Periods of American Literature

WRITTEN BY:  J.E. Luebering

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The history of American literature stretches across more than 400 years. It can be divided into five major periods, each of which has unique characteristics, notable authors, and representative works.

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• The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

  The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This was the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and focused on the future.

  In its earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction written by British settlers who populated the colonies that would become the United States.

  John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the earliest works of American literature.

  Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.

  Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.

  A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain.

  The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the political direction of the United States.

  Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a quintessentially American life story.

  Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, wrote the first African American book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau was another notable poet of the era.

  The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in 1789.

  Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the earliest slave narratives and a forceful argument for abolition.

  By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner.

  Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

  James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

• The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)

  Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of nature over human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.

  Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849.

  Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

  The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme.

  The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) are gripping tales of horror.

  In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.

  James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday life in the Northeast.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the upper-class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through European models and sensibilities.

  The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.

  Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-enduring works of American literature.

  As a young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the Transcendentalists before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

  Herman Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s early life of traveling and writing.

  Walt Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.