Origins of American National Literature and Early Novelists
The Rise of a National Literature
Debates Over a National Literary Identity
In the early years of the new republic, there was disagreement about how American literature should grow. There were three different points of view. One group was worried that American literature still lacked national feeling and did not want books based on European culture. Another group felt that American literature was too young to declare its independence from the British literary tradition. The third group also felt that the call for a national literature was a mistake. To them, good literature was universal, always rising above the time and place where it was written.
As American literature grew and flourished, the greatest writers found a way to combine the best qualities of the literature of the Old and New Worlds.
Novels and Early Novelists
Novels were the first popular literature of the newly independent United States. The 18th century became a period of greatness for the English novel, with writers like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding.
In the early days of independence, American novels served a useful purpose. The language spoke directly to ordinary Americans. They used realistic details to describe the reality of American life. The first American novel was William Hill Brown’s Power of Sympathy; it was suppressed as “morally dangerous.” As a result, novelists tried to make their books acceptable by filling them with moralistic advice and religious sentiments.
Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry Brackenridge was the first important novel. Like Susanna Rowson, Brackenridge wanted to achieve “a reform in morals and manners of the people.”
Another novelist who described the nation’s western frontier was Gilbert Imlay. His Emigrants is an early example of a long line of American novels that showed American culture to be more natural and simple than the old culture of Europe.
Far more interesting and important is the work of Charles Brockden Brown. His interest in the psychology of horror greatly influenced such writers as Hawthorne and Poe many years later. Brown had the ability to describe complicated (and often cruel) minds. Wieland, Brown’s best-known work, was a psychological “Gothic” novel in the European style.
The Knickerbocker Era
In the early part of the 19th century, New York was the center of American writing. Its writers were called the “Knickerbockers“, and the period from 1810 to 1840 is known as the “Knickerbocker era” of American literature. The name comes from A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker by Washington Irving. It was a humorous rather than a serious history of the city, and the book is also a masterpiece of comedy that laughs at the Puritans. The Sketch Book contains two of the best-loved stories from American literature: Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In all, The Sketch Book contains 32 stories. The majority are on European subjects, mostly English.
Later works by Irving include Bracebridge Hall, a collection of essays about the old-fashioned English countryside; Tales of a Traveller, set in Europe; and The Alhambra, one of his best works, which retells the legends of a great Spanish palace where he lived for many months. Irving was the first American to earn his living through literature.
Of the other Knickerbocker writers, only James Kirke Paulding is worth mentioning here. His best novel, The Dutchman’s Fireside, is an amusing satire set in Colonial America (he is anti-Indian and pro-slavery).
Cooper and Frontier Fiction
James Fenimore Cooper wanted to speak for all America. In over thirty novels and several works of non-fiction, he pointed out the best parts of American society and the American personality and severely criticized the worst parts. The Pioneers was the first novel of Cooper’s famous “Leatherstocking” series, set in the exciting period of America’s movement westward. In general, he divides Indians into two types: his “good” ones are loyal and affectionate, “noble savages,” while the “bad” ones are filled with evil and cannot be trusted. Cooper seems to be warning all of humanity that this could be the fate of other races.
Continuation of The Pioneers includes The Last of the Mohicans, one of America’s most famous novels, full of action, and others such as The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. He is most successful in scenes of violent action or of night-time terror and mystery. His descriptions of women characters are especially weak. Cooper was also one of the first writers of sea stories in America; examples include The Pilot and The Red Rover. From 1826, Cooper spent seven years in Europe, but he was angered by the way Englishmen spoke unfavorably about his country and, in defense, he wrote Notions of Americans.
Back in America, Cooper became a political conservative. His family had been part of the farming aristocracy, and he wrote the “Littlepage Trilogy” to support this group. In these three novels—The Chainbearer, Satanstoe, and The Redskins—he regrets the passing of America’s landowning aristocracy and the rise of a new class, the “money-grabbers.”
Poetry and Southern Voices
The era of Irving and Cooper had a third important voice: the poet William Cullen Bryant. Bryant’s own philosophy was democratic and liberal. As a poet, he disliked the old neoclassical style. The new kind of poetry should help the reader to understand the world through emotion. His first great poem, Thanatopsis, shows the deep Romantic spirit of Bryant in his youth. Bryant was also a writer with a deep social conscience, as in such poems as The Indian Girl’s Lament and The African Chief.
Although literature developed far more slowly in the South than in the North, there were a few important writers. In Swallow Barn, John Pendleton Kennedy remembers the old Southern society of his youth. William Gilmore Simms, the best of the “romancers of the old South“, produced in his finest novel, The Yemassee, a highly original work of literature. His subject is a tribe of Indians slowly being destroyed by the advance of white society.