Following essay explores the American literature before the Civil War to identify and understand its types and how historical events shaped them. American literature starts out with the first accounts of the colonies of Virginia and New England. Among the early tales of voyages to Virginia is one of a ship wrecked in a storm in the Bermudas. The survivors of the wreck, cast away on a strange island, rebuilt their ship and eventually sailed to Jamestown. The account of their castaway experience provided Shakespeare with source material for The Tempest. Conditions in the early Virginia colony rendered it an inauspicious place for literature. Not so in New England, where Puritan industry and discipline saw the establishment of the first college (Harvard), the first printing press, and the first newspaper. The literature that emerged in New England was of a largely religious character. One notable exception was a satire against the Puritans, New English Canaan (1637); written by Thomas Morton, a former colonist who had been banished by the authorities for his dissolute, loose living ways (Walker 37).
On a much loftier ethical plane was Roger Williams's The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), an earnest if ineloquent plea for the separation of church and state. The second generation colonists, among whom can be included the two finest poets of the period, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, also created a new genre: the captivity narrative. But the most important cultural development of the early 18th century was "the Great Awakening," the religious revival spearheaded by Jonathan Edwards, a theologian who had a lasting impact on American thought. Edwards is well acknowledged for his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), famous for its fire and brimstone character (Krupat 45).
With the exception of a few pictographs, such as those that characterize the epic Walam Olum of the Delaware Indians, American literature for the most part remained an oral tradition until the nineteenth century. Tribal histories often included myths and legends, but first person memoirs that incorporated elements of oral storytelling were among the earliest examples of American literature to take the form of written narratives. The first of these to be published was A Son of the Forest (1829), written in English by the Pequot William Apess and reflecting the type of spiritual confessions popular during the period. Other significant personal narratives combining autobiography with ethnography include The Life, History, and Travels of Kah ge ga gah bowh (1847) by the Ojibway George Copway, and Life among the Piutes (1883) by the Paiute Sarah Winnemucca (Krupat 33).
Some Americans narrated their life stories to others. The first and to many readers the most impressive of these was the Sauk chief Black Hawk's Black Hawk, an Autobiography (1833), translated by Antoine Le Claire and edited by John B. Patterson. Governor Blacksnake's narrative, which was recorded around the same time as Black Hawk's, was set down in Seneca style English by Benjamin Williams. Blacksnake's narrative was edited and published much later under the title Chainbreaker (1989).
The first American author to publish in English was the Mohegan, Samson Occom, whose popular A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772), reflected Occom's calling as a missionary (Walker 72). In 1854 Cherokee John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, which mythologized the real life mixed blood bandit was both the first American novel and the first novel published in California. Ridge's posthumously collected Poems (1868) were also the only volume of poetry published by an American writer in the nineteenth century. Among the earliest novels by an American woman was the Creek Sophia Alice Callahan's Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891), which concerns the interaction between a Creek girl and her missionary teacher.
Satire was the also a types of literature during this time of American literature, the term for a period of American literature that saw a remarkable outburst of creativity in American letters. The American critic F. O. Matthiessen first employed the term to describe the major works of Emerson (Walker 37); Thoreau; Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850); Melville (Moby Dick, 1851), and Whitman (Denson 325–345). Now the term is used to describe the entire American literary output in the 30 years preceding the Civil War. Critical to the development of literature and thought in the period was the movement known as transcendentalism, a rich mixture of Romantic ideas and American individualism (Denson 325–345).
In addition to the prominent figures named above, the period of time also bragged four poets, reverenced in their own time and even today looked upon as important figures in the development of American poetry: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (The Song of Hiawatha, 1855), Oliver Wendell Holmes ("The Wonderful One Hoss Shay," 1858), John Greenleaf Whittier (Voices of Freedom, 1846), and James Russell Lowell (The Biglow Papers, 1848). Unlike these poets, Edgar Allan Poe was almost completely neglected in his time, yet he made the greater impact on literary history. Poe's poetry and criticism proved to be an important influence on the French symbolist poets, and his fiction helped to create two unique genres, the detective story and horror fiction (Walker 55). Other important developments in the period were the publication of slave narratives and of Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional indictment of slavery Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
Works Cited
Denson, Andrew. “Nineteenth Century Indian International Fairs : and the Indian Image in Tribal Autonomy the Late Nineteenth Century Muskogee’s.” History 34.3 (2003): 325–345.
Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. University of California Press, 1989. Web. 7 Mar. 2013.
Walker, Cheryl. Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (New Americanists). Duke University Press Books, 1997. Web. 7 Mar. 2013.
