Section 8: American Literature

8.1 Historical Context and Periodisation

American literature has developed its own distinct tradition, shaped by the experience of colonisation, revolution, slavery, westward expansion, industrialisation, and the rise of the United States as a world power. Its major periods broadly parallel but diverge significantly from British literary history.

8.2 The American Renaissance (1820–1865)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Emerson was the founding figure of American Transcendentalism — a philosophical movement that held that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and that intuition rather than reason is the path to truth. His major works:

• Nature (1836) — founding Transcendentalist text; the transparent eyeball
• "The American Scholar" (1837) — America's intellectual declaration of independence
• "The Divinity School Address" (1838) — attacks institutional religion
• "Self-Reliance" (1841) — "Trust thyself"; non-conformity; "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"
• "The Over-Soul" (1841) — unity of all consciousness
• "The Poet" (1844) — the poet as seer and namer

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

Thoreau was Emerson's disciple and the most radical of the Transcendentalists. He lived for two years at Walden Pond (1845–47) to conduct his "experiment in living." Major works: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) — the account of his experiment; "Resistance to Civil Government" (later called "Civil Disobedience," 1849) — justifies refusing to pay unjust taxes, influencing Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)

Hawthorne explored Puritan guilt, sin, and the ambiguity of good and evil in prose of great symbolic density. He described his works as "romances" rather than novels — more interested in psychological and moral truth than realistic representation.

• The Scarlet Letter (1850) — Hester Prynne; adultery; Puritan New England; the letter A
• The House of the Seven Gables (1851) — hereditary sin; old New England
• The Blithedale Romance (1852) — based on Brook Farm commune
• "Young Goodman Brown" — short story; Puritan hypocrisy; the forest as evil
• "Rappaccini's Daughter" — science and sin

Herman Melville (1819–1891)

Melville's reputation collapsed in his lifetime but was resurrected in the 1920s. His masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851) is one of the greatest novels in world literature — Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the white whale becomes a meditation on obsession, evil, fate, democracy, and the unknowability of nature.

• Typee (1846) — South Sea adventures; first novel
• Moby-Dick (1851) — "Call me Ishmael"; Ahab; the white whale; Pequod
• Pierre (1852) — experimental; failed commercially
• "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) — "I would prefer not to"; alienation; Wall Street
• Billy Budd, Sailor (written 1888–91, pub. 1924) — innocence, law, and evil

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Poe was the master of Gothic horror and the inventor of the detective story. His critical theory — the "unity of effect" — argued that a short story should produce a single emotional impression and should be readable in one sitting. Major works: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (first detective story), "The Purloined Letter," "Ligeia," "Berenice." His critical essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) describes the composition of "The Raven" as a calculated rational process.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Whitman revolutionised American — and world — poetry with Leaves of Grass, which he continued to expand through his lifetime (1855–1891; nine editions). His free verse, cataloguing style, and celebration of the body, democracy, and the American self broke all inherited conventions. Key poems: "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (elegy for Lincoln), "O Captain! My Captain!" (Lincoln elegy), "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Dickinson published only 10 poems in her lifetime; 1,775 were discovered after her death. Her compressed, slant-rhyming, dash-punctuated poems — mostly in common metre — explore death, immortality, nature, God, and consciousness with extraordinary originality. Key poems: "Because I could not stop for Death" (poem 712), "I heard a Fly buzz — when I died" (465), "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" (288), "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1129), "This is my letter to the World" (441), "Hope is the thing with feathers" (254).

8.3 Realism, Naturalism, and Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835–1910)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, is the central figure of American literary realism and the creator of the first great American vernacular novel. Ernest Hemingway said: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) — boyhood; Missouri; Aunt Polly
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — Huck and Jim; Mississippi; race and freedom
• The Prince and the Pauper (1881) — identity; class
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) — time travel; satire
• The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) — race; identity; fingerprints

American Naturalism

Naturalism applied Darwinian determinism to fiction — characters are shaped by heredity, environment, and economic forces beyond their control. Key naturalist writers:

• Stephen Crane — The Red Badge of Courage (1895); Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
• Theodore Dreiser — Sister Carrie (1900); An American Tragedy (1925)
• Frank Norris — McTeague (1899); The Octopus (1901)
• Jack London — The Call of the Wild (1903); The Sea-Wolf (1904)
• Upton Sinclair — The Jungle (1906); meatpacking industry; socialism

8.4 American Modernism

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

Fitzgerald was the laureate of the Jazz Age — the 1920s era of prosperity, excess, and disillusionment. His masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925) is the defining American novel of the 20th century — Nick Carraway narrates the story of Jay Gatsby's obsessive pursuit of Daisy Buchanan and the American Dream. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, and the Valley of Ashes are among the most discussed symbols in American literature.

• This Side of Paradise (1920) — first novel; Jazz Age youth
• The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
• The Great Gatsby (1925) — masterpiece; American Dream; green light
• Tender is the Night (1934) — expatriates; decline
• The Last Tycoon (1941) — unfinished; Hollywood

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

Hemingway's style — short sentences, sparse dialogue, understated emotion, the "iceberg theory" (seven-eighths below the surface) — transformed American prose. He won the Nobel Prize in 1954.

• The Sun Also Rises (1926) — Lost Generation; expatriates in Paris and Pamplona
• A Farewell to Arms (1929) — First World War; love and loss; Lt Henry and Catherine
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) — Spanish Civil War
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952) — Santiago and the marlin; Nobel citation
• "Hills Like White Elephants" — short story; abortion; iceberg theory
• "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" — nada philosophy; nihilism

William Faulkner (1897–1962)

Faulkner — Nobel Prize 1949 — set most of his work in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, creating a mythical South haunted by slavery, the Civil War, and family decay. His style is complex, stream-of-consciousness, with multiple narrators and non-linear time.

• The Sound and the Fury (1929) — four narrators; Compson family; Benjy's section
• As I Lay Dying (1930) — 15 narrators; Bundren family; Addie's coffin
• Light in August (1932) — race; Joe Christmas; Lena Grove
• Absalom, Absalom! (1936) — Thomas Sutpen; the South's past; multiple tellings
• "The Bear" — wilderness; the old South; initiation

8.5 The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1920s–1930s) was a flowering of African American intellectual, literary, and artistic life centred in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York. Its key figures celebrated Black culture, identity, and experience while protesting racial injustice.

8.6 Post-War American Literature

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) and Tennessee Williams (1911–1983)

The two giants of post-war American drama:

• Miller — Death of a Salesman (1949); The Crucible (1953); All My Sons (1947)
• Williams — The Glass Menagerie (1944); A Streetcar Named Desire (1947); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

The Beat Generation

The Beat writers of the 1950s rejected mainstream American materialism and conformity in favour of spontaneous expression, Eastern religion, jazz, and sexual freedom.

• Jack Kerouac — On the Road (1957); spontaneous prose
• Allen Ginsberg — "Howl" (1956); "America"; Kaddish
• William S. Burroughs — Naked Lunch (1959); cut-up technique

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry used raw personal experience — mental illness, family trauma, sexuality — as poetic subject matter, breaking the Modernist taboo on direct self-expression.

• Sylvia Plath — The Bell Jar (1963, novel); Ariel (1965, poems): "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "Morning Song"
• Robert Lowell — Life Studies (1959); founded confessional poetry
• Anne Sexton — To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
• John Berryman — The Dream Songs (1964–68); Henry

Toni Morrison (1931–2019)

Morrison — Nobel Prize 1993 — is the greatest African American novelist, exploring the legacy of slavery, community, and Black identity with mythic power and linguistic richness.

• The Bluest Eye (1970) — Black girl's desire for blue eyes; racism internalised
• Sula (1973) — female friendship; community
• Song of Solomon (1977) — myth; Black male identity
• Beloved (1987) — slavery; a mother kills her child to save her from slavery; the ghost Beloved
• Jazz (1992) — Harlem; jazz structure
• Paradise (1997) — all-Black Oklahoma town

8.7 American Postmodernism and Other Key Figures

• John Updike — Rabbit tetralogy; middle-class American life
• Philip Roth — Portnoy's Complaint (1969); American Pastoral (1997)
• Thomas Pynchon — The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
• Don DeLillo — White Noise (1985); Underworld (1997)
• Raymond Carver — minimalist short stories; "Cathedral"; dirty realism
• Alice Walker — The Color Purple (1982); womanist; recovered Hurston
• Ralph Ellison — Invisible Man (1952); Black identity; "I am an invisible man"
• Richard Wright — Native Son (1940); Black Boy (1945)
• J. D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye (1951); Holden Caulfield; adolescent alienation