequently display the largeness of vision and vigor of style characteristic of contemporary Elizabethan writers. Such qualities are evident in the work of Capt. John Smith, the first great figure in American letters. His Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) had the enormous vitality of much English prose in the epoch of the King James Bible (see Bible).

This rich energy diminished as literature, especially in the New England colonies, became preoccupied with theology. A religious explanation for every event was eloquently provided. Among the notable works in this vein are History of Plimmoth Plantation (posthumously pub. 1856) by William Bradford, an early governor of Plymouth Colony and The History of New England by John Winthrop, earliest governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first published in relatively complete form in 1853. The vast theological work Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), subtitled The Ecclesiastical History of New England From Its First Planting, by the Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather was, in spite of its awkward style and didacticism, a masterpiece of religious scholarship and thought. Cotton Mather was the author of more than 400 printed works, and his father, Increase, also a clergyman, wrote about 100.

A countervoice was that of Thomas Morton (c. 1590–c. 1647), an English adventurer in America, who in The New English Canaan (1637) expounded the point of view of an early rebel against Puritanism.

Modern readers have probably found more of interest in the accounts of Indian wars and of captivities. Notable among the former are narratives such as A Brief History of the Pequot War by the English colonist John Mason (1600?–72), edited in 1736 by the historian Thomas Prince (1687–1758). Among the many published reports about colonists captured by Indians, perhaps the most celebrated is the narrative by Mary Rowlandson (1635?–78?).

Much pious verse was written during the early colonial period. The first book printed in the colonies, in fact, was a hymnal, The Whole Book of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640), better known as the Bay Psalm Book; this was the work of three New England clergymen, Richard Mather, John Eliot, and Thomas Weld (1595–1661). The most remarkable colonial poets were Anne Bradstreet (The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, 1650); Edward Taylor, whose exceptionally fine Poetical Works was first published in 1939; and the clergyman Michael Wigglesworth, whose once–popular poem Day of Doom (1662) recounts in ballad meter the end of the world from a firmly Calvinist viewpoint.

The literature of the colonies outside New England was generally of a less theological cast. Present-day readers may still be amused by the wit and satire of A Character of the Province of Maryland (1666) by George Alsop (1638–66), an indentured servant, and they will be charmed by A Brief Description of New York (1670) by the publicist Daniel Denton (c. 1626–96). Other writings of this period may be found in the collection edited by Albert C. Myers (1874–1960), Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Jersey, 1630–1708 (1912).

With the 18th century, interest moved to more secular, practical problems. The work of the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards remains significant, however. Popularly associated with his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), Edwards is distinguished for his clarity of expression in such metaphysical works as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and Freedom of the Will (1754).

Two names commonly associated with provincial life illustrate the growing secularism of American writing. The first is William Byrd, a plantation owner and political leader; his History of the Dividing Line (written 1738, first pub. 1841) has remained a humorous masterpiece, and his even more belatedly published diaries, Secret Diary (1941), and Another Secret Diary (1942), are comparable to the work of his near contemporary, the English diarist Samuel Pepys. The other, greater name is that of Benjamin Franklin, whose masterly unfinished Autobiography has become a classic of world literature. His letters, satires, “bagatelles,” almanacs, and scientific writings are the writings of a great citizen of the world.

The earliest known work by a black American writer is “Bar's Fight, August 28, 1746,” 28 lines of verse by Lucy Terry (1730–1821). Shortly afterward came the poem “An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (1760) by a slave, Jupiter Hammon (1720–1800). The African-born poet Phillis Wheatley, the servant of a tailor's wife in Boston before her release from slavery, was the first black American to receive considerable critical acclaim as a writer. Her collection Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral (1773, London) is predominately religious in tone.

THE REVOLUTION AND AFTER

The brilliance of American thought between the accession of King George III in 1760 and the creation in 1789 of a federal government is notable in intellectual history.

Revolutionary Period.

The writings of the American statesmen of the period deserve to be read, as the monumental Literary History of the American Revolution (1897) by the historian Moses Coit Tyler (1835–1900) makes evident. Better known to the modern reader is the famous series of papers known as The Federalist, written in 1787–88 by the statesmen John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, whose cogent defense of the new U.S. Constitution still offers one of the most persuasive arguments on behalf of constitutional government.

Although American literature did not achieve full maturity in the 18th century, its scope was widened. The first newspaper, Publick Occurrences, appeared in Boston in 1690; its one edition was suppressed by colonial authorities because it did not have a license. Fourteen years later the journalist John Campbell (1653–1728) founded the Boston News-Letter. The first magazines appeared in 1741 in Philadelphia, when the printer Andrew Bradford (1686–1742) founded the American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin established the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle. Both failed. Franklin's better-known writings appeared in Poor Richard's Almanack, which he published from 1732 to 1757. Later, amid the tumult of the American Revolution, several notable writers emerged, particularly Thomas Paine, whose pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and the 12 issues of Crisis (1776–83) awakened enthusiasm for independence. Paine lost favor in America when he published in London The Age of Reason (1794–95), which argued against Christianity—but also against atheism. An important political satire was the mock epic M'Fingal (1775–82) by the lawyer and poet John Trumbull. The most versatile and sensitive poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose “The House of Night” (1779) was a powerful exercise in the style of Gothic romanticism.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789, London), regarded as the fullest and most penetrating account of an 18th-century black man's life, was the first published autobiography by a black American. It is attributed to Olaudah Equiano (c. 1750–97), a slave who bought his freedom, settled in England, and afterward became active in the antislavery movement.

Postrevolutionary Period.

During the administration of President George Washington one literary center of the new nation was Hartford, Conn., where a group of young writers, including the clergyman Timothy Dwight and the poets John Trumbull and Joel Barlow (1754–1812), became known as the Hartford Wits. They wrote in many forms, including the epic, but only their lighter verse is still read.

Of greater later significance was the emergence at this time of the American novel, as exemplified by The Power of Sympathy (1789), a sentimental work by the writer William Hill Brown (1765–93), and Modern Chivalry (1792–1815) by the poet and novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748–1816), a realistic and satirical account of frontier manners. The writings of the novelist and journalist Charles Brockden Brown, which were very popular in Europe, included Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). Strange compounds of Gothic terror and pseudoscience, they point to the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

THE 19TH CENTURY

The years from 1815 to 1861 have been called the “First National Period.” The phrase is useful, for imaginative energies, gathering force after the War of 1812, reached a climax in the 1850s, during which more first-class literary work was produced than in any previous decade. In American history the Civil War was a dividing line between the simpler antebellum days and the more troubled industrial postwar period. Most of the leading prewar writers lived on, but after 1865 they had little new to say.

Early 19th Century.

The literary task before the young nation was to prove that it had attained cultural maturity. Proof was sought in opposite ways. Anticipating the position later developed by the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poet Walt Whitman, some writers argued that a radical political experiment should be matched by a radically new literature. Others, however, especially in Boston, thought that American writers should seek to meet European standards. Although little literature of lasting value was produced in Boston in the opening decades of the epoch, North American Review, long an influential literary quarterly, was founded there in 1815. In New York City, the main center of those who wanted to create a new literature, the first three important creators of an indigenous but still cosmopolitan American literature worked: Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper.

The writing of Washington Irving retains its charm and deserves to be more widely read. In A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) he gave New York City its legendary father, travestied conventional histories with consummate skill, and rivaled Franklin in urbanity. In The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820), particularly in the story of Rip Van Winkle and the legend of Ichabod Crane, Irving further enriched American mythology. Although distinctly American, Irving's writing preserved the style of 18th-century English prose, especially perhaps that of the Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, whose biography Irving wrote in 1849. Like Goldsmith, he turned to history, interpreting the Spain of Ferdinand V and Isabella I in The Alhambra (1832). With diminished success he wrote about the Far West, as in A Tour of the Prairies (1835). His work includes also substantial biographies of Christopher Columbus (1828) and George Washington (5 vol., 1855–59).

William Cullen Bryant, although born in New England, in 1825 went to live in New York City, where his best-known poem, “Thanatopsis” (1817), had already established his fame. In his long career he wrote verse and fiction, books of travel, an important work on the theory of poetry, and faithful translations of Homer. He edited the New York Evening Post from 1829 to his death in 1878, defending the abolitionists in the newspaper's pages. Present poetical fashions are exactly contrary to Bryant's stately rhetoric, and he has been somewhat unfairly demoted to a minor place in American literature.

James Fenimore Cooper was the first American author after Franklin to achieve a worldwide reputation. The great Leatherstocking series of novels (The Pioneers, 1823; The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; The Prairie, 1827; The Pathfinder, 1840; The Deerslayer, 1841) form a prose epic of the conquest of America. Endless forests and lonely waters, hunters, Indians, and hostile Europeans provided a setting for the exploits of the hero, the wilderness scout Natty Bumppo. Cooper's sea novels, of which The Pilot (1823) is most often read, were superior to those by his predecessors. Social, political, economic, and religious issues in American life are evident in his work, as in the trilogy known as the Littlepage Manuscripts (1845–46). He was a great, if uneven, genius, and Europeans such as the French novelist Honoré de Balzac and, more recently, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence readily acknowledged his power.

Among those who wrote with a greater consciousness of European traditions were the Cambridge poets, so called because of their attachment in one way or another to Harvard College. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the best-known member of this cosmopolitan group, appealed to the religious, patriotic, and cultural yearnings of the middle class. He translated works from many European languages (his The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, 3 vol., 1865–67, is admirable), wrote exquisite short poems of religious and moral sentiment, and became the foremost American writer of sonnets of the century. In a series of narrative poems on American themes, for example, Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), Longfellow sought to dignify and elevate life in the New World.

The literary reputation of the physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes has faded; nevertheless, in verse and prose, especially in the 12 essays titled The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), he helped liberate the American mind from the tyranny of the Puritan theologians. The poet and critic James Russell Lowell, once regarded as an American counterpart to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is important historically. His lively Biglow Papers (first series, 1848; second series, 1867), his great patriotic document known familiarly as “The Harvard Commemoration Ode,” and his collections of critical essays, such as Among My Books (first series, 1870; second series, 1876), broadened and enriched the national mind. Associated peripherally with the Cambridge group was the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who wrote the well-known poem Snow-Bound (1866) and many religious lyrics, and who vigorously denounced the slave-holders in poems such as “Massachusetts to Virginia” (1843).

During the early and mid-19th century, with the intensification of the slavery issue in the U.S., most of the writing produced by black Americans was concerned with dramatizing the immorality and agony of slavery and refuting the romanticized, antebellum vision of slavery as presented by a host of white Southern writers of the so-called plantation tradition. Outstanding works concerned with the question of slavery are the three autobiographies of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, written at different times in his life. The first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published in 1845 just after Douglass had escaped from slavery in Maryland. This was followed by enlarged versions in 1855 (My Bondage and My Freedom) and in 1881 (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, final rev. 1882). Another important work is The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), by Martin Robinson Delany (1812–85), who is now considered by some historians as the first major black nationalist.

The historian, novelist, and playwright William Wells Brown (1816–84), who escaped from slavery in 1834, wrote the first novel by a black American, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853, London). The theme of Clotel, miscegenation, or racial intermarriage, thereafter was dealt with frequently by other 19th-century authors who, like Brown, were torn between their African heritage and a need for roots in the U.S.

Looking back at the 19th century, modern readers generally prefer the writers who sought more radical solutions to cultural problems. Foremost were the essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In his famous address “The American Scholar” (1837) Emerson did more than repudiate a genteel cosmopolitanism; he proclaimed an exhilarating philosophy of idealistic individualism that is evident in the book Nature (1836), the “Address at Divinity College” (1838), the Essays (first series, 1841; second series, 1844), and Representative Men (1850). Although philosophies similar to his had been developed in Germany and in Great Britain, Emerson spoke with an American accent.

Thoreau's writings may have been less broad in range than Emerson's, but Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is presently more widely read than anything of Emerson. Thoreau's essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849) has had worldwide political influence, and “Life Without Principle,” compounded from passages in Thoreau's journal and published posthumously in 1863, is one of the great statements of the idea that without integrity the individual perishes. Emerson disliked slavery, but Thoreau actively opposed it, and Thoreau's writings are still used to controvert the kind of slavery that reduces human beings to parts of a machine.

The greatness of Hawthorne and of his masterly novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) is secure, but critics continue to study and interpret his character and his literary purpose. Many 19th-century readers took him at his own ironic valuation as a dreamy romantic; later knowledge has altered the picture of the dreamer into that of the sardonic commentator on public event and private character. The enigma of evil is central to many stories in the collections Twice-Told Tales (first series, 1837; second series, 1842) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846); as it is to the novels The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860).

More drastic has been the modern reevaluation of Herman Melville. Known originally as the man who lived among the cannibals, from the adventures recounted in his first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), he puzzled his contemporary readers with the romance Mardi (1849) and still more with his masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale (1851), an adventure narrative that is also a complex and profound study of good and evil. Pierre: or the Ambiguities (1852) was a complete failure. Forgotten in the second half of the 19th century, Melville was discovered again during the 20th. As with Hawthorne, the problem of evil is central to Melville's work, most explicitly so in the short novel Billy Budd, Foretopman (not pub. until 1924); but this conception of evil is so shrouded in myth and allegory that critics disagree about its personal significance, in terms of the writer's life and about its broader meaning.

The poet, critic, and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe was one of the major figures of the first half of the century. Poe simultaneously inhabited the world of journalism and a weird and lonely universe of his own imagining, characterized by relentless logic and a haunting sense of anguish. In his criticism Poe was capable of extreme partiality and extreme severity. His poetry profoundly affected the development of French symbolist verse, and his short stories, such as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), are among the triumphs of romantic horror. He launched the American detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Purloined Letter” (1844), and other tales. His poem “The Raven” (1845) has grown so familiar it has lost some of its appeal, but poems such as “Ulalume” (1847) have kept their inexplicable magic of image and music.

The opposite of Poe in virtually every respect, the poet Walt Whitman, after much unsuccessful writing, produced in 1855 the first version of Leaves of Grass, which he continued to expand until 1892. To this volume all else that he wrote—Drum-Taps (1865), the prose collections Democratic Vistas (1871) and Specimen Days & Collect (1882), and many other works—is subsidiary. Of his books he wrote, “Who touches this touches a man,” and the man was bombastic, affirmative, self-involved, yet mystical and sensitive. Whitman created a new, unrestrained verse form. The long, rhythmic lines, the heaping up of details, the affirmation of mystic identity with all that exists were intended to celebrate the spiritual strength in the democracy of “powerful uneducated persons.”

The American Civil War and the Later 19th Century.

President Abraham Lincoln humorously described Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, author of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), as “the little woman who caused this big war.” The work, weak perhaps as literature, was powerful as propaganda and expressed the deep antislavery feeling of the North. Lincoln himself can be included in the roster of significant American writers because of the measured succinctness of his occasional prose. Profoundly moved by the tragic conflict of the Civil War, he turned American oratory away from the ornate rhetoric of the statesman Daniel Webster to the inspirational simplicity of his address at Gettysburg (1863) and of his second inaugural address (1865). No other American public figure has quite equaled Lincoln's command of forceful, accurate, and inspiring prose.

After the war, many new writers emerged, especially in fiction. Among the forces that brought about change in American literature at that time were the increasing concentration of publishing houses in a single city, New York; new schemes for the manufacture, sale, and distribution of printed matter; the effectiveness of the public school systems, which created a larger reading public; the wider teaching of English literature and of foreign languages and literatures; and the increasing effectiveness of literary periodicals. The decades following 1870 were the golden age of the American magazine; the single instance of the prestigious and influential Atlantic Monthly magazine, founded in 1857, four years before the Civil War, is interesting. James Russell Lowell, its editor, appealed for stories emphasizing what came to be known as local color, and local color dominated the writing of the 1870s and the 1880s.

From the South, fiction by the authors George Washington Cable (Old Creole Days, 1879), Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, 1880), and the painter and writer Francis Hopkinson Smith (1838–1915), author of Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891), presented a sentimental picture of life in the Confederacy. The name of Kate O'Flaherty Chopin (1851–1904), a Louisiana-born author, may be added here or to the late 19th-century realists discussed below. Her last novel, The Awakening (1899), realistically depicts Creole life and a married woman's struggle for both independence and fulfillment in pursuing her artistic career.

Best known of a group of able and talented women who wrote of New England life is Sarah Orne Jewett. Among her many short stories about Maine people are those collected in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). California was the setting of the stories of Bret Harte, whose The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870) has been called the “father of Western local-color stories.”

Local color also appeared in poetry; the works of Joaquin Miller and James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote about the Midwest, are characteristic of this trend.

From 1865 to 1910 poetry largely was in a state of decline. The taste of the period was summed up in the standard collection An American Anthology, 1787–1899 (1900) by the conservative critic Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908). Of more interest to modern readers are the works of the leading southern poet Sidney Lanier, whose best-known poems are “The Marshes of Glynn” (1879) and “The Revenge of Hamish” (1878); the philosopher George Santayana, who also wrote exquisitely crafted poetry (Sonnets and Other Verses, 1894); or Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of a former slave, whose Lyrics of a Lowly Life (1896) brought him national attention.

Emily Dickinson is now recognized as a unique genius, one of the greatest poets of the 19th century, but she was virtually unknown to her contemporaries. The first collection of her poetry (Poems, 1890) was not published until four years after her death and was little read before the 1920s.

Humor.

American humor can be studied as a special manifestation of the national literature. It has fluctuated between humor of the people and urbane humor. Humor of the people tends to retain the qualities of popular speech, as in Lowell's The Biglow Papers. Even before Lowell, however, the humorists of the southwestern frontier, such as the clergyman and writer Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870), author of the sketches Georgia Scenes (1835), had followed this lead. In the mid-century and after, popular idiom and spelling were used as humorous devices in lectures and newspaper columns. Representatives of this later phase were the humorists Josh Billings (Josh Billings, His Sayings, 1865), Petroleum V. Nasby (The Nasby Papers, 1864), and Artemus Ward (Artemus Ward, His Book, 1862). Using illiterate speech, these authors not only satirized the eternal human follies but also powerfully influenced public opinion and political events. The genre was continued later by Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley's Opinions, 1901).

Out of this tradition emerged the most powerful literary personality of the postbellum era, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to the world as Mark Twain. His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), retains the characteristics of the oral tale; successes such as The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883) waver between journalism and literature; but with the novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Mark Twain transcended his own tradition of satire and created two master pictures of life on and along the Mississippi River. The genius of Twain was that he understood the moral realism of childhood. In this connection both works may be compared and contrasted with Little Women (1868–69) by Louisa May Alcott. This still enormously popular novel is one of a series of works by Alcott that show her serious concern with childhood and adolescence. Mark Twain's later fictional works such as “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900), the compelling The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and philosophical works such as What is Man? (1906) express the pessimism already evident in The Gilded Age (1873).

Fiction.

Twain's friend and mentor, the novelist and critic William Dean Howells, expressed in theory and practice the philosophy that literary art ought to mirror the facts of human life. His theory was best expounded in Criticism and Fiction (1891), and in a succession of novels (A Modern Instance, 1882; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 1890) illustrating that the business of literature is with the present and not with the remote and far away. No writer had a more sensitive ear for American conversation.

About Howells were grouped other realists and naturalists, notably the novelists and short-story writers Hamlin Garland (Main-Travelled Roads, 1890), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage, 1895), and Frank Norris (McTeague, 1899; The Octopus, 1901), as well as that singular genius, perhaps better known as a satirist, Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (In the Midst of Life, 1898). Their successors in the early years of the next century were novelists such as Jack London (The Sea Wolf, 1904); David Graham Phillips (1867–1911), who wrote Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (written 1908, pub. 1917); and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906). Towering among these figures was the novelist and journalist Theodore Dreiser, who began as a writer in the naturalist style and ended as a religious mystic. His novel Sister Carrie (1900) was withdrawn from sale as immoral; better received were his novels The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), which trace the career of a ruthless businessman. His best-known novel, An American Tragedy (1925), is, like Norris's McTeague, one of the most representative American novels of naturalism. Dreiser's lack of stylistic distinction was a weakness, but his dedication to truth and his compassionate insights into American society have made his novels endure.

While realists and naturalists argued about the degree to which human actions are determined by forces external to the will, the novelist Henry James concentrated on subjective experience and personal relationships. His great theme, the conflict between European and American values, is explored in novels from The American (1877) through The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). As he moved toward ever greater subtlety of insight and precision of statement, he developed a uniquely complex style that has as many detractors as devotees. James was a master of the short novel, for example, the ghost story “The Turn of the Screw” (1898); his criticism is impressive (an example is Notes on Novelists, 1914); and the prefaces to the famous New York edition of his books (1907–16), later gathered into The Art of the Novel (1934), were the first full revelation in American literature of the psychology of literary creation. The influence of such a genius was immense, and later novelists as diverse as Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth, 1905; The Age of Innocence, 1920), Ellen Glasgow (In This Our Life, 1941), and Willa Cather (A Lost Lady, 1923; Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927) owed something to his great example.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most major black writers came from the black middle class. The most important figure was W. E. B. Du Bois, sociologist, professor, and editor, who wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of essays, and many other books. Du Bois believed that well-educated blacks, whom he labeled the Talented Tenth, should lead the fight for equality for all black Americans. The Garies and Their Friends (1875) by Frank J. Webb (d. 1940) and Imperium in Imperio (1899) by a Baptist clergyman, Sutton Griggs (1872–1930), are works that vacillate between a cry for militancy and a plea for acceptance. Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932), who practiced law in Cleveland, wrote about racial dilemmas in a volume of short stories, The Conjure Woman (1899), and in a novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901).

19th-Century Nonfiction.

Didactic literature made steady progress in many directions. In biographies ranging from that of Horace Greeley (1885) to that of Thomas Jefferson (1874), James Parton (1822–91) laid the foundations of modern biography. Much significant writing was done in the field of history, for example, the work of George Bancroft (History of the United States, 10 vol., 1834–74, rev. ed. 1884–87); and the two great “romantic” historians, William Hickling Prescott, whose History of the Conquest of Mexico (3 vol.) was published in 1843, and Francis Parkman, whose distinguished studies of the roles of France and England in North America appeared from 1851 to 1892. Stylistically, Parkman was the greatest of these historians, but his preeminence was challenged by the brilliance of Henry Brooks Adams in History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (9 vol., 1889–91). The analytical approach of the latter in some ways foreshadowed his analysis of medieval culture, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), and his enigmatic, skeptical autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1906), in which he tried to balance the claims of medievalism and modernism.

The treatise Progress and Poverty (1879), by the economist Henry George, as well as the novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) by the journalist Edward Bellamy, present disturbing analyses of a laissez-faire industrial philosophy; both works inspired movements toward reform. The social sciences in America came of age with studies such as Past, Present, and Future (1848) by the economist Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879), and Dynamic Sociology (1883) by the pioneering sociologist Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913). Meanwhile, the literature of science had expanded steadily, reaching its finest expression in The Principles of Psychology (1890), by William James, philosopher, psychologist, and brother of Henry James. This classic work had profound influence not only on psychology but also on literary expression in the U.S. and abroad. As the 19th century ended, a profound shift in the basis of American thought was taking place, gradually giving way to the pragmatism expounded by James in his The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).

THE 20TH CENTURY

With the 20th-century communications revolution—the advent of motion pictures, radio, and, later, television—books became a secondary source of amusement and enlightenment. American society became more mobile and homogeneous, and regionalism, the dominant mode of 19th-century literature, all but vanished, except in the work of some southern writers. At the same time, American writers began to exert a major influence on world literature.

Fiction of the 1920s.

The reaction against 19th-century romanticism, already being felt at the turn of the century, was given great impetus by the searing experience of World War I. The horrors and brutal reality of the war had a lasting impact on the American imagination. Novels such as William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) portray war as a symbol of human life, savage and ignoble. (The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Faulkner in 1949 and Hemingway in 1954.) The fiction of the 20th century emerged from World War I on a realistic and antiromantic path, and it has seldom strayed significantly since. American writers, especially, became more and more firmly committed to the replacement of sentimentality by new psychological insights. One such writer was Ellen Glasgow, a Virginian, whose novels Barren Ground (1925) and Vein of Iron (1935) are candid examinations of southern traditions, especially as regards the role of women; they have enjoyed a revival of interest in light of the renaissance of feminism that began in the 1960s.

The decade after World War I is often referred to as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. Rapid changes took place in society, as Americans rebelled against the strictures of Puritanism and the Victorian age. Rapid changes occurred also in literature, most notably in fiction. Most influential was the powerful fiction of Sherwood Anderson, including Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of psychologically penetrating short stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald, disillusioned but at the same time yearning, turned a satiric eye on upper-class society in such novels as This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925); critics have called the latter, a commentary on the American dream of the acquisition of wealth and power, a “perfect” novel. Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize in literature (1930), brilliantly satirized the “get-rich-quick” business culture of the age in the novels Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). Thornton Wilder, author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), began a long career as a novelist and playwright, later achieving greatest renown for his innovative drama of small-town life, Our Town (1938).

It was Gertrude Stein, an American author resident in Paris, who gave the name the “lost generation” to the group of rootless young Americans who flocked to Europe after the war. The group included Anderson, Fitzgerald, and Wilder, but the most prominent, who was to become one of the most important American writers of the century, was Hemingway. In addition to his novels about the war, Hemingway wrote books of short stories during the 1920s, including In Our Time (1924) and Men Without Women (1927). He epitomized the disillusioned and cynical survivors of the war to end wars, as World War I had been proclaimed. Stein herself was a significant influence on the writers of that generation, not only as a friend but also as a literary stylist in her own right, with her flaunting of tradition and her experiments with language, beginning with the three short novels in Three Lives (1908). More influential, however, was the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce. His use of stream-of-consciousness narration, symbols, and consciously poetic prose was reflected in virtually all the important American (and European) fiction written after World War I.

The Harlem Renaissance.

From 1920 to 1930 a major outburst of creative activity was notable among black Americans in all fields of art. The center of this activity was Harlem, in New York City; thus the period is often called the Harlem Renaissance. Black Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage, to become “The New Negro,” to use a term coined in 1925 by the sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke (1886–1954) in a landmark anthology of black writers by the same title. From the Harlem Renaissance came Jean Toomer (1894–1967), author of Cane (1923), a work mixing short stories and poems, marked by symbol and myth; the Jamaican-born Claude McKay, author of the novels Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929); the well-known poet Countee Cullen, author of Color (1925) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927); and the equally famed poet and short-story writer Langston Hughes, author of The Weary Blues (1926) and numerous other volumes of poetry and creator of Jesse B. Semple of the Simple tales, which first appeared in book form in 1934. As developed by Hughes, Semple is the symbol of the average African American living in the urban ghetto. Another leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance was the novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1901–60), also an anthropologist who in 1935 published Mules and Men, a book of southern black folktales. Her best-known novels were Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her autobiography (reprinted in 1985), and other recent books about her work constitute a Hurston revival.

Dorothy West (1907–98), known as the “kid” of the Harlem circle, much like Hurston, explored conflict within the black middle class as well as interracial conflict—the major theme of African-American literature. Publication of her novel The Wedding (1995), nearly fifty years after her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), stimulated a new interest in the Harlem Renaissance. (Arna Bontemps/Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967, published in 1978, and Bontemps's The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays—1972; reissued, 1984—contributed to the revival of interest in this period.)

The Depression Years.

Ending the glitter and excess of the Jazz Age, the catastrophe of the 1929 stock-market crash ushered in the “angry decade” of the 1930s. Many novels of neonaturalism and social protest were written, inspired by the rigors of the Great Depression.

A novelist who had gotten his start during the Harlem Renaissance, Arna Bontemps (1902–73), produced God Sends Sunday (1931), Black Thunder (1936; reprint 1968), and Drums at Dusk (1939), which dealt realistically with social issues. The works of John Steinbeck, including Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), exude despair; Steinbeck was to win a Nobel Prize in literature in 1962. Class conflict is the underlying theme of the prolific John O'Hara's most important work, the novel Appointment in Samarra (1934). Two monumental trilogies, James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (1932–35) and John Dos Passos's U.S.A. (1930–36), are suffused with bitterness and rage. The intense, often poignant, and unstructured novels of Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and The Web and the Rock (1939), express personal torment, as well as a mystical optimism about America. The intricately narrated novels of William Faulkner in this period, The Sound and the Fury (1929), Sanctuary (1931), and The Hamlet (1940), combine dark violence and earthy humor in their vision of the tragically contorted, wounded society of the post-Civil War South. His superb short stories have been issued in Go Down, Moses (1942) and Collected Stories (1950). Faulkner was leader of the group that kept southern regional writing alive through the next three decades.

World War II and After: Fiction.

The extensive fictional literature that arose out of World War II lacked the tendency to shock that had energized previous war novels. Authors were, perhaps, able by this time to regard armed conflict with greater philosophical detachment. The most impressive novels of World War II, all hard-edged and all concerned with the adaptation of the individual to restrictive military life, were From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones, and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer. Two popular novelists began their successful careers with war books: James Michener, with a collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947); and Irwin Shaw (1913–84), with his novel about the war in Europe, The Young Lions (1948). Humor, a persistently recurring strain in American writing, appeared in such novels as A Bell for Adano (1944), in which John Hersey dealt with the occupation of an Italian town by U.S. Army forces; and Mr. Roberts (1946), a bittersweet story about the U.S. Navy (later dramatized for stage and screen), by Thomas Heggen (1919–49).

Just as the novels of World War II seemed to emphasize individuality, the novels written in the decades following continued that emphasis. Authors, determined to assert their individuality, worked in a wide range of styles and dealt with an even wider range of material. A few uniquely original writers, however, can be distinguished. Vladimir Nabokov, born in Russia, became one of the greatest masters of English prose style. His novels with American settings, such as Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), written many years after he became an American citizen, are remarkable examples of tragicomedy. J. D. Salinger's novel of rebellious adolescence, The Catcher in the Rye, is both a humorous and a terrifyingly precise observation; written in 1951, it remains enormously popular. So too does Catch-22 (1961), a novel about World War II written by Joseph Heller. A statement about authority, it employs a sardonic, wildly imaginative style that has come to be known as black humor. Another very popular novelist in this vein, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., based one of his several innovative novels, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), on the fire bombing of Dresden as he saw it while a German prisoner during World War II. The multilevel narrative also introduces elements of science fiction, a genre that became increasingly popular after 1950. Among other experimental novelists are John Simmons Barth, whose novels include Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and Thomas Pynchon, author of V. (1963), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), and Mason & Dixon (1997).

Among the postwar southern writers who continued the tradition of Faulkner—sometimes referred to as “southern Gothic”—were Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940), Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1947), Eudora Welty (The Ponder Heart, 1954), and Flannery O'Connor (The Violent Bear It Away, 1960). Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men (1946), a powerful characterization of a southern politician, Kentucky-born Robert Penn Warren was also a noted poet, critic, and literary historian.

Two of the major writers of the mid- and late 20th century, John Cheever and John Updike, share a similar concern and approach in their somewhat detached, rueful, or more openly satirical ruminations on upper middle-class suburban life in the Northeast. Both wrote short stories for the New Yorker, a magazine that became as important to postwar fiction as the Atlantic Monthly was in the late 19th century. Cheever's novels range from the relatively benign The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), the story of an eccentric family, to the bleak tale of a fratricide, Falconer (1977). Updike is perhaps best known for his novels about a man fleeing disillusion. Two in the series, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), won Pulitzer prizes. Another noted novelist, Joyce Carol Oates, is also a fine critic and teacher of writing. She remains one of the most prolific of current writers. A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Them (1969) are major examples of her Gothic fiction. In contrast, Unholy Loves (1979) is a satirical portrait of life and learning at a small, second-rank college.

Ethnic and Regional Writing.

Concern about their ethnic heritage and role in American society has characterized the work of a large number of Jewish and black writers.

Examining their lives as Jews in urban 20th-century America, sometimes with despair and sometimes with hilarity, several writers created a remarkable body of introspective fiction from the immediate postwar period on. Chief among them were Saul Bellow, author of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Herzog (1964), who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976; Bernard Malamud, who wrote The Assistant (1957) and several collections of haunting short stories, including Idiots First (1963); and Philip Roth, author of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), the very popular Portnoy's Complaint (1969), and the trilogy Zuckerman Bound (1985).

Against the background of the transition from the Great Depression to involvement in World War II may be set several novels that deal on a personal level with the long-standing American problem of racial prejudice. Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and his autobiographical Black Boy (1945) are powerful statements, written in a starkly realistic manner. Passionate indignation about the black experience was voiced again in Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952) and in James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as in his later essays such as Nobody Knows My Name (1961).

The long tradition of American regional writing has continued into the latter part of the 20th century. Baltimore is the specific setting of the novels and stories of Anne Tyler (1941–    ). She was much praised for her Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), the story of the members of a broken home coming to terms with their lives. Alice Walker, poet and novelist, first won attention for Meridian (1976). In the highly acclaimed The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was also made into a film, she evokes by the structure of the dialogue the speech of rural southern blacks; she weaves a multilayered narrative of their lives much like Faulkner.

Writing from their special vantage point as black women, many other talented novelists have re-created the settings and lives with which they are intimately familiar in fiction that speaks, however, to a wide audience. Most important among this group is Toni Morrison, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. In The Bluest Eye (1969) and Song of Solomon (1977) she deals largely with the black experience in the south. Among her more recent books, Jazz (1992) is set in Harlem during the 1920s. Gloria Naylor (1950–    ), in The Women of Brewster Place (1982), gives a realistic picture of women's lives in an urban housing project.

20th-Century Poetry.

The founding by the poet and editor Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912) signaled an extraordinary poetic renaissance after a long fallow period. The first phase of the revival was imagism, a movement initiated by the poets Amy Lowell (Men, Women, and Ghosts, 1916) and Ezra Pound (Ripostes, 1912). Imagists set out to revolutionize poetic style, but two other phases of the poetic revival of the early 20th century were more popular: the work of an Illinois group, including the poets Vachel Lindsay, (The Congo and Other Poems, 1914), Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1915), and Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1915); and the work of a New England group, including Edwin Arlington Robinson (The Town Down the River, 1910) and Robert Frost (North of Boston, 1914). The works of Frost and Sandburg, during their long careers, became especially beloved and were regarded as the authentic expression of an American poetic spirit. Outside these literary groups, but widely popular and influential, was Edna St. Vincent Millay (The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, 1922).

The publication of The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot, an expatriate who lived in London, marked a turning point. The tendency to the esoteric in verse forms, language, and symbolism was augmented by Pound's Cantos (pub. between 1925 and 1960). Both Eliot and Pound, through their poetry as well as their critical writings, had an immense influence on the course of 20th-century poetry. So did the work of William Carlos Williams, whose 40 volumes of prose and poetry, among them Paterson (Books I–V, 1946–58), affected the writing of generations of poets.

Experiments with verse employing complex, often difficult imagery and symbolism were also carried on by Hart Crane, best known for his epic The Bridge (1930), Wallace Stevens (The Man with the Blue Guitar, 1937), and Marianne Moore (Collected Poems, 1951). The highly inventive work of e. e. cummings, from Is 5 (1926) to 73 Poems (1963), played with typographical form and aural imagery. Theodore Roethke managed two styles: free-form for the expression of surrealistic ideas, and a simpler, lyrical form for the expression of more rational modes of thought; both styles are exemplified in his collection The Far Field (posthumously pub. 1964).

Other poets who established a more direct communication with the reader include Robinson Jeffers, whose eloquent lines, as in Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925), express his reverence for nonhuman forms of life; Randall Jarrell, whose poetry, for example, Losses (1948), was formed by grief over World War II; and Archibald MacLeish (Collected Poems, 1917–1952, 1952) and Richard Wilbur (Things of This World, 1956), who in their lyrical, contemplative verse express humanist concerns. The protest poetry of the Beat Generation communicates directly, with great impact. Far different in tone is the strain of southern black oral narrative tradition that can be detected in some of the work of Gwendolyn Brooks (Annie Allen, 1949), Nikki Giovanni (1945–    ; Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement, 1970), and Maya Angelou (Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, 1971).

With Robert Lowell (Lord Weary's Castle, 1946), there began what has been termed the “confessional” mode in poetry, characterized by explicit references to personal anxieties and disabilities. The verse of Sylvia Plath (Ariel, 1965) and Anne Sexton (Live or Die, 1966, and The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975) is similarly informed by images of personal torment.

A resurgence of poetry manifested itself from the late 1960s on, as a proliferation of literary magazines provided outlets for work and colleges and universities sponsored poetry workshops and offered courses taught by poets in residence. Among the many contemporary poets—encompassing a wide variety of forms and styles—May Swenson (1919–89), Robert Bly (1926–    ), and Galway Kinnell (1927–    ) are noted for their clearly defined imagery, often based on the close observation of nature. In contrast, the use by James Merrill (1926–95) of highly personal images, often inspired by the occult, and the notoriously convoluted syntax employed by John Ashbery (1927–    ) make their verse very difficult to apprehend. Merrill's First Poems (1951) were lyric verse influenced by the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden; he later shifted to a more epic form in The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). Ashberry, inspired by the French surrealist poets, is best known for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Elizabeth Bishop's poems (Collected Poems, 1969) are often vividly descriptive, written in a spare, generally colloquial style that has won her many admirers among fellow poets. The first woman to be chosen U.S. poet laureate, Mona Van Duyn (1921–2004), is noted for the warmth and intellect, the wit and strong emotions of her poetry about parents and children, married life, and love, as in Letters from a Father and Other Poems (1983). Adrienne Rich is both a critic and the author of many volumes of poetry, including The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950–2000 (2002). Rich's writings, often suffused with sexuality, show her commitment to radical feminism. Rita Dove, the nation's first black poet laureate and author of four books of poetry, including Thomas and Beulah (1986; Pulitzer Prize, 1987), is also a novelist, short story writer, and playwright.

20th-Century Nonfiction.

A traditional view of American history was presented by the historians Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), and by Samuel Eliot Morison (The Oxford History of the American People, 1965) and Henry Steele Commager (The Search for a Usable Past, 1967). Accounts of specific trends and eras include Anti-Intellectualism in America (1963) by Richard Hofstadter (1916–70), a study of the effects of conservatism; and The Guns of August (1962), about the beginnings of World War I, and A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978), by Barbara Tuchman (1912–89).

Brilliant political reporting and analysis was done in the 1930s. Such books as Inside Europe (1936), by the journalist John Gunther (1901–70); The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937), by the novelist Elliot Harold Paul (1891–1958); and Not Peace but a Sword (1939), by the foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean (1899–1975), helped prepare Americans for World War II.

After the war, the novelist John Hersey's landmark report Hiroshima (1946; updated, 1985) described the effects of the first atomic bomb. Other writers of fiction turned to nonfiction during the postwar period. Truman Capote invented what he called the “nonfiction novel” with In Cold Blood (1966), a harrowing account of the murder of a Kansas family. Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (both 1968) describe and interpret headline-making contemporary political protest. A distinctive type of writing, often called the New Journalism, is seen in the work of Tom Wolfe (1931–    ). Writing in a personal, humorous, free-flowing style, he has reported on varied aspects of American life from hippie culture (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968) to space exploration (The Right Stuff, 1975); his “non-journalistic” writings included The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998).

Out of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s came writers whose works reveal the experiences of black Americans. Among these was the dramatist and poet Imamu Amiri Baraka (originally named LeRoi Jones; 1934–    ), who also probed the situation in his Home: Social Essays (1966) and Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971). The black nationalist leader Malcolm X (originally named Malcolm Little) wrote his influential Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) with Alex Haley, who later became famous as the author of the best-selling Roots (1976), a semifictional account of Haley's family history from its African beginnings to the present. Maya Angelou, the poet-novelist and children's author, wrote a powerful memoir of her own growing up in the South, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970); other autobiographical volumes followed in 1974, 1976, and 1981.

Other serious concerns addressed by American writers from the 1960s on have been the war in Indochina, the pollution of the environment, and women's rights. Among the books about the American involvement in the Vietnam War are The Best and the Brightest (1972) by David Halberstam (1934–    ) and Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972) by Frances Fitzgerald (1940–    ). Silent Spring (1962), by the marine biologist and ecologist Rachel Carson, provoked worldwide concern about the effects of pesticides on the environment and led to the banning of DDT in the U.S. A pioneering work on women's role in society was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963); she was followed by many authors, including Susan Faludi (1959–    ), a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who wrote the popular Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1991).

20th-Century Literary Criticism.

Literary criticism in the 20th century began with the neohumanists, who upheld the classical tradition and called for a firmer ethical basis for art. These theories were expounded by such critics as Paul Elmer More (1864–1937; Shelburne Essays, 11 vol., 1904–21), William Crary Brownell (1851–1928; American Prose Masters, 1909), and the Harvard University professor Irving Babbitt (The New Laokoön, 1910). The appraisal of American writing as a distinct national literature began in the 1920s, introduced by the English novelist D. H. Lawrence in his groundbreaking Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). The American scholar Vernon Louis Parrington provided a sociopolitical interpretation of American literature in his treatise Main Currents in American Thought (3 vol., 1927–30), which won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1928. A more popular survey of American letters was done by the literary historian Van Wyck Brooks in his series beginning with The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (1936). Coincident with these studies was the assault unleashed by H. L. Mencken in his American Mercury reviews, 1924–33, on contemporary tastes and prejudices of what he called the American “boobocracy.”

From the professional scholars of literature came, beginning in the late 1930s, the new criticism, a name derived from a 1941 essay by John Crowe Ransom; it emphasized close analysis of text and structure rather than consideration of social or biographical contexts. Among the critics expounding these tenets were Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Independent of this approach were several notable scholars, including Joseph Wood Krutch, whose essays were collected in The Modern Temper (1929) and The Measure of Man (1954); and Lionel Trilling, author of one of the most influential of modern critical essays, The Liberal Imagination (1950). Also noteworthy were Malcolm Cowley, author of Exile's Return (1934); Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942) and The Inmost Leaf (1955); and Leslie Fiedler , whose Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) provided a new interpretation of certain themes and approaches.

Edmund Wilson has been considered a notably well-rounded literary critic and theorist. Independent of mind, widely erudite yet never dryly pedantic, he remained unaligned with formal academic criticism. His best-known works are Axel's Castle (1931) and The Wound and the Bow (1941).

Since the mid-1960s, academic criticism has become increasingly esoteric, often comprehensible only to scholars. Among the major theoretical influences have been Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and new historicism. By the 1990s they also included Afrocentrism, gender criticism, postcolonial criticism, and cultural criticism. Perhaps the best-known American literary critics after 1970 were Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom (1930–    ), both associated with Yale University. The French-born Derrida devised the approach known as deconstructionism, which holds that written texts seem to refer more to other texts than to some central, fixed reality; therefore, close analysis of their language reveals essential ambiguities of meaning. Bloom maintained in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973) that writers attempt to overcome the influence exerted by their predecessors through a process he describes as creative misreading of texts. Harvard University professor Helen Vendler (1933–    ) has won respect for her sensitive analyses of poetry, such as The Odes of John Keats (1983).

See also African-Americans; Criticism, Literary; Drama and Dramatic Arts; Novel; Poetry; Short Story; Nobel Prizes; Pulitzer Prizes.

For further information on this topic, see the Bibliography, sections 815. General literature, 816. Literary tradition, 817. Romanticism in literature, 818. Criticism, literary, 819. Poetry, 820. Versification, 821. Dramatic literature, 822. Children's literature, 823. Novel, 824. Short story, 825. Detective and mystery story, 826. Science fiction, 827. Essay, 828. Biography, 829. Satire, 830. Rhetoric, 831. American literature, 832. History of American literature.