US history through literature

US history through literature

Why literature matters for history

American literature is a privileged way to grasp the contradictions of the land of the free: slavery, expansion, immigration, civil rights, capitalism. Each generation rewrites the national story.

Foundations (17th–18th c.)

• Puritan beginnings: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation; sermons of Jonathan Edwards.
• Revolutionary period: Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776); Declaration of Independence (1776); The Federalist Papers (1788).

The American Renaissance (19th c.)

• Transcendentalists: Emerson, Self-Reliance; Thoreau, Walden (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1849).
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850) — Puritan guilt.
• Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) — obsession and capitalism.
• Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855) — democratic poetry.
• Slave narratives: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life (1845); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

Civil War to the Roaring Twenties

• Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — race in the South.
• Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) — war disillusion.
• Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) — American dream as illusion.
• Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926).
• Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston.

Great Depression and War

• Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) — Dust Bowl migration.
• Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) — racial violence in Chicago.

Postwar to today

• Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
• Ginsberg, Howl (1956) — Beat Generation.
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) — Jim Crow South.
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) — legacy of slavery; Nobel 1993.
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985) — frontier violence.
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016).
• Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).

Sample problematic

In what ways has American fiction kept rewriting the myth of the frontier — from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales to McCarthy's Blood Meridian?