1

Introduction

Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that

produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the

eastern seaboard of the North American continent—colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively

ventured westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United

States, a nation. By the end of the 19th century this nation extended southward to the Gulf of Mexico,

northward to the 49th parallel, and westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had

taken its place among the powers of the world—its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that

inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of

Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking

and feeling, wrought many modifications in people’s lives. All these factors in the development of the

United States molded the literature of the country. This article traces the history of American poetry,

drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the early 17th century through the turn of the 21st

century. For a description of the oral and written literatures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas,

see Native American literature. Though the contributions of African Americans to American literature are

discussed in this article, see African American literature for in-depth treatment. For information about

literary traditions related to, and at times overlapping with, American literature in English.
 2

Body

The literature of exploration

Had history taken a different turn, the United States easily could have been a part of the great

Spanish or French overseas empires. Its present inhabitants might speak Spanish and form one

nation with Mexico, or speak French and be joined with Canadian Francophone Quebec and

Montreal. Yet the earliest explorers of America were not English, Spanish, or French. The first

European record of exploration in America is in a Scandinavian language. The Old

Norse Vinland Saga recounts how the adventurous Leif Eriksson and a band of wandering

Norsemen settled briefly somewhere on the northeast coast of America -- probably Nova Scotia,

in Canada -- in the first decade of the 11th century, almost 400 years before the next recorded

European discovery of the New World. The first known and sustained contact between the

Americas and the rest of the world, however, began with the famous voyage of an Italian

explorer, Christopher Columbus, funded by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella.

Columbus's journal in his "Epistola," printed in 1493, recounts the trip's drama -- the terror of the

men, who feared monsters and thought they might fall off the edge of the world; the near-

mutiny; how Columbus faked the ships' logs so the men would not know how much farther they

had travelled than anyone had gone before; and the first sighting of land as they neared America.

Bartolomé de las Casas is the richest source of information about the early contact between

American Indians and Europeans. As a young priest he helped conquer Cuba. He transcribed

Columbus's journal, and late in life wrote a long, vivid History of the Indians criticizing their

enslavement by the Spanish. Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. The first

colony was set up in 1585 at Roanoke, off the coast of North Carolina; all its colonists

disappeared, and to this day legends are told about blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the area. The
 3

second colony was more permanent: Jamestown, established in 1607. It endured starvation,

brutality, and misrule. However, the literature of the period paints America in glowing colors as

the land of riches and opportunity. Accounts of the colonizations became world-renowned. The

exploration of Roanoke was carefully recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True Report of

the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). Hariot's book was quickly translated into Latin, French,

and German; the text and pictures were made into engravings and widely republished for over

200 years. The Jamestown colony's main record, the writings of Captain John Smith, one of its

leaders, is the exact opposite of Hariot's accurate, scientific account. Smith was an incurable

romantic, and he seems to have embroidered his adventures. To him we owe the famous story of

the Indian maiden, Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American

historical imagination. The story recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan,

saved Captain Smith's life when he was a prisoner of the chief. Later, when the English

persuaded Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them as a hostage, her gentleness, intelligence, and

beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married John Rolfe, an English gentleman. The

marriage initiated an eight-year peace between the colonists and the Indians, ensuring the

survival of the struggling new colony. In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers

opened the way to a second wave of permanent colonists, bringing their wives, children, farm

implements, and craftsmen's tools. The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters,

travel journals, ships' logs, and reports to the explorers' financial backers -- European rulers or, in

mercantile England and Holland, joint stock companies -- gradually was supplanted by records

of the settled colonies. Because England eventually took possession of the North American

colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial literature is English. As American

minority literature continues to flower in the 20th century and American life becomes
 4

increasingly multicultural, scholars are rediscovering the importance of the continent's mixed

ethnic heritage. Although the story of literature now turns to the English accounts, it is important

to recognize its richly cosmopolitan beginnings.

 5

The Colonial period in New England

It is likely that no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the Puritans.

Between 1630 and 1690, there were as many university graduates in the northeastern section of

the United States, known as New England, as in the mother country -- an astounding fact when

one considers that most educated people of the time were aristocrats who were unwilling to risk

their lives in wilderness conditions. The self-made and often self-educated Puritans were notable

exceptions. They wanted education to understand and execute God's will as they established their

colonies throughout New England. The Puritan definition of good writing was that which

brought home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual

dangers that the soul faced on Earth. Puritan style varied enormously -- from complex

metaphysical poetry to homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious history. Whatever the

style or genre, certain themes remained constant. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal

damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. This world was an arena of constant battle

between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, a formidable enemy with many disguises.

Many Puritans excitedly awaited the "millennium," when Jesus would return to Earth, end

human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and prosperity. Scholars have long pointed

out the link between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest on ambition, hard work, and an intense

striving for success. Although individual Puritans could not know, in strict theological terms,

whether they were "saved" and among the elect who would go to heaven, Puritans tended to feel

that earthly success was a sign of election. Wealth and status were sought not only for

themselves, but as welcome reassurances of spiritual health and promises of eternal life.

Moreover, the concept of stewardship encouraged success. The Puritans interpreted all things

and events as symbols with deeper spiritual meanings, and felt that in advancing their own profit
 6

and their community's well-being, they were also furthering God's plans. They did not draw lines

of distinction between the secular and religious spheres: All of life was an expression of the

divine will -- a belief that later resurfaces in Transcendentalism. In recording ordinary events to

reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the Bible, chapter and verse.

History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the Puritan triumph over the New World

and to God's kingdom on Earth. The first Puritan colonists who settled New England exemplified

the seriousness of Reformation Christianity. Known as the "Pilgrims," they were a small group

of believers who had migrated from England to Holland -- even then known for its religious

tolerance -- in 1608, during a time of persecutions. Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible

literally. They read and acted on the text of the Second Book of Corinthians -- "Come out from

among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord." Despairing of purifying the Church of England

from within, "Separatists" formed underground "covenanted" churches that swore loyalty to the

group instead of the king. Seen as traitors to the king as well as heretics damned to hell, they

were often persecuted. Their separation took them ultimately to the New World.
 7

Multicultural writing

The dramatic loosening of immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s set the stage for the rich

multicultural writing of the last quarter of the 20th century. New Jewish voices were heard in

the fiction of E.L. Doctorow, noted for his mingling of the historical with the fictional in novels

such as Ragtime (1975) and The Waterworks (1994) and in the work of Cynthia Ozick, whose

best story, Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969), has characters modeled on leading figures

in Yiddish literature. Her story The Shawl (1980) concerns the murder of a baby in a

Nazi concentration camp. David Leavitt introduced homosexual themes into his portrayal of

middle-class life in Family Dancing (1984). At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish

writers from the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar dealt

impressively with the experience of immigrants in the United States. Novels such as N. Scott

Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch’s Winter

in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977),

and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and The Antelope

Wife (1998) were powerful and ambiguous explorations of Native American history and identity.

Mexican Americans were represented by works such as Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me,

Ultima (1972), Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1981), and Sandra

Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1983) and her collection Woman Hollering Creek, and

Other Stories (1991). Some of the best immigrant writers, while thoroughly assimilated,

nonetheless had a subtle understanding of both the old and the new culture. These included the

Cuban American writers Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love [1989])

and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban [1992] and The Agüero Sisters [1997]); the Antigua-

born Jamaica Kincaid, author of Annie John (1984), Lucy (1990), the AIDS memoir My
 8

Brother (1997), and See Now Then (2013); the Dominican-born Junot Díaz, who won acclaim

for Drown (1996), a collection of stories, and whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar

Wao (2007) won a Pulitzer Prize; and the Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, who

wrote The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002). Chinese Americans found an

extraordinary voice in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and China

Men (1980), which blended old Chinese lore with fascinating family history. Her first

novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), was set in the bohemian world of the San

Francisco Bay area during the 1960s. Other important Asian American writers included Gish

Jen, whose Typical American (1991) dealt with immigrant striving and frustration; the Korean

American Chang-rae Lee, who focused on family life, political awakening, and generational

differences in Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999); and Ha Jin,

whose Waiting (1999; National Book Award), set in rural China during and after the Cultural

Revolution, was a powerful tale of timidity, repression, and botched love, contrasting the mores

of the old China and the new. Bharati Mukherjee beautifully explored contrasting lives in India

and North America in The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Jasmine(1989), Desirable

Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004). While many multicultural works were merely

representative of their cultural milieu, books such as these made remarkable contributions to a

changing American literature.

 9

Kincaid, Jamaica

Jamaica Kincaid, 1999.MDCarchives

During the 1990s some of the best energies of fiction writers went into autobiography, in works

such as Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995), about growing up in a loving but dysfunctional

family on the Texas Gulf Coast; Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), a vivid portrayal of a

Dickensian childhood amid the grinding conditions of Irish slum life; Anne Roiphe’s bittersweet

recollections of her rich but cold-hearted parents and her brother’s death from AIDS in 1185

Park Avenue (1999); and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a

painful but comic tour de force, half tongue-in-cheek, about a young man raising his brother after

the death of their parents.

 10

Dave Eggers, 2006.Davide Lanzilao—Contrasto/Redux

The memoir vogue did not prevent writers from publishing huge, ambitious novels,

including David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), an encyclopaedic mixture of arcane lore,

social fiction, and postmodern irony; Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001, National Book

Award) and Freedom (2010), both family portraits; and Don DeLillo’s Underworld(1997), a

brooding, resonant, oblique account of the Cold War era as seen through the eyes of both

fictional characters and historical figures. All three novels testify to a belated convergence

of Social Realism and Pynchonesque invention. Pynchon himself returned to form with

sprawling, picaresque historical novels: Mason & Dixon (1997), about two famous 18th-century

surveyors who explored and mapped the American colonies, and Against the Day (2006), set at

the turn of the 20th centur

 11

Poetry

The post-World War II years produced an abundance of strong poetrybut no individual poet as

dominant and accomplished as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost,

or William Carlos Williams, whose long careers were coming to an end. The major poetry from

1945 to 1960 was Modernist in its ironic texture yet formal in its insistence on regular rhyme and

metre. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, there were a variety of poets and schools who

rebelled against these constraints and experimented with more-open forms and more-colloquial

styles.
 12

Formal poets

The leading figure of the late 1940s was Robert Lowell, who, influenced by Eliot and

such Metaphysical poets as John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, explored his spiritual

torments and family history in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). Other impressive formal poets

included Theodore Roethke, who, influenced by William Butler Yeats, revealed a genius for

ironic lyricism and a profound empathy for the processes of nature in The Lost Son and Other

Poems (1948); the masterfully elegant Richard Wilbur (Things of This World [1956]); two war

poets, Karl Shapiro (V-Letter and Other Poems [1944]) and Randall Jarrell (Losses [1948]); and

a group of young poets influenced by W.H. Auden, including James Merrill, W.S. Merwin,

James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and John Hollander. Although they displayed brilliant technical

skill, they lacked Auden’s strong personal voice.

 13

Experimentation and Beat poetry

By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction had developed. Poets began to turn away from

Eliot and Metaphysical poetry to more-romantic or more-prosaic models such as Walt Whitman,

William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of poets associated

with Black Mountain College in western North Carolina, including Charles Olson, Robert

Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov, treated the poem as an unfolding

process rather than a containing form. Olson’s Maximus Poems (1953–68) showed a

clear affinity with the jagged line and uneven flow of Pound’s Cantos and

Williams’s Paterson. Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory, prophetic “Howl” (1956) and his moving

elegy for his mother, “Kaddish” (1961), gave powerful impetus to the Beat movement. Written

with extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired by writers as diverse as Whitman, the

biblical prophets, and English poets William Blake and Christopher Smart, as well as by the

dream-logic of the French Surrealists and the spontaneous jazz aesthetic of Ginsberg’s friend the

novelist Jack Kerouac. Other Beat poets included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso,

and Gary Snyder, a student of Eastern religion who, in Turtle Island (1974), continued the

American tradition of nature poetry. The openness of Beat poetry and the prosaic directness of

Williams encouraged Lowell to develop a new autobiographical style in the laconic poetry and

prose of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead(1964). Lowell’s new work influenced

nearly all American poets but especially a group of “confessional” writers, including Anne

Sexton in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia

Plath in the posthumously published Ariel (1965). In her poetry Plath joined an icy sarcasm to

white-hot emotional intensity. Another poet influenced by Lowell was John Berryman,

whose Dream Songs(1964, 1968) combined autobiographical fragments with minstrel-show

 14

motifs to create a zany style of self-projection and comic-tragic lament. Deeply troubled figures,

Sexton, Plath, and Berryman all took their own lives. Lowell’s influence can still be discerned in

the elegant quatrains and casually brutal details of Frederick Seidel’s Life on Earth (2001), as in

the crisp elegiac poems of his award-winning Sunrise (1980).

 15

“Deep image” poets

Through his personal charisma and his magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The

Seventies), Robert Bly encouraged a number of poets to shift their work toward the individual

voice and open form; they included Galway Kinnell, James Wright, David Ignatow, and, less

directly, Louis Simpson, James Dickey, and Donald Hall. Sometimes called the “deep image”

poets, Bly and his friends sought spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self rather than

confessional immediacy. Their work was influenced by the poetry of Spanish and Latin

American writers such as Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, César Vallejo, and Pablo

Neruda, especially their surreal association of images, as well as by the “greenhouse poems”

(1946–48) and the later meditative poetry of Roethke, with their deep feeling for nature as a

vehicle of spiritual transformation. Yet, like their Hispanic models, they were also political

poets, instrumental in organizing protest and writing poems against the Vietnam War. Kinnell

was a Lawrentian poet who, in poems such as “The Porcupine” and “The Bear,” gave the

brutality of nature the power of myth. His vatic sequence, The Book of Nightmares (1971), and

the quieter poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) are among the most rhetorically effective

works in contemporary poetry.

 16

New directions

James Wright’s style changed dramatically in the early 1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal

verse for the stripped-down, meditative lyricism of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall

We Gather at the River (1968), which were more dependent on the emotional tenor of image

than on metre, poetic diction, or rhyme. In books such as Figures of the Human (1964)

and Rescue the Dead (1968), David Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made their

effect through swiftness, deceptive simplicity, paradox, and personal immediacy. Another poet

whose work ran the gamut from prosaic simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was A.R.

Ammons. His short poems in Briefings (1971) were close to autobiographical jottings, small

glimpses, and observations, but, like his longer poems, they turned the natural world into a

source of vision. Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem unliterary and found illumination in

the pedestrian and the ordinary. Both daily life and an exposure to French Surrealism helped

inspire a group of New York poets, among them Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler,

and John Ashbery. Whether O’Hara was jotting down a sequence of ordinary moments or paying

tribute to film stars, his poems had a breathless immediacy that was distinctive and unique.

Koch’s comic voice swung effortlessly from the trivial to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by

Wallace Stevens, Ashbery’s ruminative poems can seem random, discursive, and enigmatic.

Avoiding poetic colour, they do their work by suggestion and association, exploring the interface

between experience and perception.

Elizabeth Bishop reading the first four stanzas of her poem “Manuelzinho.”© Alice Helen
 17

Methfessel

Other impressive poets of the postwar years included Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise, loving

attention to objects was reminiscent of her early mentor, Marianne Moore. Though she avoided

the confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her sense of place, her heartbreaking decorum, and

her keen powers of observation gave her work a strong personal cast. In The Changing Light at

Sandover (1982), James Merrill, previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the

vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the help of a Ouija board, called up the

shades of all his dead friends, including the poet Auden. In a prolificcareer highlighted by such

poems as Reflections on Espionage (1976), “Blue Wine” (1979), and Powers of

Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like Merrill, displayed enormous technical virtuosity. Richard

Howardimagined witty monologues and dialogues for famous people of the past in poems

collected in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part Inventions (1974).

 18

Autobiographical approaches

With the autobiographical knots and parables of Reasons for Moving(1968)

and Darker (1970), Mark Strand’s paradoxical language achieved a resonant simplicity.

He enhanced his reputation with Dark Harbor (1993) and Blizzard of One (1998). Other strongly

autobiographical poets working with subtle technique and intelligence in a variety of forms

included Philip Levine, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Gerald Stern, Louise Glück, and Sharon

Olds. Levine’s background in working-class Detroit gave his work a unique cast, while Glück

and Olds brought a terrific emotional intensity to their poems. Pinsky’s poems were collected

in The Figured Wheel (1996). He became a tireless and effective advocate for poetry during

his tenure as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000. With the sinuous sentences and long flowing lines

of Tar (1983) and Flesh and Blood (1987), C.K. Williams perfected a narrative technique

founded on distinctive voice, sharply etched emotion, and cleanly observed detail. He received

the Pulitzer Prize for Repair (2000). Adrienne Rich’s work gained a burning immediacy from

her lesbian feminism. The Will to Change(1971) and Diving into the Wreck (1973) were turning

points for women’s poetry in the wake of the 1960s.

 19

Rich, AdrienneAdrienne Rich, 1980.K. Kendall

That decade also enabled some older poets to become more loosely autobiographical and freshly

imaginative, among them Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn Warren, and W.S. Merwin. The 1960s

invigorated gifted black poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael S.

Harper. It formed the background for the work of the young poets of the 1980s, such as Edward

Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, Jorie Graham, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove, whose sequence about her

grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Graham’s

increasingly abstract and elusive work culminated in The Dream of the Unified Field(1995),

selected from five previous volumes. The AIDS crisis inspired My Alexandria (1993) by Mark

Doty, The Man with Night Sweats (1992) by Thom Gunn, and a superb memoir, Borrowed

Time (1988), and a cycle of poems, Love Alone (1988), by the poet Paul Monette. With razor-

sharp images and finely honed descriptive touches, Louisiana-born Yusef Komunyakaa emerged

as an impressive African American voice in the 1990s. He wrote about his time as a soldier and

war correspondent in Vietnam in Dien Cai Dau (1988) and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for

his volume of new and selected poems Neon Vernacular (1993). His poems were collected

in Pleasure Dome (2001). Billy Collins found a huge audience for his engagingly witty and

conversational poetry, especially that collected in Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001),

published the year he became poet laureate.

 20

Drama

Miller, Williams, and Albee

Two post-World War II playwrights established reputations comparable to Eugene

O’Neill’s. Arthur Miller wrote eloquent essays defending his modern, democratic concept of

tragedy; despite its abstract, allegorical quality and portentous language, Death of a

Salesman (1949) came close to vindicating his views. Miller’s intense family dramas were rooted

in the problem dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the works of the socially conscious ethnic dramatists

of the 1930s, especially Clifford Odets, but Miller gave them a metaphysical turn. From All My

Sons (1947) to The Price (1968), his work was at its strongest when he dealt with father-son

relationships, anchored in the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet Miller could also be an

effective protest writer, as in The Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch trials to attack the

witch-hunting of the McCarthy era. Though his work was uneven, Tennessee Williams at his

best was a more powerful and effective playwright than Miller. Creating stellar roles for actors,

especially women, Williams brought a passionate lyricism and a tragic Southern vision to such

plays as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin

Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). He empathized with his characters’ dreams

and illusions and with the frustrations and defeats of their lives, and he wrote about his own

dreams and disappointments in his beautifully etched short fiction, from which his plays were

often adapted. Miller and Williams dominated the post-World War II theatre until the 1960s, and

few other playwrights emerged to challenge them. Then, in 1962, Edward Albee’s reputation,

based on short plays such as The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1960), was

secured by the stunning power of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A master of absurdist theatre
 21

who assimilated the influence of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène

Ionesco, Albee established himself as a major figure in American drama. His reputation with

critics and audiences, however, began to decline with enigmatic plays such as Tiny Alice (1964)

and A Delicate Balance (1966), but, like O’Neill, he eventually returned to favour with a

complex autobiographical drama, Three Tall Women (1994).

 22

The Off-Broadway ascendancy

The centre of American drama shifted from Broadway to Off-Broadwayand Off-Off-

Broadway with works such as Jack Gelber’s The Connection(1959). American

playwrights, collaborating with the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and other adventurous new

companies, were increasingly free to write radical and innovative plays. David Rabe’s The Basic

Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1972) satirized America’s

militaristic nationalism and cultural shallowness. David Mametwon a New York Drama Critics’

Circle Award for American Buffalo (1976). In plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), he

showed brilliantly how men reveal their hopes and frustrations obliquely, through their language,

and in Oleanna (1992) he fired a major salvo in the gender wars over sexual harassment.

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins inspired an angry blacknationalist theatre.

Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave (1964) effectively dramatized racial confrontation, while

Bullins’s In the Wine Time (1968) made use of “street” lyricism. Maria Irene Fornés’s Fefu and

Her Friends(1977) proved remarkable in its exploration of women’s relationships. A clear

indication of Off-Broadway’s ascendancy in American drama came in 1979 when Sam Shepard,

a prolific and experimental playwright, won the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child. Shepard’s earlier

work, such as The Tooth of Crime (1972), was rooted both in the rock scene and counterculture

of the 1960s and in the mythic world of the American West. He reached his peak with a series of

offbeat dramas dealing with fierce family conflict, including Curse of the Starving

Class (1976), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1986).
 23

Amiri Baraka.AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

Other important new voices in American drama were the prolific Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer

winner for Talley’s Folly (1979); John Guare, who created serious farce in The House of Blue

Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six Degrees of Separation (1990); and Ntozake Shange,

whose “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is

Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976. Other well-received women playwrights included Marsha

Norman, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein. In a series of plays that included Ma

Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and Joe

Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), August Wilson emerged as the most powerful black playwright

of the 1980s. Devoting each play to a different decade of life in the 20th century, he won a

second Pulitzer Prize, for The Piano Lesson (1990), and completed the 10-play cycle in 2005,

shortly before his death. The anguish of the AIDS epidemic proved a dark inspiration to many

gay playwrights, especially Tony Kushner, who had gained attention with A Bright Room Called

Day (1991), set in Germany in 1932–33; he won Broadway fame with his epically ambitious

two-part drama Angels in America (1991–92), which combined comedy with pain, symbolism

with personal history, and invented characters with historical ones. A committed political writer,

Kushner often focused on public themes. His later plays included Slavs! (1996) and the

timely Homebody/Kabul (2001), a brilliant monologue followed by a drama set in Taliban-

controlled Afghanistan. After writing several Off-Broadway plays about Chinese

Americans, David Henry Hwang achieved critical and commercial success on Broadway with his

gender-bending drama M. Butterfly (1988). Richard Nelson found an enthusiastic following

in London for literate plays such as Some Americans Abroad (1989) and Two Shakespearean

Actors (1990), while Richard Greenberg depicted Jewish American life and both gay and straight
 24

relationships in Eastern Standard (1989), The American Plan (1990), and Take Me Out (2002),

the last about a gay baseball player who reveals his homosexuality to his teammates. Donald

Margulies dealt more directly with Jewish family life in The Loman Family Picnic (1989). He

also explored the ambitions and relationships of artists in such plays as Sight Unseen (1992)

and Collected Stories (1998). The 1990s also saw the emergence of several talented women

playwrights. Paula Vogel repeatedly focused on hot-button moral issues with humour and

compassion, dealing with prostitution in The Oldest Profession (1981), AIDS in The Baltimore

Waltz (1992), pornography in Hot ’n’ Throbbing (1994), and the sexual abuse of minors in How

I Learned to Drive (1997). A young African American playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, gained

increasing recognition with her surreal pageant The America Play (1993), an adaptation of The

Scarlet Letter called In the Blood (1999), and Topdog/Underdog (2001), a partly symbolic tale of

conflict between two brothers (named Lincoln and Booth) that reminded critics of Sam

Shepard’s fratricidal True West. She later adapted George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in

2012, and her Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), produced in 2014, placed

Homer’s Odyssey in the context of the American Civil War. Other well-received works included

Heather McDonald’s An Almost Holy Picture (1995), a one-man play about the spiritual life of a

preacher; poet Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare (1995), set in London during the Great Plague

of 1665; and Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995), about the slow, poignant cancer death of a literary

scholar whose life has been shaped by the eloquence and wit of Metaphysical poetry.

Parks, Suzan-LoriSuzan-Lori Parks, 2006.Eric Schwabel.

 25

Conclusion

American literature, as a whole, depicts the diverse and revolutionary forthcoming of a nation to

what it is today. The history of America is gifted with making itself from nothing, building on

new and radical expectations, and rivaling the rest of the world for respect and independence. At

one time, this ability to completely remake a country was viewed as a burden and the constant

hardship and suffering it took to create this country is everything American literature is now

known for across the globe. The ruthlessness and raw portrayal of the narratives, poems, and

stories constitute all that America is, was, and will be. To define American literature is to

recognize how harsh, detached, and insensitive it stands, and that it cannot even be defined fully.

American writing consists of physical abuse, a lack of love, and a morbid character, all across

the board from the Native Americans to the colonists, revolutionaries, explorers, to the Civil

War, the American Renaissance, and beyond. Throughout American literature, each writer, poet,

and author, not only sets a higher standard for the next, but adds to the mosaic it has originated

and exemplifies a distinctly unsympathetic and unforgiving theme.

 26

Reference

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/literature-1991/early-american-and-colonial-period-to-
1776/the-literature-of-exploration.php

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/literature-1991/early-american-and-colonial-period-to-
1776/the-colonial-period-in-new-england.php

https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature/Multicultural-writing/media/19939/8744
 27

Appendix

250 thistle logo

DEMYSTIFIED QUIZZES #WTFACT LISTS ON THIS DAY BIOGRAPHIES SAVING

EARTH

START YOUR FREE TRIAL

SEARCH BRITANNICA

What are you looking for?

Search

Search Britannica Articles and Images...

CLICK HERE TO SEARCH

BROWSE POPULAR TOPICS:

Sri Lanka Easter Island Chinese Civil War Barabbas Five-Year Plans

Bring fact-checked results to the top of your browser search. LEARN MORE. Chrome store
logo

LIST / LITERATURE & LANGUAGE, HISTORY

Periods of American Literature

WRITTEN BY: J.E. Luebering

SHARE:

The history of American literature stretches across more than 400 years. It can be divided into
five major periods, each of which has unique characteristics, notable authors, and representative
works.

The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the 1600s.
This was the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature
in Great Britain, and focused on the future.
 28

In its earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction
written by British settlers who populated the colonies that would become the United States.

John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a
president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the
earliest works of American literature.

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in
colonial America.

Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest
collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.

A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new
writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on
what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers
consumed also came from Great Britain.

The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped
the political direction of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a
quintessentially American life story.

Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, wrote the first African American book,
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau was another notable
poet of the era.

The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in
1789.
 29

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the earliest
slave narratives and a forceful argument for abolition.

By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though
still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800
through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an
unprecedented manner.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van
Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These
novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American
wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)

Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over
the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of
nature over human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the
late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.

Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a
genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to
his mysterious death in 1849.

Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).
 30

The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its
meter and rhyme scheme.

The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado”
(1846) are gripping tales of horror.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each
exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.

James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict
everyday life in the Northeast.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the
upper-class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through European models and
sensibilities.

The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified
whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David Thoreau wrote
Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was editor of The
Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.

Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing

novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-
enduring works of American literature.

As a young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the
allegorical “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the
Transcendentalists before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
 31

Herman Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong
influence on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s early life of
traveling and writing.

Walt Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional
constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his
frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went through
many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of
the Romantic period.

During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and
about enslaved and free African Americans were written.

William Wells Brown published what is considered the first black American novel, Clotel, in
1853. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858).

In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first black women to
publish fiction in the United States.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published serially 1851–52, is credited with
raising opposition in the North to slavery.

Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely
in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886; and she was a
woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a
Romantic vision as clearly as Walt Whitman’s or Edgar Allan Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and
emotionally intense. Five of her notable poems are

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

 32

“Because I could not stop for Death –”

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”

“A Bird, came down the Walk –”

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million
soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt
Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and what
emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and unembellished
vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified
form of realism. After the grim realities of a devastating war, they became writers’ primary mode
of expression.

Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before
he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting on politics in
the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was
a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain
deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. Some of his notable
works include

Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi
(1883)
 33

Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg”
(1899)

Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of
the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them,
particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.

Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism. His Sister
Carrie (1900) is the most important American naturalist novel.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane,
and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris, are novels that
vividly depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in black dialect—
“Possum,” “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and gave
them what they believed was reality for black Americans. Dunbar also wrote poems not in
dialect—“We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of racism in America
during Reconstruction and afterward.

Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present reality,
but his writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic experience, not
simply document truth. He was preoccupied with the clash in values between the United States
and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-
century modernism. Some of his notable novels are

The American (1877)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

 34

What Maisie Knew (1897)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

The Golden Bowl (1904)

The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the
20th century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress. The devastation of World
War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering in Europe and the United
States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling within modernism, a movement in
the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But this break was often an
act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or
perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the
richest and most productive in American literature.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may
be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward
civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at
the prospect of change.

F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).

Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).

Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937).
 35

Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929)
articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O
Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to

break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and
The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His
fragmentary, multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but his
was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the
Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen,
Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.

Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important
organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world.

During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a
spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.
 36

Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century.
Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and
enduringly American.

Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey
into Night (written 1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20 years of
creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with The Iceman Cometh
(written 1939, performed 1946).

During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that
exposed injustice in America.

Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America
in Our Town, first produced in 1938.

The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong,
entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global
politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that
came to define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature during the second
half of the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United
States driven by the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Prior to the last decades
of the 20th century, American literature was largely the story of dead white men who had created
Art and of living white men doing the same. By the turn of the 21st century, American literature
had become a much more complex and inclusive story grounded on a wide-ranging body of past
writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and open to more
Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many
ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. He left the
United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he
faced as a black man in America; other black writers working from the 1950s through the 1970s
also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.
 37

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed black man adrift in,
and ignored by, America.

James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his
first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first
performed in 1959.

Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of black nationalism and sought to
generate a uniquely black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm
X and Alex Haley, is among its most-lasting literary expressions.

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the
lives of black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.

In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her
involvement in the civil rights movement.

The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist,
metafictional, postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist, stream
of consciousness—these and dozens more labels can be applied to the vast output of American
novelists. Little holds them together beyond their chronological proximity and engagement with
contemporary American society. Among representative novels are

Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)
 38

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)

Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)

Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)

Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)

Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1983)

 39

Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1984)

Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)

Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)

Ha Jin: Waiting (1999)

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)

The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting
influence on American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956)
pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate
American poetry. Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for
poetry during the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Among the important poets of this
period are

Anne Sexton

Sylvia Plath
 40

John Berryman

Donald Hall

Elizabeth Bishop

James Merrill

Nikki Giovanni

Robert Pinsky

Adrienne Rich

Rita Dove

Yusef Komunyakaa

W.S. Merwin

Tracy K. Smith
 41

In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three men:
Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949)
questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main character, while Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’
dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered what might
have been a benign domestic situation into something vicious and cruel. By the 1970s the face of
American drama had begun to change, and it continued to diversify into the 21st century.
Notable dramatists include

David Mamet

Amiri Baraka

Sam Shepard

August Wilson

Ntozake Shange

Wendy Wasserstein

Tony Kushner
 42

Citations

The literature of exploration

Had history taken a different turn, the United States easily could have been a part of the great

Spanish or French overseas empires. Its present inhabitants might speak Spanish and form one

nation with Mexico, or speak French and be joined with Canadian Francophone Quebec and

Montreal. Yet the earliest explorers of America were not English, Spanish, or French. The first

European record of exploration in America is in a Scandinavian language. The Old

Norse Vinland Saga recounts how the adventurous Leif Eriksson and a band of wandering

Norsemen settled briefly somewhere on the northeast coast of America -- probably Nova Scotia,

in Canada -- in the first decade of the 11th century, almost 400 years before the next recorded

European discovery of the New World. The first known and sustained contact between the

Americas and the rest of the world, however, began with the famous voyage of an Italian

explorer, Christopher Columbus, funded by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella.

Columbus's journal in his "Epistola," printed in 1493, recounts the trip's drama -- the terror of the

men, who feared monsters and thought they might fall off the edge of the world; the near-

mutiny; how Columbus faked the ships' logs so the men would not know how much farther they

had travelled than anyone had gone before; and the first sighting of land as they neared America.

Bartolomé de las Casas is the richest source of information about the early contact between

American Indians and Europeans. As a young priest he helped conquer Cuba. He transcribed

Columbus's journal, and late in life wrote a long, vivid History of the Indians criticizing their

enslavement by the Spanish. Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. The first

colony was set up in 1585 at Roanoke, off the coast of North Carolina; all its colonists
 43

disappeared, and to this day legends are told about blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the area. The

second colony was more permanent: Jamestown, established in 1607. It endured starvation,

brutality, and misrule. However, the literature of the period paints America in glowing colors as

the land of riches and opportunity. Accounts of the colonizations became world-renowned. The

exploration of Roanoke was carefully recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True Report of

the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). Hariot's book was quickly translated into Latin, French,

and German; the text and pictures were made into engravings and widely republished for over

200 years. The Jamestown colony's main record, the writings of Captain John Smith, one of its

leaders, is the exact opposite of Hariot's accurate, scientific account. Smith was an incurable

romantic, and he seems to have embroidered his adventures. To him we owe the famous story of

the Indian maiden, Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American

historical imagination. The story recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan,

saved Captain Smith's life when he was a prisoner of the chief. Later, when the English

persuaded Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them as a hostage, her gentleness, intelligence, and

beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married John Rolfe, an English gentleman. The

marriage initiated an eight-year peace between the colonists and the Indians, ensuring the

survival of the struggling new colony. In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers

opened the way to a second wave of permanent colonists, bringing their wives, children, farm

implements, and craftsmen's tools. The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters,

travel journals, ships' logs, and reports to the explorers' financial backers -- European rulers or, in

mercantile England and Holland, joint stock companies -- gradually was supplanted by records

of the settled colonies. Because England eventually took possession of the North American

colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial literature is English. As American

 44

minority literature continues to flower in the 20th century and American life becomes

increasingly multicultural, scholars are rediscovering the importance of the continent's mixed

ethnic heritage. Although the story of literature now turns to the English accounts, it is important

to recognize its richly cosmopolitan beginnings.

 45

The Colonial period in New England

It is likely that no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the Puritans.

Between 1630 and 1690, there were as many university graduates in the northeastern section of

the United States, known as New England, as in the mother country -- an astounding fact when

one considers that most educated people of the time were aristocrats who were unwilling to risk

their lives in wilderness conditions. The self-made and often self-educated Puritans were notable

exceptions. They wanted education to understand and execute God's will as they established their

colonies throughout New England. The Puritan definition of good writing was that which

brought home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual

dangers that the soul faced on Earth. Puritan style varied enormously -- from complex

metaphysical poetry to homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious history. Whatever the

style or genre, certain themes remained constant. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal

damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. This world was an arena of constant battle

between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, a formidable enemy with many disguises.

Many Puritans excitedly awaited the "millennium," when Jesus would return to Earth, end

human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and prosperity. Scholars have long pointed

out the link between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest on ambition, hard work, and an intense

striving for success. Although individual Puritans could not know, in strict theological terms,

whether they were "saved" and among the elect who would go to heaven, Puritans tended to feel

that earthly success was a sign of election. Wealth and status were sought not only for

themselves, but as welcome reassurances of spiritual health and promises of eternal life.

Moreover, the concept of stewardship encouraged success. The Puritans interpreted all things

and events as symbols with deeper spiritual meanings, and felt that in advancing their own profit
 46

and their community's well-being, they were also furthering God's plans. They did not draw lines

of distinction between the secular and religious spheres: All of life was an expression of the

divine will -- a belief that later resurfaces in Transcendentalism. In recording ordinary events to

reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the Bible, chapter and verse.

History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the Puritan triumph over the New World

and to God's kingdom on Earth. The first Puritan colonists who settled New England exemplified

the seriousness of Reformation Christianity. Known as the "Pilgrims," they were a small group

of believers who had migrated from England to Holland -- even then known for its religious

tolerance -- in 1608, during a time of persecutions. Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible

literally. They read and acted on the text of the Second Book of Corinthians -- "Come out from

among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord." Despairing of purifying the Church of England

from within, "Separatists" formed underground "covenanted" churches that swore loyalty to the

group instead of the king. Seen as traitors to the king as well as heretics damned to hell, they

were often persecuted. Their separation took them ultimately to the New World.
 47

Multicultural writing

The dramatic loosening of immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s set the stage for the rich

multicultural writing of the last quarter of the 20th century. New Jewish voices were heard in

the fiction of E.L. Doctorow, noted for his mingling of the historical with the fictional in novels

such as Ragtime (1975) and The Waterworks (1994) and in the work of Cynthia Ozick, whose

best story, Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969), has characters modeled on leading figures

in Yiddish literature. Her story The Shawl (1980) concerns the murder of a baby in a

Nazi concentration camp. David Leavitt introduced homosexual themes into his portrayal of

middle-class life in Family Dancing (1984). At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish

writers from the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar dealt

impressively with the experience of immigrants in the United States. Novels such as N. Scott

Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, James Welch’s Winter

in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977),

and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and The Antelope

Wife (1998) were powerful and ambiguous explorations of Native American history and identity.

Mexican Americans were represented by works such as Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me,

Ultima (1972), Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1981), and Sandra

Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1983) and her collection Woman Hollering Creek, and

Other Stories (1991). Some of the best immigrant writers, while thoroughly assimilated,

nonetheless had a subtle understanding of both the old and the new culture. These included the

Cuban American writers Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love [1989])

and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban [1992] and The Agüero Sisters [1997]); the Antigua-

born Jamaica Kincaid, author of Annie John (1984), Lucy (1990), the AIDS memoir My
 48

Brother (1997), and See Now Then (2013); the Dominican-born Junot Díaz, who won acclaim

for Drown (1996), a collection of stories, and whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar

Wao (2007) won a Pulitzer Prize; and the Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, who

wrote The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002). Chinese Americans found an

extraordinary voice in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and China

Men (1980), which blended old Chinese lore with fascinating family history. Her first

novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), was set in the bohemian world of the San

Francisco Bay area during the 1960s. Other important Asian American writers included Gish

Jen, whose Typical American (1991) dealt with immigrant striving and frustration; the Korean

American Chang-rae Lee, who focused on family life, political awakening, and generational

differences in Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999); and Ha Jin,

whose Waiting (1999; National Book Award), set in rural China during and after the Cultural

Revolution, was a powerful tale of timidity, repression, and botched love, contrasting the mores

of the old China and the new. Bharati Mukherjee beautifully explored contrasting lives in India

and North America in The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Jasmine(1989), Desirable

Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004). While many multicultural works were merely

representative of their cultural milieu, books such as these made remarkable contributions to a

changing American literature.

 49

Kincaid, Jamaica

Jamaica Kincaid, 1999.MDCarchives

During the 1990s some of the best energies of fiction writers went into autobiography, in works

such as Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995), about growing up in a loving but dysfunctional

family on the Texas Gulf Coast; Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), a vivid portrayal of a

Dickensian childhood amid the grinding conditions of Irish slum life; Anne Roiphe’s bittersweet

recollections of her rich but cold-hearted parents and her brother’s death from AIDS in 1185

Park Avenue (1999); and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a

painful but comic tour de force, half tongue-in-cheek, about a young man raising his brother after

the death of their parents.

 50

Dave Eggers, 2006.Davide Lanzilao—Contrasto/Redux

The memoir vogue did not prevent writers from publishing huge, ambitious novels,

including David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), an encyclopaedic mixture of arcane lore,

social fiction, and postmodern irony; Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001, National Book

Award) and Freedom (2010), both family portraits; and Don DeLillo’s Underworld(1997), a

brooding, resonant, oblique account of the Cold War era as seen through the eyes of both

fictional characters and historical figures. All three novels testify to a belated convergence

of Social Realism and Pynchonesque invention. Pynchon himself returned to form with

sprawling, picaresque historical novels: Mason & Dixon (1997), about two famous 18th-century

surveyors who explored and mapped the American colonies, and Against the Day (2006), set at

the turn of the 20th centur

 51

Poetry

The post-World War II years produced an abundance of strong poetrybut no individual poet as

dominant and accomplished as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost,

or William Carlos Williams, whose long careers were coming to an end. The major poetry from

1945 to 1960 was Modernist in its ironic texture yet formal in its insistence on regular rhyme and

metre. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, there were a variety of poets and schools who

rebelled against these constraints and experimented with more-open forms and more-colloquial

styles.
 52

Formal poets

The leading figure of the late 1940s was Robert Lowell, who, influenced by Eliot and

such Metaphysical poets as John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, explored his spiritual

torments and family history in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). Other impressive formal poets

included Theodore Roethke, who, influenced by William Butler Yeats, revealed a genius for

ironic lyricism and a profound empathy for the processes of nature in The Lost Son and Other

Poems (1948); the masterfully elegant Richard Wilbur (Things of This World [1956]); two war

poets, Karl Shapiro (V-Letter and Other Poems [1944]) and Randall Jarrell (Losses [1948]); and

a group of young poets influenced by W.H. Auden, including James Merrill, W.S. Merwin,

James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and John Hollander. Although they displayed brilliant technical

skill, they lacked Auden’s strong personal voice.

 53

Experimentation and Beat poetry

By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction had developed. Poets began to turn away from

Eliot and Metaphysical poetry to more-romantic or more-prosaic models such as Walt Whitman,

William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of poets associated

with Black Mountain College in western North Carolina, including Charles Olson, Robert

Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov, treated the poem as an unfolding

process rather than a containing form. Olson’s Maximus Poems (1953–68) showed a

clear affinity with the jagged line and uneven flow of Pound’s Cantos and

Williams’s Paterson. Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory, prophetic “Howl” (1956) and his moving

elegy for his mother, “Kaddish” (1961), gave powerful impetus to the Beat movement. Written

with extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired by writers as diverse as Whitman, the

biblical prophets, and English poets William Blake and Christopher Smart, as well as by the

dream-logic of the French Surrealists and the spontaneous jazz aesthetic of Ginsberg’s friend the

novelist Jack Kerouac. Other Beat poets included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso,

and Gary Snyder, a student of Eastern religion who, in Turtle Island (1974), continued the

American tradition of nature poetry. The openness of Beat poetry and the prosaic directness of

Williams encouraged Lowell to develop a new autobiographical style in the laconic poetry and

prose of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead(1964). Lowell’s new work influenced

nearly all American poets but especially a group of “confessional” writers, including Anne

Sexton in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia

Plath in the posthumously published Ariel (1965). In her poetry Plath joined an icy sarcasm to

white-hot emotional intensity. Another poet influenced by Lowell was John Berryman,

whose Dream Songs(1964, 1968) combined autobiographical fragments with minstrel-show

 54

motifs to create a zany style of self-projection and comic-tragic lament. Deeply troubled figures,

Sexton, Plath, and Berryman all took their own lives. Lowell’s influence can still be discerned in

the elegant quatrains and casually brutal details of Frederick Seidel’s Life on Earth (2001), as in

the crisp elegiac poems of his award-winning Sunrise (1980).

 55

“Deep image” poets

Through his personal charisma and his magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The

Seventies), Robert Bly encouraged a number of poets to shift their work toward the individual

voice and open form; they included Galway Kinnell, James Wright, David Ignatow, and, less

directly, Louis Simpson, James Dickey, and Donald Hall. Sometimes called the “deep image”

poets, Bly and his friends sought spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self rather than

confessional immediacy. Their work was influenced by the poetry of Spanish and Latin

American writers such as Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, César Vallejo, and Pablo

Neruda, especially their surreal association of images, as well as by the “greenhouse poems”

(1946–48) and the later meditative poetry of Roethke, with their deep feeling for nature as a

vehicle of spiritual transformation. Yet, like their Hispanic models, they were also political

poets, instrumental in organizing protest and writing poems against the Vietnam War. Kinnell

was a Lawrentian poet who, in poems such as “The Porcupine” and “The Bear,” gave the

brutality of nature the power of myth. His vatic sequence, The Book of Nightmares (1971), and

the quieter poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) are among the most rhetorically effective

works in contemporary poetry.

 56

New directions

James Wright’s style changed dramatically in the early 1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal

verse for the stripped-down, meditative lyricism of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall

We Gather at the River (1968), which were more dependent on the emotional tenor of image

than on metre, poetic diction, or rhyme. In books such as Figures of the Human (1964)

and Rescue the Dead (1968), David Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made their

effect through swiftness, deceptive simplicity, paradox, and personal immediacy. Another poet

whose work ran the gamut from prosaic simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was A.R.

Ammons. His short poems in Briefings (1971) were close to autobiographical jottings, small

glimpses, and observations, but, like his longer poems, they turned the natural world into a

source of vision. Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem unliterary and found illumination in

the pedestrian and the ordinary. Both daily life and an exposure to French Surrealism helped

inspire a group of New York poets, among them Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler,

and John Ashbery. Whether O’Hara was jotting down a sequence of ordinary moments or paying

tribute to film stars, his poems had a breathless immediacy that was distinctive and unique.

Koch’s comic voice swung effortlessly from the trivial to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by

Wallace Stevens, Ashbery’s ruminative poems can seem random, discursive, and enigmatic.

Avoiding poetic colour, they do their work by suggestion and association, exploring the interface

between experience and perception.

Elizabeth Bishop reading the first four stanzas of her poem “Manuelzinho.”© Alice Helen
 57

Methfessel

Other impressive poets of the postwar years included Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise, loving

attention to objects was reminiscent of her early mentor, Marianne Moore. Though she avoided

the confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her sense of place, her heartbreaking decorum, and

her keen powers of observation gave her work a strong personal cast. In The Changing Light at

Sandover (1982), James Merrill, previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the

vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the help of a Ouija board, called up the

shades of all his dead friends, including the poet Auden. In a prolificcareer highlighted by such

poems as Reflections on Espionage (1976), “Blue Wine” (1979), and Powers of

Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like Merrill, displayed enormous technical virtuosity. Richard

Howardimagined witty monologues and dialogues for famous people of the past in poems

collected in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part Inventions (1974).

 58

Autobiographical approaches

With the autobiographical knots and parables of Reasons for Moving(1968)

and Darker (1970), Mark Strand’s paradoxical language achieved a resonant simplicity.

He enhanced his reputation with Dark Harbor (1993) and Blizzard of One (1998). Other strongly

autobiographical poets working with subtle technique and intelligence in a variety of forms

included Philip Levine, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Gerald Stern, Louise Glück, and Sharon

Olds. Levine’s background in working-class Detroit gave his work a unique cast, while Glück

and Olds brought a terrific emotional intensity to their poems. Pinsky’s poems were collected

in The Figured Wheel (1996). He became a tireless and effective advocate for poetry during

his tenure as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000. With the sinuous sentences and long flowing lines

of Tar (1983) and Flesh and Blood (1987), C.K. Williams perfected a narrative technique

founded on distinctive voice, sharply etched emotion, and cleanly observed detail. He received

the Pulitzer Prize for Repair (2000). Adrienne Rich’s work gained a burning immediacy from

her lesbian feminism. The Will to Change(1971) and Diving into the Wreck (1973) were turning

points for women’s poetry in the wake of the 1960s.

 59

Rich, AdrienneAdrienne Rich, 1980.K. Kendall

That decade also enabled some older poets to become more loosely autobiographical and freshly

imaginative, among them Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn Warren, and W.S. Merwin. The 1960s

invigorated gifted black poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael S.

Harper. It formed the background for the work of the young poets of the 1980s, such as Edward

Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, Jorie Graham, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove, whose sequence about her

grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Graham’s

increasingly abstract and elusive work culminated in The Dream of the Unified Field(1995),

selected from five previous volumes. The AIDS crisis inspired My Alexandria (1993) by Mark

Doty, The Man with Night Sweats (1992) by Thom Gunn, and a superb memoir, Borrowed

Time (1988), and a cycle of poems, Love Alone (1988), by the poet Paul Monette. With razor-

sharp images and finely honed descriptive touches, Louisiana-born Yusef Komunyakaa emerged

as an impressive African American voice in the 1990s. He wrote about his time as a soldier and

war correspondent in Vietnam in Dien Cai Dau (1988) and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for

his volume of new and selected poems Neon Vernacular (1993). His poems were collected

in Pleasure Dome (2001). Billy Collins found a huge audience for his engagingly witty and

conversational poetry, especially that collected in Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001),

published the year he became poet laureate.

Rita Dove in front of Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia,

1993.Eduardo Montes-Bradley
 60

Drama

Miller, Williams, and Albee

Two post-World War II playwrights established reputations comparable to Eugene

O’Neill’s. Arthur Miller wrote eloquent essays defending his modern, democratic concept of

tragedy; despite its abstract, allegorical quality and portentous language, Death of a

Salesman (1949) came close to vindicating his views. Miller’s intense family dramas were rooted

in the problem dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the works of the socially conscious ethnic dramatists

of the 1930s, especially Clifford Odets, but Miller gave them a metaphysical turn. From All My

Sons (1947) to The Price (1968), his work was at its strongest when he dealt with father-son

relationships, anchored in the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet Miller could also be an

effective protest writer, as in The Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch trials to attack the

witch-hunting of the McCarthy era. Though his work was uneven, Tennessee Williams at his

best was a more powerful and effective playwright than Miller. Creating stellar roles for actors,

especially women, Williams brought a passionate lyricism and a tragic Southern vision to such

plays as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin

Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). He empathized with his characters’ dreams

and illusions and with the frustrations and defeats of their lives, and he wrote about his own

dreams and disappointments in his beautifully etched short fiction, from which his plays were

often adapted. Miller and Williams dominated the post-World War II theatre until the 1960s, and

few other playwrights emerged to challenge them. Then, in 1962, Edward Albee’s reputation,

based on short plays such as The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1960), was

secured by the stunning power of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A master of absurdist theatre
 61

who assimilated the influence of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène

Ionesco, Albee established himself as a major figure in American drama. His reputation with

critics and audiences, however, began to decline with enigmatic plays such as Tiny Alice (1964)

and A Delicate Balance (1966), but, like O’Neill, he eventually returned to favour with a

complex autobiographical drama, Three Tall Women (1994).

 62

The Off-Broadway ascendancy

The centre of American drama shifted from Broadway to Off-Broadwayand Off-Off-

Broadway with works such as Jack Gelber’s The Connection(1959). American

playwrights, collaborating with the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and other adventurous new

companies, were increasingly free to write radical and innovative plays. David Rabe’s The Basic

Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1972) satirized America’s

militaristic nationalism and cultural shallowness. David Mametwon a New York Drama Critics’

Circle Award for American Buffalo (1976). In plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), he

showed brilliantly how men reveal their hopes and frustrations obliquely, through their language,

and in Oleanna (1992) he fired a major salvo in the gender wars over sexual harassment.

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins inspired an angry blacknationalist theatre.

Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave (1964) effectively dramatized racial confrontation, while

Bullins’s In the Wine Time (1968) made use of “street” lyricism. Maria Irene Fornés’s Fefu and

Her Friends(1977) proved remarkable in its exploration of women’s relationships. A clear

indication of Off-Broadway’s ascendancy in American drama came in 1979 when Sam Shepard,

a prolific and experimental playwright, won the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child. Shepard’s earlier

work, such as The Tooth of Crime (1972), was rooted both in the rock scene and counterculture

of the 1960s and in the mythic world of the American West. He reached his peak with a series of

offbeat dramas dealing with fierce family conflict, including Curse of the Starving

Class (1976), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1986).
 63

Amiri Baraka.AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

Other important new voices in American drama were the prolific Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer

winner for Talley’s Folly (1979); John Guare, who created serious farce in The House of Blue

Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six Degrees of Separation (1990); and Ntozake Shange,

whose “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is

Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976. Other well-received women playwrights included Marsha

Norman, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein. In a series of plays that included Ma

Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and Joe

Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), August Wilson emerged as the most powerful black playwright

of the 1980s. Devoting each play to a different decade of life in the 20th century, he won a

second Pulitzer Prize, for The Piano Lesson (1990), and completed the 10-play cycle in 2005,

shortly before his death. The anguish of the AIDS epidemic proved a dark inspiration to many

gay playwrights, especially Tony Kushner, who had gained attention with A Bright Room Called

Day (1991), set in Germany in 1932–33; he won Broadway fame with his epically ambitious

two-part drama Angels in America (1991–92), which combined comedy with pain, symbolism

with personal history, and invented characters with historical ones. A committed political writer,

Kushner often focused on public themes. His later plays included Slavs! (1996) and the

timely Homebody/Kabul (2001), a brilliant monologue followed by a drama set in Taliban-

controlled Afghanistan. After writing several Off-Broadway plays about Chinese

Americans, David Henry Hwang achieved critical and commercial success on Broadway with his

gender-bending drama M. Butterfly (1988). Richard Nelson found an enthusiastic following

in London for literate plays such as Some Americans Abroad (1989) and Two Shakespearean

Actors (1990), while Richard Greenberg depicted Jewish American life and both gay and straight
 64

relationships in Eastern Standard (1989), The American Plan (1990), and Take Me Out (2002),

the last about a gay baseball player who reveals his homosexuality to his teammates. Donald

Margulies dealt more directly with Jewish family life in The Loman Family Picnic (1989). He

also explored the ambitions and relationships of artists in such plays as Sight Unseen (1992)

and Collected Stories (1998). The 1990s also saw the emergence of several talented women

playwrights. Paula Vogel repeatedly focused on hot-button moral issues with humour and

compassion, dealing with prostitution in The Oldest Profession (1981), AIDS in The Baltimore

Waltz (1992), pornography in Hot ’n’ Throbbing (1994), and the sexual abuse of minors in How

I Learned to Drive (1997). A young African American playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, gained

increasing recognition with her surreal pageant The America Play (1993), an adaptation of The

Scarlet Letter called In the Blood (1999), and Topdog/Underdog (2001), a partly symbolic tale of

conflict between two brothers (named Lincoln and Booth) that reminded critics of Sam

Shepard’s fratricidal True West. She later adapted George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in

2012, and her Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), produced in 2014, placed

Homer’s Odyssey in the context of the American Civil War. Other well-received works included

Heather McDonald’s An Almost Holy Picture (1995), a one-man play about the spiritual life of a

preacher; poet Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare (1995), set in London during the Great Plague

of 1665; and Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995), about the slow, poignant cancer death of a literary

scholar whose life has been shaped by the eloquence and wit of Metaphysical poetry.

Parks, Suzan-LoriSuzan-Lori Parks, 2006.Eric Schwabel.