American Literature

Module 3-American Novelists

Reported by-Sanilyn Grace T. Zamora

Sources-Encyclopedia

             World Literature

At the end of this module the students are expected to:

1. Identify the American Novelists;

2. Differentiate the American Novelists from one another;

3. Match the appropriate description of the American Writer.

                The earliest American writings were concerned directly with the dream of a new world and first attempts at its realization. From both North and South came published accounts of pioneering motives and settlements. They form the picture of foundations. As the new century began, American authors commenced to free themselves from the inevitable preoccupation with the establishment of a new nation. “All things have their season,” Franklin had written, “and with young countries as with young men, you must curb their fancy to strengthen their judgement…To America, one schoolmaster is worth dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael.”

                It was one thing for writers to create a Native American literature; it was quite another thing to know how to do it. For 50 years after the founding of the nation, authors patterned their work after the writings of Englishmen. William Cullen Bryant was known as the America’s Wordsworth; Washington Irvings essays resemble those of Addison and Steele; James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels like those of Scott. Although the forma and style of these Americans were English, the content—character and especially setting—was American. Every American region was described by at least one prominent writer.

                The first great period of American literature came between about 1830 and the beginning of the civil war, when many writers were inspired by the mood of expansion and democracy that characterized the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the new spirit of hope and adventure that pervaded the country. The took as their subject the common man instead of the aristocratic figures found in English literature. The greatest of this group were the novelists Herman Melville, whose major work was the epic moral tale Moby Dick (1851); Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of such novels as The Scarlet Letter (1850); and the poet Walt Whitman, whose progressive and unconventional poetic autobiography was entitled Leaves of Grass (1855).  Other writers of this period included the poet Emily Dickinson and a group known as the Transcendentalists, including the liberal philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Individualists Henry David Thoreau, whose well-known book Walden (1854) described his experience of learning self-reliance.

                Westward expansion during the 19^th century resulted in the creation of much regional and humorous literature. The most important contributor to these genres was Mark Twain, whose The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) described life along the Mississippi River. Toward the end of the 19^th century there emerged a group of writers known as Naturalists, who saw man as a victim of his fate and treated everyday subjects unromantically and in unflinchingly realistic detail. Among the greatest of these group were Theodore Dreiser, whose novels Sister Carrie (1900) and The Financier (1912) explored new social problems in a rapidly industrializing America, and Stephen Crane, whose masterful account of Civil War combat was The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Other notable writers of naturalist fiction included Frank Norris and Jack London. Henry James’s novels of the same period were quite different, dealing with the psychological process of upper-middle class characters and the social and moral conflicts arising between European and Americans. James’s enormous productivity, mastery of style and psychological subtlety made him perhaps the greatest of all American Novelists.

                After World War I an important group of novelists and poets, collectively known as the “Lost Generation,” reflecting their disillusionment with post war society, won acclaim. The most important novelist of this interwar period included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and other books show the disillusionment and the moral decay of American society in the 1920s. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) treat American expatriates in Europe during war or its aftermath. In such novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), Faulkner offered a fictional rural Mississippi county as a microcosm of human society.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) 

                The first U.S. Novel was William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) it is an imitation of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Charles Brockden Brown, was the first professional U.S. novelist, modeled his work after the English gothic romances, as exemplified in Weiland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799). Fenimore Cooper was the first important American Novelist, he wrote more than 30 novels and many other works. His subjects and settings capture the American idea of his nature. He was an enormously popular writer in Europe as well as at home. In his day Cooper was best known as the author of the ‘Leatherstocking Tales,’ five novels of frontier life. These stories of stirring adventure such as ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ (1826) and the ‘Deerslayer’ (1841), feature Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo, the skillful, courageous, and valorous woodsman. This character embodied American traits and so to Europeans seemed to represent the New World. Cooper achieved international prominence with his second novel, The Spy (1821), a tale of the Revolution. His many novels blending history and romance resulted in his being called “The American [Sir Walter] Scott,” a title that put him in the company of one of the periods most popular and respected authors.

Match the appropriate description of the American writers. Some requires two answers.

_____Captain John Smith                                                           

_____Charles Brockden Brown                                                

_____James Fenimore Cooper                                                

_____Irving                                                                                      

_____Edgar Allan Poe                                                                  

_____Emily Dickinson

a. Poems are mixed gaiety and gloom

b. “The Spy”

c. Explored Native American life

d. “A True Relation of…Occurences and   Accidents in Virginia”

e. “Dying”

f. First American poet inventor of horror and detective genres

g. “Rip Van Winkle”                                                                        

h. First American Novel

i. Satirists

j. First important American novelists whose subjects and settings are largely American