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United States literature

Early US literature falls into two distinct periods: colonial writing of the 1600s–1770s, largely dominated by the Puritans, and post-Revolutionary literature from the 1780s, when the ideal of US literature developed, and poetry, fiction, and drama began to evolve on national principles. Early 19th-century Romanticism contrasted sharply with the social realism of subsequent post-Civil War writing. 20th-century US writers continued the trend towards realism, as well as developing various forms of modernist experimentation.

colonial period (1607–1770s) Literature of this period includes travel books and religious verse, but is mainly theological: Roger Williams (1603–1683), Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) were typical Puritan writers. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) is the first work of more than historical interest.

post-Revolutionary period (1780s–1820s) This period produced much political writing, by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), and Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), and one noteworthy poet, Philip Freneau (1752–1832).

Early 19th century

The influence of English Romantics became evident, notably on the poems of William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), Washington Irving's tales, Charles Brockden Brown's Gothic fiction, and James Fenimore Cooper's novels of frontier life. During 1830–60 intellectual life was centred in New England, which produced the essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Oliver Wendell Holmes; the poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Lowell, and John Whittier; and the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. Outside the New England circle were the novelists Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.

post-Civil War period (1865–1900) The disillusionment of this period found expression in the realistic or psychological novel. Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane wrote realistic war stories; Mark Twain and Bret Harte dealt with Western life; the growth of industrialism led to novels of social realism, notably the works of William Howells and Frank Norris; and Henry James and his disciple Edith Wharton developed the novel of psychological analysis among the well-to-do. The dominant poets were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The short story flourished, its leading practitioners being Hawthorne, Poe, James, Harte, and O Henry.

20th century

Writers specializing in the short story have included Ring Lardner, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, William Saroyan, Eudora Welty, Grace Paley, and Raymond Carver.

Drama

The USA produced a powerful group of dramatist between the wars, including Eugene O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Elmer Rice, Thornton Wilder, and Clifford Odets. They were followed by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. A later generation now includes Edward Albee, Neil Simon, David Mamet, John Guare, and Sam Shepard.

Poetry

Poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, and Edna St Vincent Millay extended the poetic tradition of the 19th century, but after the Imagist movement (see Imagism) of 1912–14 an experimental modern tradition arose with Ezra Pound, T S Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, ‘HD’ (Hilda Doolittle), and Wallace Stevens. Attempts at writing the modern US epic include Pound's Cantos, Hart Crane's The Bridge, and William Carlos Williams's Paterson. Among the most striking post-World War II poets are Karl Shapiro, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Charles Ulson, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), Denise Levertov (1923–97), John Ashbery, A R Ammons (1926– ), and Allen Ginsberg.

literary criticism Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), George Santayana (1863–1953), H L Mencken, and Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) were dominant figures, followed by Lionel Trilling (1905–1975), Van Wyck Brooks, Yvor Winters (1900–1968), and John Crowe Ransom, author of The New Criticism (1941), which stressed structural and linguistic factors. More recently, US criticism has been influenced by French literary theory and the journalistic criticism of Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, and Susan Sontag.

Novel

The main trends have been realism, as exemplified in the work of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser, and modernist experimentation. After World War I, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, and Richard Wright established the main literary directions. Among the internationally known novelists since World War II have been John O'Hara, James Michener, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, J D Salinger, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, and James Baldwin. Recent US literature increasingly expresses the cultural pluralism, regional variety, and historical and ethnic range of US life. Feminism and minority consciousness have been brought to the fore by authors such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison (Nobel Prize 1993), and Maya Angelou.

Best-selling authors of popular fiction include Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, Anne Rice, Stephen King, and John Grisham.

American literature literature