Chapter VIIA Brief Introduction to American Literature
I. Different Stages of American Literature
1. American literature was formed and developed at the time of the War of Independence.
2. At the beginning of the 19th century, American literature showed great importance on the stage of world literature.
3. American literature is the product of the development of the American society, reflecting the social life of America.
II. Fiction
1. Stages of American fiction
A. From Irving, American fiction began to flourish, but it still followed the European convention.
B. There rose the novelists of Romanticism.
C. The fiction that is typically American actually began from Mark Twain.
D. From the turn of the 20th C., American fiction began to be more noticeable.
E. After WWII, there appeared a diversity of American fiction.
F. American contemporary literature has continued to undergo healthy development in producing new forms and new language suitable for expressing a vivid and varied sense about contemporary life.
2. Schools of American fiction
A. American modernism from 1900 to 1940
B. Postmodernism from 1960s to 1980s

C. American fiction became more conservative during the late 1980s.
D. The new directions: science fiction & hybrid forms, critical literature, voices and myths by women writers and authors from other marginal groups.
E. Short story or cool-surfaced minimalist fiction.

3. Washington Irving (1783-1859)
A. The “father of American literature”
B. The first American to achieve international literary reputation.
C. Born in NYC on April 3rd, 1783.
D. He was the first to write by using the local color of America, and his details added a note of symbolism to the basic themes.
E. His most famous
story is Rip Van Winkle.
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
A. Born on Day of Independence, 1804 as a descendant of Puritan immigrants.
B. He is famous in romantic fiction, a pioneer in psychological description, and the outstanding representative of the 19th century American literature.
C. He wrote as a moralist.
D. His most famous novel
is The Scarlet Letter.


5. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
A. Born in Boston in 1809.
B. Poe’s life was very miserable.
C. He is a critic, a  poet and a novelist.
D. He wrote 50 stories, 70 poems and some criticisms.
E. Famous works: The Fall of the
House of Usher, The Black Cat.
F. The “father of detective stories”
6. Mark Twain (1835-1910)
 A. Basic information:
a. The pen name of Samuel L. Clements.
b.  A realistic writer called “the true father of our national literature”
B. Life:
a. Born on Nov. 30, 1835.
b. An apprentice on a steam boat.
c. A soldier during the Civil War.
d. In 1862 he went West and wrote many humorous sketches.
C. Contributions:
a. His masterpiece is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
b. He is humorist and he connected American folk humor and serious literature.
c. He satirized the evils of the society greatly, but later he showed a pessimistic attitude to society.
7. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

A. One of the great American realists or naturalist.
B. His novels deal with everyday life, with details, mixed with good and bad, but without comments.
C. Two periods boarded by the Russian Revolution:
    Before that his writing was realistic and naturalistic.
    After that he gave up naturalists, and became a socialist writer.
D. The American Tragedy is his masterpiece.
E. He joined the American Communist Party.

F. He is an outstanding representative of modern American progressive literature.
G. His works revealed the tragedies of American society, but he failed to find ways to solve these problems.
8. Jack London (1876-1916)
A. Born on Jan. 12th, 1876 in San Francisco.
B. He led a very poor and miserable life.
C. Best novels: The Call of the Wild and White Fang.
D. He revealed severely the evils of American society.
E. Once he became a socialist and later pessimistic.
F. He killed himself on the night of Nov. 21, 1916 at the age of 40.

9. Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
A. He graduated from Yale.
B. When his novel Main Street appeared, he became a famous novelist.
C. He is a satirist and the first writer in America to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
D. He describes the daily life of the American people in a small town with a very sharp eye.
E. In 1930, he won the Nobel Prize.
10. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
A. His subjects were often about war and its effect  on people, or contest.
B. He first became an editor, then a volunteer soldier in WWI, and he began to write professionally.
C. After the war, he became part of a group of Americans---the lost generation.
D. He won the Nobel Prize for
    The Old Men and the Sea.
E. His style of writing is striking.

11. Saul Bellow (1915-)
A. He got a doctorate in literature.
B. He is professor at the University of Chicago.
C. In 1976, he won Nobel Prize and became the eighth Nobel Prize winner in American literature.
D. One of the most outstanding representatives of the Jewish literature.

12. Toni Morrison (1931-)
A. An African American woman writer, editor, and professor.
B. The best known novels: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
C. One of “The 30 Most Powerful Women in America” by Ladies’ Home Journal.
D. Born in 1931 and she studied humanities in Howard University in 1949.
E. In 1970 she published her first novel The Bluest Eye, and in 2000 the novel was chosen as a selection for Oprah’s Book Club.
F. In 1973, her novel Sula was nominated for the National Book Award.
G. In May 2006, The New York Times Book  Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty five years.
H. In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African American woman to win it. ?

II. Poetry
1. Basic introduction
A. Before the American War of Independence, poetry was the main literary form of the colonies.
B. Walt Whitman started the real American poetry.
a. concentrating on a native and contemporaneous subject matter and the style of free verse
b. a vision of all the exaltation based on common but minutely observed instances
c. He influenced a number of excellent but very different poets.

C. During the post-war period, American poetry varied greatly and flourished.



A. He taught European languages, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard.
B. He received many honors.

2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(1807-1882)
C. After his death, a bust of Longfellow was placed in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey---the first American to be so honored.
D. He introduced European culture to the attention of Americans and spread American folklore in Europe.
E. He was famous for the lyrical style and was the most popular poet in the late 19th century America.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
3. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
A. He is remembered for his poems The Leaves of Grass.
B. He combined the ideal of democratic common man and that of the rugged individual.
C. The poetic style he devised is now called free verse.
4. Robert Frost (1874-1963)


A. Born in 1874 in San Francisco.
B. He did not get university degree,
      but he taught in many universities.
C. Frost was the 20th century national poet.
D. He was chosen to read one of his poems at the inauguration of the late President John F. Kennedy, the first poet ever to be so honored.
E. His famous poems: Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken and his collection of poems A Boy’s Will.
5. Langston Hughs ( 1902-1967)
A. Born in Missouri, on Feb. 1st 1902.
B. In 1925 he formed a group for the purpose of exchanging ideas, encouraging each other and initiating a new trend in Negro literature.
C. He was honored “ The Harlem Laureate” and “O. Henry of Harlem”
D. He was a poet, play writer, novelist, songwriter, biographer, editor, newspaper columnist, translator and lecturer.
E. He received many awards and honors for his writing.
F. Famous poems: The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and collections of New Songs, and Shakespeare of Harlem.

III. Drama
1. Introduction
A. America did not have its own drama until the turn of the twentieth century.
B. In 1906, there opened the New Theatre in Chicago which marked a welcome to encourage experimental drama.
C. After WWI, the plays by O’Neill reflected the upsurge of the American theatres and O’Neill became America’s foremost playwright.
D. America’s most widely discussed playwrights since WWII have been Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
2. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

A. He began a new epoch of American Drama and in 1936 he got the Nobel Prize for his famous and original plays.
B. O’Neill was born in a Broadway hotel on Oct. 16th, 1888.
C. Famous plays: The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness.

3. Tennessee Williams (1911-)
A. At 16 he won a prize in a national writing contest and at 17 he saw his first short story printed in Weird Tales.
B. He got his B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1938.
C. He is a novelist, short story-writer,
and a poet and playwright.
D. Works: The Glass Menagerie,
    A Streetcar Named Desire,
    Suddenly Last Summer

4. Arthur Miller (1915-)
A. He went to the University of Michigan, where he began writing plays and became interested in socialism.
B. He is a playwright of social philosophy, concerned with the inner thoughts of individuals and their conflicts with the
   morality of their society.
C. His main works: Death of
A Salesman, The Crucible,
Incident At Vichy and The Price.