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American Literature Throughout the Years

By: Eloise Dunfee

Poor Richards Almanac

(1732)

1731

Originally, the character Poor Richard was portrayed as a dim-witted and foolish astronomer but was later replaced by a country dweller, quiet and dull man who values thrift, hard work, and a simple life

Benjamin Franklin

  • Originally began posting in brothers newspaper The New England Courant
  • Appealed to audience by using easily understood language and practical arguments

About the Author

Other Works

Other Works

Autobiography (1771)

- Offered Worldy Suggestions for Success

The Power of Sympathy

(1789)

1789

  • "First American Novel"

  • Wrote about how to overcome the prejudices against sentimental writing

  • Led to a flood of sentimental novels in the 19th century

William Hill Brown

  • Born in Boston late in the year 1765 to his father, a well known clockmaker, and third wife
  • Known to literary history as the author of the first American novel
  • Also a poet, essayist, and dramatist of some contemporary reputation

About the Author

Common Sense

(1776)

1776

  • Urged Americans to embrace "common sense" and trust their own feelings about what was right.
  • Strongly advocated for independence from Great Britain
  • Very Influencial

Thomas Paine

  • Born in Thetford, England
  • Failed out of school by age 12
  • Took to the sea and in 1774, met Benjamin Franklin who helped him emigrate to Philadelphia
  • Published "Common Sense" in 1776 and became the most effective propogandist for colonial cause
  • Wrote in the language of the people, often quoting the Bible in his arguments

About the Author

"'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death"

Legend of Sleepy Hollow

(1819)

1819

  • Symbolizes the conflict of man versus the supernatural
  • Headless Horseman - appears in literature from as early as the fourteenth century in works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century)
  • The story’s main protagonist, Ichabod is the schoolmaster and singing master of Sleepy Hollow.
  • He is well-read and highly superstitious,

Washington Irving

  • One of the most famous 19th century American authors
  • At the age of 19, he began to write essays in his brother’s newspaper The Morning Chronicle.
  • His short stories best helped to demostrate his unique sense of humor and style
  • Along with short stories, wrote a four part biography of George Washington
  • At the news of his passing, the flag was held at half mast and people paused and reflected on his achievements as a literary figure

About the Author

"A tart temper never mellows with age; and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use."

Rip Van Winkle (1819)

Rip Van Winkle

  • Story follows a villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious men in the Catskill mountains, drinks their strong liquor, and thence falls deeply asleep.
  • He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.
  • Examines the tyranny of marriage, the tyranny of day-to-day responsibilities, and the more literal tyranny of King George III of Britain over his American subjects.

The

Leatherstocking Tales

(1823-1840)

1823

  • A five-volume series celebrating the career of a frontiersman named Natty Bumpoo
  • Popular in America as well as European Continents
  • Introduced new levels of Romanticism

James Fenimore Cooper

  • Author whose historical romances of 17th-19th century colonial & indigenous characters brought him fame and fortune.
  • First major american novelist
  • One of the most sucessful writers in the world

About the Author

“All greatness of character is dependent on individuality”

-Cooper

By order of story, not publication

Books in Series

The Deerslayer (1841)

The Last of the Mohicans(1826)

The Pathfinder(1840)

The Pioneers(1823)

The Prairie(1827)

The Tell Tale Heart

1843

  • Short Gothic horror story published in The Pioneer in 1843
  • First of the genre of detective stories
  • His tale of murder and terror, told by a nameless homicidal madman, influenced

later stream-of-consciousness fiction and helped secure Poe's reputation as master of the macabre(disturbing & horrifying because of depiction of death )

Edgar Allan Poe

  • American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic
  • Best known for poems and short stories
  • Central figure of American Literature
  • A part of the American Gothic literary movement
  • Explored the human experience through irrationality, madness, and supernatural horror.
  • His work often featured characters suffering from melancholy, insanity, and obsession

About the Author

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality”

Self Reliance

(1841)

1841

  • Discussed the need for each individual to avoid conformity, follow his own instincts and ideas, and manifest his own destiny
  • Promoted emerging idea of the American dream and solidified many prominent American ideals
  • Boldly defines an image of the self-reliant American who believes in the unfailing sanctity of the individual who seeks to manifest their personal destiny in a nation filled with opportunities

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher
  • Began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston
  • Achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer & author of such essays as Self-Reliance.
  • Developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement
  • Influences generations of Americans and even authors worldwide

About the Author

“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”

The Liberator

1831-1865

1831

  • The most widely circulated anti-slavery newspaper during the antebellum period and throughout the Civil War
  • Published and edited in Boston
  • Denounced all people and acts that would prolong slavery including the US Constitution
  • Demanded the immediate emancipation of all people held in bondage & the restoration of the natural rights of enslaved persons

William Lloyd Garrison

  • Born in Massachusetts in 1805
  • Worked for women’s right to vote, civil rights, and prohibition, but he is best known for his work as a leading white abolitionist
  • Founder of the influential American Anti-Slavery Society
  • Founded The Liberator, an antislavery newspaper, in 1831, and was its outspoken editor until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865

About the Author

"I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD."

-William Lloyd Garrison

Walden

1854

  • Draws upon each of Thoreau's various identities in meditating upon the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being
  • A work of narrative prose which often soars to poetic heights, combining philosophical speculation with close observation of a concrete place
  • It is a rousing summons to the examined life and to the realization of one’s potential, while at the same time it develops a religious vision of the human being and the universe.
  • Walden has been admired by a larger world audience than any other book written by an American author

Henry David Thoreau

(1817–1862)

  • Philosopher, poet, environmental scientist, and political activist
  • Well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy (and poetry)
  • Familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes to Emerson
  • Discussed his own empirical findings with leading naturalists of the day
  • Made unique contributions to ontology, the philosophy of science, and radical political thought

About the Author

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

Other Works by Thoreau

  • A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

  • Civil Disobedience (1849)

Other Works

Moby Dick

1851

  • Has been called a whaling yarn, a theodicy, a Shakespeare-styled political tragedy, an anatomy, a queer confessional, an environmentalist epic, and more because this novel seems to hold all the world
  • Moby Dick was a symbol of the biblical leviathan which symbolizes the indomitable force of nature.
  • Captain Ahab had his leg bitten off by the whale Moby Dick and journeys around the ocean with his crew to kill the whale
  • His vengeance leads everyone except

Ishamel to their fates

Herman Mellvile

  • Born William Melvill in 1819 to a merchant

family in New York City

  • After failing to get a job working on the Eerie Canal, Melville began his career as a seaman
  • Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • The book is infused with energy and insights the two developed through letters and conversation
  • ALthough the book is popular now, only sold 3,000 copies in Melvilles lifetime

About the Author

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”

Uncle Tom's Cabin

1852

  • Helped Precipitate Civil War
  • Stowe heard first-hand accounts from formerly enslaved people and employed at least one fugitive in her home
  • She was appalled by the stories of cruel separations of mothers and children
  • Stowe enlisted friends and family to send her information and scoured freedom narratives and anti-slavery newspapers for first-hand accounts.
  • Critics told her she had made it up so she published The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), compiling real-life evidence that had informed her novel

Harriet Beecher

Stowe

  • Published more than 30 books, bestselling was :Uncle Tom's Cabin"
  • Took part in lively debates at the family table and by discussing current events and social issues, she learned how to argue persuasively.
  • Stowe undertook two speaking tours
  • Promoting progressive ideals, she worked to reinvigorate the art museum at the Wadsworth Atheneum and establish the Hartford Art School, later part of the University of Hartford.

About The Author

“Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. ...”

(1811-1896)

'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'

1921

  • Written by Langston Hughes when he was 17 years old
  • Told from the perspective of a man who has seen the great ages of the world alongside the banks of the most important rivers
  • Used the image of the river to depict Black perseverance and strength
  • Engages with themes of identity and perseverance and what Black men and women have had to endure throughout centuries of slavery and discrimination in America

Langston Hughes

  • Born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri
  • Raised by his grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston until he was 13
  • Then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband
  • Began Writing Poetry in Lincoln
  • Along with poetry, wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose

About the Author

“Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

The Great Gatsby

(1925)

1925

  • Explores human follies, the hopelessness of societal constructs, and man’s struggle with time and fate
  • Touches on the hopeless American Dream
  • Hypocrisy of the elite
  • Speaks volumes about the women of its time, their position, relevance, helplessness and meek acceptance

Francis Scott Firzgerald

(September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940)

About the Author

  • Born in St. Paul, Minnesota
  • Attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement
  • Princeton Class of 1917
  • wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael

"Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures."

The Scarlet Letter

  • Written bout shaming and social stigmatizing during the early Puritanism
  • Uses symbolism to portray certain things
  • To show that all people sin no matter who they are or what status they have
  • People can learn from the consequences of their sin, and that sin can help a person change for the better

1850

Other Works by Hawthorne

  • The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

  • The marble Faun(1860)

Other Works

Nathaniel Hawthorne

  • Born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts
  • Began writing tales or a romance or both
  • Chose mainly American materials, drawing especially on the history of colonial New England and his native Salem in the time of his early American ancestors
  • Died on May 19, 1864 and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts

About the Author

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. …”

The Jungle

1905

  • Muckracking the meat packing industry
  • Wrote to expose apalling working conditions of the meat industry
  • Led to new federal legislation of food safety
  • Progressives wanted to reveal how these companies eliminated competition, set high prices, and treated workers as "wage slaves."
  • "The Jungle" fictionalized account of Chicago's Packingtown
  • Story centered on Jurgis Rudkis, a young man who had recently immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania.

Upton Sinclair

(Sept. 20, 1878 – Nov. 25, 1968)

  • Livined in cheap apartments from the age of 10 but often visited his wealthy relatives in Maryland.
  • Contrast between wealth & poverty troubled him and became his major theme
  • One of the best educated American writers of his era
  • Socialist contacts sent him to Chicago to write about the plight of meatpacking workersin 1904

About the Author

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

  • https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-24-1-b-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle-muckraking-the-meat-packing-industry.html
  • https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/browse/irvin_dept_special_collections/collections/matthew_arlyn_bruccoli_collection_of_f_scott_fitzgerald/life_of_fitzgerald/index.php
  • https://poemanalysis.com/langston-hughes/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers/
  • https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/harriet-beecher-stowe-life/
  • https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-24-1-b-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle-muckraking-the-meat-packing-industry.html
  • https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/uncle-toms-cabin/
  • https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/the-endless-depths-of-i-moby-dick-i-symbolism/278861/
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/herman-melville
  • https://literarydevices.net/the-scarlet-letter-symbolism/
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nathaniel-hawthorne
  • https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/
  • https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=etd
  • https://www.nationalabolitionhalloffameandmuseum.org/william-lloyd-garrison.html
  • https://transcription.si.edu/project/11766#:~:text=The%20Liberator%20(1831%2D1865),influential%20American%20Anti%2DSlavery%20Society.
  • https://www.loc.gov/nls/braille-audio-reading-materials/lists-nls-produced-books-topic-genre/listings-on-narrow-topics-minibibliographies/leatherstocking-tales-james-fenimore-cooper/
  • https://www.ushistory.org/paine/

Sources

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