AMERICAN LITERATURE 



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AMERICAN LITERATURE 



Longfellow's Erai. distinctly Ameri- 



can, not merely because their scenes are laid 

 in Aimnca. hut they breathe the 



spirit of the new land. 



Its Beginnings. The United States has a 

 ry which dates back 300 years, and since 

 many of the men who made its earliest history 

 were scholars, it produced literature of a kind 

 through all that period. But literature in the 

 broader sense those writings which all the 

 reading world accepts and authorities class 

 with really worthy productions it has had for 

 little more than a century. 



They were serious folk, those early produc- 

 ers of literature in America, and the condi- 

 tions in the new home were not such as to 

 encourage artistic production. Histories of the 

 colonies; dissertations on liberty, the desire 

 for which had led many of them across the 

 sea; profound theological treatises; solemn 

 song books these were the earliest output of 

 the colonies. Occasionally one figure stood out 

 far above the rest. There was Anne Brad- 

 street, for instance, the title-page of whose 

 publications heralded her as "The Tenth Muse 

 lately sprung up in America"; whose works, 

 however, show nothing of the life of the new 

 land to which she had come as a bride, but 

 drone on about solemn "world facts." 



Two of the greatest names in this very 

 early history of literature in New England 

 were those of Increase and Cotton Mather, 

 autocratic father and ascetic son, whose works 



were highly regarded in their day, but have 

 won no recognition from posterity. Jonathan 

 Edwards had a more far-reaching influence, 

 and his Freedom of the Will is still recognized 

 as a masterpiece of reasoning. 



The Stirring Revolutionary Times. These 

 early figures in the literature of America seem 

 very far away and indistinct, but with the 

 thrilling events which led to the Revolution, 

 and with the Revolution itself, there came into 

 prominence a man who stands even to these 

 later days as a typical American Benjamin 

 Franklin. His writings, and particularly his 

 Autobiography, which ranks with the great 

 biographies" of all time, mark the beginning 

 of a new era in American literature. 



As the colonial period was interested most 

 of all in religion, the Revolutionary era con- 

 cerned itself chiefly with politics, and most of 

 the great statesmen of the day left some mark 

 on the literature of the period. The Federal- 

 ist, the Declaration of Independence and Jef- 

 ferson's Autobiography stand as monuments 

 of this era when men were too much engaged 

 in doing to find much time for writing. 



No time is without its verse-writers, and 

 this Revolutionary period had several, of 

 whom only one, Philip Freneau, possessed 

 enough force and originality to write verse 

 that would live. The earliest novel-writer of 

 note, Charles Brockden Brown, lived in this 

 period, and his weird romances fairly bristle 

 with horrors. 



The National Era 



The "Pioneers." Only with the nineteenth 

 century did the United States begin to pro- 

 duce literature that attracted favorable atten- 

 tion abroad. Men had made permanent homes 

 for themselves, had won the liberty without 

 which they felt that life could not broaden 

 to its full, and at length they had time for 

 joy and for beauty. The first man to respond 

 to the new, scarce-conscious demand and to 

 win international recognition was Washington 

 Irving, whose genial spirit no less than his 

 delightful style makes him to this day one 

 of the best-loved of American authors. In 

 poetry, the great name of those early days 

 was that of Bryant, whose Thanatopsis stands 

 as "an event and a landmark" in American 

 literature. It is impossible to imagine a 

 present-day boy of seventeen producing such 

 a poem, yet that was Bryant's age when he 

 wrote : 



So live that when thy summons comes to join 



The innumerable caravan, which moves 



To that mysterious realm, where each shall 



take 



His chamber in the silent halls of death, 

 Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, 

 Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and 



soothed 



By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave 

 Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 

 About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. 



Another outstanding figure in the early half 

 of the century was James Fenimore Cooper, 

 whose Spy, published in 1821, was the first 

 typically American novel. He almost always 

 has "a forest trail to follow or a windy sea 

 to sail," and his stories will live for the action 

 in which they abound. With this pioneer 

 group, too, must be reckoned Edgar Allan Poe, 

 accounted by many critics the supreme genius 

 in the history of American literature. It is 

 difficult to say which is more masterly, his 



