General and Brief Introduction to American Literature

In the beginning, America was a series of British colonies on the east coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins with the tradition of English literature. However, very quickly unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production began to develop an American writing tradition.

Some consider Captain John Smith to be the first American author, when he wrote The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

Similar writers of interest include Daniel Cox, John Hammond, Gabriel Thomas, George Percy, Daniel Denton, Thomas Ash, John Lawson and William Strachey.

Poetry was also written in those early days, Nicholas Noyes wrote Doggerel verse.

Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet were popular and Michael Wiggleworth was known for his best selling poem The Day of Doom.

لشعر كان يكتب في تلك الايام من قبل كتاب الشعر مثل نيكولاس نويز حيث كتب قصيدة فكاهيه . ادوارد تايلور وآن برادستريت كانوا معروفين ذلك الوقت , و مايكل ويقلوورث كان معروفا بقصيدته الاكثر مبيعات ( ذا دي أوف دووم ) . It is almost inevitable that given the history of the early American settlers, religious questions were rich topics for early writings. A journal written by John Winthrop discussed the religious foundations of the Massachusetts Bay Colony..

American literature has a relatively short but colorful history. The first widely read American author was Benjamin Franklin, whose witty aphorisms and sound advice written in the yearly journal Poor Richard’s Almanack helped shape ideas of what it means to be an American.

Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) was the first American to gain an international literary reputation

James Fenimore Cooper’s verbal landscapes in his Leatherstocking Tales captured the nation’s vast beauty

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson broke from poetic tradition and brought a sense of individuality to the nation’s literature

Mark Twain still captivates readers with his unique—and uniquely American—humor and insight

The modernists of the 1920s and 1930s produced such talents as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway

Today, writers like Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy continue to make American literature relevant and exciting

American literature like American history, although short, however, still full of glories and shining masterpieces and writers

Those American writers, while conquering this wild America, also had conquered the great field of American literature

. From its first imitative activities to innovative attempts nowadays, American literature gradually gains its unique style, theme and form, and it is always excited to see their works are more and more America in its true sense

American literature is part of world's literature, however, it always has its unique flavor that cannot be easily ignored.

Most critics hold that the history of American literature can be divided into six parts, orderly, colonial period, romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism and post-modernism.

Although American literature in its true sense did not begin until 19th century, however, we always talk about colonial period as a preparatory introduction to American literature.

American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies

During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States

Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English Literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition