Literary work produced or written in the United States of America and Colonial America as well is known as American Literature. America was a series of 13 Original British Colonies on the eastern coast of the present day United States, during its early history. As a result, its literary tradition has links to the wide scale tradition of English Literature.
Moreover, in 1812, numerous new literary figures emerged with a desire and passion to create American Literature. Among these prominent literary figures were Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper. Washington Irving is considered to be the first writer to produce a unique American style. Even though this is debatable, he is credited for writing humorous developments in Salmagundi and the very popular satire, in 1809, A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker. William Cullen Bryant wrote romantic and nature inspired poetry, evolving from their European origins. In 1832, Edgar Allan Poe started writing short stories of mystery and fantasy, including The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Lastly, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo which includes The Last of the Mohicans were popular here and abroad. Subsequently, humorous writers focusing on the American frontier were popular as well, including Davy Crockett, George Washington Harris, Johnson J. Hooper, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Benjamin P. Shillaber, Seba Smith, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Additionally, a group of writers from Harvard University and Cambridge Massachusetts called the New England Brahmins surfaced, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, Sr.
Even more so, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former minister, published a nonfiction work called Nature. He claimed that it was possible to do away with organized religion and reach a spiritual state by studying and reacting to the natural world itself. His work influenced other lecturers, the public and other writers, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism. Henry David Thoreau, a gifted thinker, followed Emerson as a resolute nonconformist. After living along for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote Walden, a memoir that urges resistance to the dictates of organized society. Thoreau’s radical writings express a tendency towards individualism in the American character. Consequently, other writers influenced by Emerson and Transcendentalism, include Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley and Jones Very.
Furthermore, the political conflict involving abolitionism, lead to the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and his newspaper The Liberator, with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On the other hand, Herman Melville focused on his seafaring days and made a name for himself in Billy Budd, a short novel and Moby Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage that became a vehicle for examining themes, such as obsessions, the nature of evil and human struggles against the elements. Accordingly, anti-transcendental literature from Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all comprised the Dark Romanticism subgenre of literature during this time.
Conclusively, from the early 1970s until the present day, the best known literary category has been Postmodernism. Authors labeled Postmodern are dealing directly with many of the ways that popular culture and mass media have influenced the average American's perception of the world in which with live. They are often criticized along with the American government and with America's history. Thus, they are criticized with the average American's perception of his or her own history, respectively.
