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LITERATURE

LITERATURE This entry includes 5 subentries: Overview
African American Literature
Children's Literature
Native American Literature
Popular Literature

OVERVIEW

The first Europeans in America did not encounter a silent world. A chorus of voices had been alive and moving through the air for approximately 25,000 years before. Weaving tales of tricksters, warriors and gods; spinning prayers, creation stories, and spiritual prophesies, the First Nations carved out their oral traditions long before colonial minds were fired and flummoxed by a world loud with language when Leif Ericsson first sighted Newfoundland in A.D. 1000. Gradually the stories that these first communities told about themselves became muffled as the eminences of the European Renaissance began to contemplate the New World. One of them, the French thinker and father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, was not loath to transform the anecdotes of a servant who had visited Antarctic France (modern Brazil) into a report on the lives of virtuous cannibals. According to his "On Cannibals" (1588), despite their predilection for white meat, these noble individuals led lives of goodness and dignity, in shaming contrast to corrupt Europe. Little wonder that on an imaginary New World island in Shakespeare's The Tempest (first performed in 1611), the rude savage Caliban awaits a conquering Prospero in the midst of natural bounty.

Pioneers to Puritans

Whether partially or entirely fanciful, these visions of paradise on Earth were not much different from Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), itself partly inspired by the Italian Amerigo Vespucci's voyages to the New World. Wonders of a new Eden, untainted by European decadence, beckoned

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to those who would venture to America, even as others spared no ink to paint accounts of the savagery of this hostile, unknown world. Between these extremes lay something approaching the truth: America as equal parts heaven and hell, its aboriginal inhabitants as human beings capable of both virtue and vice. While wealth, albeit cloaked in Christian missionary zeal, may have been the primary motive for transatlantic journeys, many explorers quickly understood that survival had to be secured before pagan souls or gold. John Smith, himself an escaped slave from the Balkans who led the 1606 expedition to Virginia, wrote of his plunders with a raconteur's flair for embellishment, impatient with those who bemoaned the rigors of earning their colonial daily bread. His twin chronicles, A True Relation of Virginia (1608) and The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624), differ in at least one suggestive detail: the Indian maiden Pocahontas appears only in the latter, betraying the freedom with which European imagination worked on some "facts" of this encounter.

Competing accounts of the American experiment multiplied with Thomas Morton, whose Maypole paganism and free trade in arms with the natives raised the ire of his Puritan neighbors, Governor William Bradford, who led Mayflower Pilgrims from religious persecution in England to Plymouth Rock in 1620, and Roger Williams, who sought to understand the language of the natives, earning him expulsion from the "sanctuary" of Massachusetts. More often than not, feverish religiosity cast as potent a spell on these early American authors as their English literary heritage. The terrors of Judgment Day inspired Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom (1662), a poem so sensational that one in twenty homes ended up harboring a copy. Equally electrifying were narratives of captivity and restoration, like that of Mary Rowlandson (1682), often cast as allegories of the soul's journey from a world of torment to heaven. Beset by fragile health and religious doubt, Anne Bradstreet captured in her Several Poems (1678) a moving picture of a Pilgrim mind grappling with the redemptive trials of life with a courage that would later bestir Emily Dickinson.

It seems unlikely that two college roommates at Harvard, Edward Taylor and Samuel Sewall, would both come to define Puritan literary culture—yet they did. Influenced by the English verse of John Donne and George Herbert, Taylor, a New England minister, became as great a poet as the Puritans managed to produce. Sewall's Diary (begun 12 August 1674) made him as much a rival of his British counterpart Samuel Pepys as of the more ribald chronicler of Virginia, William Byrd. While it is easy to caricature the Puritans as models of virtue or else vicious persecutors of real or imagined heresy, the simplicity of myth beggars the complexity of reality. A jurist who presided over the SALEM WITCH TRIALS, Sewall was also the author of The Selling of Joseph (1700), the first antislavery tract in an America that had accepted the practice since 1619.

The GREAT AWAKENING, a period in which the Puritan mindset enjoyed a brief revival, is notable for the prolific historian and hagiographer Cotton Mather. The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) afforded a glimpse of his skepticism about the prosecutors of the witch trials, while his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) provided a narrative of settlers' history of America, regularly illuminated with the exemplary "lives of the saints." Moved equally by dogmatic piety and the imperatives of reason and science, Jonathan Edwards delivered arresting sermons that swayed not only his peers, but also centuries later, William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). True to form, Edwards's A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) is a celebration not only of spiritual reawakening, but of the empiricism of John Locke as well.

Enlightenment to Autonomy

If anyone embodied the recoil from seventeenth-century Puritan orthodoxy toward the Enlightenment, it was the architect of an independent, modern United States, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790). Printer, statesman, scientist, and journalist, he first delighted his readers with the annual wit and wisdom of POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC (launched in 1733). In 1741, in parallel with Andrew Bradford's The American Magazine, Franklin's General Magazine and Historical Chronicle marked the beginning of New England magazine publishing. But it was his best-selling Autobiography (1791) that revealed the extent to which his personal destiny twined with the turbulent course of the new state. Ostensibly a lesson in life for his son, the book became a compass for generations of Americans as it tracked Citizen Franklin's progress from a humble printer's apprentice, through his glory as a diplomat in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), to the exclusive club of the founding fathers who drafted the Declaration of Independence and ratified the Constitution.

The Revolution that stamped Franklin's life with the destiny of the nation found its most brazen exponent in Thomas Paine. Author of COMMON SENSE (1776) and The American Crisis (pamphlet series, 1776–1783), Paine was a British expatriate who came to Philadelphia sponsored by Franklin and galvanized the battle for independence. His fervid opposition to the British social order, slavery, and the inferior status of women made him a lightning rod of the Revolution, helping to create an American identity in its wake. America's emergence as a sovereign power became enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Harking back to Montaigne in Notes on the State of Virginia (1784–1785), this patrician statesman idolized the purity of agrarian society in the fear that the closer the New World edged toward the satanic mills of industrial Europe, the more corrupt it would become. The founder of the University of Virginia, whose library would seed the Library of Congress, Jefferson was elected president in 1800 and again in 1804.

Literature after the Revolution

After the Revolution, American literary culture grew less dependent on British models, and the popular success of poets like the Connecticut Wits, including Timothy Dwight, composer of an American would be epic, The Conquest of Canaan (1785), only confirmed this point. The broad appeal of novels like The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown and Charlotte Temple (1791) by Susanna Haswell Rowson, both tales of seduction that spoke to what future critics would call a pulp fiction sensibility, signaled the growing success of domestic authors (Rowson's novel, the best-seller of the eighteenth century, would do equally well in the nineteenth). Modeled on Don Quixote, the comic writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge and the gothic sensibilities of Charles Brockden Brown also won a degree of popular and critical laurels, the latter presaging the dark strains of Poe and Hawthorne.

Knickerbockers to Naturalists

The career of Washington Irving marked a categorical break with the past, inasmuch as this mock-historian succeeded where the poet/satirist Philip Freneau and others had failed by becoming the first professional American writer. Affected by the Romantics, Irving created folk literature for the New World: A History of New York (1809), fronted by the pseudonymous Diedrich Knickerbocker, would be synonymous thereafter with American folklore and tall tales, while The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman (1819–1820) introduced the immortal "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Admired on both sides of the Atlantic, Irving's prose did for America's literary prestige what the Romantic poetry of William Cullen Bryant did for its verse, while James Fenimore Cooper worked a similar alchemy on the novel. While critics from Twain to the present have belittled Cooper's cumbersome prose, he gripped the imagination with books of frontier adventure and romance, collectively known as the LEATHERSTOCKING TALES (after the recurrent hero). The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and The Prairie (1827) still captivate as narrative testimonies to American frontier clashes: civilization against savagery, pioneers against natives, apparent goodness versus moral rot.

The flood of creative energy unleashed by these no longer apologetic American authors crested with the birth of TRANSCENDENTALISM, overseen by the sage Ralph Waldo Emerson. This minister, essayist, and philosopher renounced the theological and literary dogma of the past, striving to nurture and encourage new American muses. It is for no other reason that his essays, including "Nature" (1836) and "Representative Men" (1850), and his Harvard address, "The American Scholar" (1837), amount to America's declaration of literary independence. The more reclusive Henry David Thoreau beheld in the tranquility of the pond at WALDEN (1854) the difference between false liberty and herd consciousness, while his Civil Disobedience (1849) made nonviolent resistance to tyranny a new and powerful weapon in the hands of Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Singing himself and America, Walt Whitman cultivated his LEAVES OF GRASS (1855) over nine evergrander editions, confirming him as the poet that Emerson tried to conjure: a giant clothed in the speech of the people. Emily Dickinson would lift her voice along with Whitman, though her startling hymns were made for the chambers of the solitary mind, minted to miniature perfection.

The same fertile season saw Herman Melville complete MOBY-DICK (1851), a multilayered sea epic whose White Whale incarnates the essence of evil and otherness and everything that the human will cannot conquer. Its deranged pursuer, Ahab, may be the doomed part of us all that vainly rejects that "cannot." Exhausted by this beast of a novel, Melville produced nothing to rival its scope and complexity, languishing forgotten until the Hollywood decades. Nathaniel Hawthorne revisited an allegorical world in which vice masqueraded as virtue, staining the Puritan snow with blood from "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) to The Scarlet Letter (1850). The shadows explored by Hawthorne became the abode of Edgar Allan Poe, a legendary editor, poet, and literary critic, as well as a short story giant, inventor of the detective novel, and father of modern horror and science fiction. Tied to "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Purloined Letter" (1845), or "The Raven" (1845), Poe's worldwide influence is bound to endure evermore.

Civil War to World War

The events of the Civil War (1861–1865) made it possible for the literature written by African Americans to receive a measure of attention and acclaim, the torch passing from Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass. With the advent of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, black Americans would finally secure basic liberties and a literary voice. Some of the abolitionist zeal, both at home and abroad, may be credited to Harriet Beecher Stowe: no less than 1.5 million pirated copies of her UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1852) flooded Britain weeks after its publication. Though a powerful storyteller, she was certainly no Joel Chandler Harris, whose acute ear for dialect and fearless sense of humor made his tales of Uncle Remus (1880–1883) as entertaining as morally astute. In some of their writings, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois would continue to offer differing remedies for the gross inequities still imposed on their black countrymen.

The end of the nineteenth century was the playing field for Bret Harte and his regional tales of a harsh, untamed California, for the crackling wit of William Sydney Porter, a.k.a. O. Henry (1862–1910), and for the scalding satire of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain (1835–1910). A national masterpiece, Twain's The Adventures of HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1884) has been universally admired since its publication, though it continues to stir controversy in politically correct circles. Just because the author permits his protagonist to speak the mind of his age and call his runaway slave friend, Jim, "a nigger," some readers miss the moral metamorphoses that Huck undergoes, and the salvos Twain launches against ignorance and prejudice. What looks like interpretive "safe water" (Clemens's pseudonym meant "two fathoms of navigable water under the keel"), can prove very turbulent, indeed.

Twain's unflinching representation of "things as they were," whether noble or nasty, shared in the realism that reigned in the novels and stories of Henry James (1843– 1916). Lavish psychological portraits and a keen eye for the petty horrors of bourgeois life allowed James to stir controversy, and occasionally, as in The Turn of the Screw (1898), genuine terror. Edith Wharton (1862–1937), who added the gray agonies of Ethan Frome (1911) to the canon of American realism, garnered a Pulitzer in 1921, and in 1923 she became the first woman to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters from Yale. Stephen Crane (1871–1900) used his short life to produce extraordinary journalism about New York's daily life and a gory close-up of warfare in The Red Badge of Courage (1895).

Naturalism

Fidelity to life along realistic lines, combined with a pessimistic determinism concerning human existence, dominated NATURALISM, a somewhat later strain in American fiction. Heavily under the influence of Marx and Nietzsche, Jack London was more fascinated by the gutter than the stars—his The People of the Abyss (1903), a study of the city of London's down and out, merits as much attention as The Call of the Wild (1903).Theodore Dreiser (1871– 1945) gave a Zolaesque account of sexual exploitation in the naturalist classic Sister Carrie (1900), and similarly shocking scenes of deranged dentistry in McTeague (1899) allowed Frank Norris to show the mind cracking under the vice of fate, symptoms that would become more familiar as the next anxious century unfolded.

Modernists to Mods

According to Jonathan Schell, antinuclear activist and author of the harrowing Fate of the Earth (1982), the "short" twentieth century extended from the Great War (1914– 1918) to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. World War I forms another historical dam, between the (if only by comparison) placid nineteenth century and the turmoil of modernism that raced to supersede Romantic and/or realist art with a mosaic of manifesto-armed movements. Germinating in fin de siècle Germany and Scandinavia, the modernist period spawned a palette of programmatic "isms" underpinning most of early twentieth-century poetry and painting (the novel formed the secondary wave): impressionism, expressionism, cubism, symbolism, imagism, futurism, unanimism, vorticism, dadaism, and later surrealism.

In the United States, the changing of the guard coincided with the New York Armory Show of 1913, a defiant exhibition of European cubists, from the enfant terrible Marcel Duchamp to the already famous Pablo Picasso. On their geometrically condensed and contorted canvas lay the heart of modernism. Order, linearity, harmony were out. Fragmentation, collage, and miscellany were in. Continuities ceded to multitudes of perspectives; classical unities to clusters of "days in the life"; moral closure to open-ended, controlled chaos. The Sun Also Rises (1926), Ernest Hemingway's story of Jake Barnes, a war-emasculated Fisher-King vet, captures not only this literary generation but also its poetics of arbitrary beginnings, episodes bound only by the concreteness of imagery and the irony of detachment, and the endings dissolving with no resolution. The prose is sparse, the narrator limited in time, space, and omniscience, the speech colloquial and "unliterary," in accord with Papa Hemingway's dictum that American literature really began with Huckleberry Finn.

Hard and terse prose was in part a legacy of the muckrakers, a new breed of investigative journalists who scandalized the public with the stench of avarice, corruption, and political "muck." An early classic was Upton Sinclair's (1878–1968) The JUNGLE (1906), an exposé of economic white slavery in the filth of the Chicago stock-yards. An instant celebrity, its socialist author, who conferred with President Theodore Roosevelt and later came within a heartbeat of winning the governorship of California, forever rued hitting the country in the stomach while aiming for its heart. The same vernacular, mean street–savvy style became the trademark of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler, hardboiled founders of the American noir which, together with the western, science fiction, and the romance, began its long ascent out of the literary gutter into the native voice and dominant vehicle of American culture.

Novelistic modernism—less international, more involved with domestic, social themes—flourished in the period of 1919 to 1939. It stretched from the JAZZ AGE, during which American literature caught up with the world, to the end of the radical, experiment-heavy decade of the GREAT DEPRESSION—from Sinclair Lewis's broadsides against conformism and Babbitry in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), to the controversial breast-feeding finale of John Steinbeck's proletarian The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In between there was Sherwood Anderson's impressionistic Winesburg, Ohio (1919), John Dos Passos's urban etude, Manhattan Transfer (1925), Dreiser's naturalistic An American Tragedy (1925), Thornton Wilder's philosophical The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Hemingway's tragic A Farewell to Arms (1929), Thomas Wolfe's autobiographic Look Homeward, Angel (1929), and the first volumes of William Faulkner's symbolic southern chronicles. There was also F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose masterpiece The GREAT GATSBY (1925) told of a man in search of the elusive bird of happiness, fatally beguiled by America's materialist Dream.

The obscure symbolism of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) was interpreted by the culturati as a rallying cry against a nation that, in accord with the presidential "the business of America is business," lost its soul amid advertisements for toothpastes, laxatives, soft drinks, automobiles, and household gadgets without which families might become un-American. Trying to make sense of these freewheeling times was Van Wyck Brooks's America's Coming of Age (1915), which mythologized the nation's "usable past" while assaulting its puritanism and stagnation. This harsh diagnosis was seconded by a crop of polemical columnists, running the gamut from arch-conservatives like H. L Mencken to the more proletarian Walter Lippmann and Joseph Wood Krutch, and from harangues against the cultural "booboisie" to campaigns against the establishment.

In poetry a pleiad of older and rising stars, many part-time expatriates in London and Paris, burst on the scene: from the CEO of the modernist risorgimento (revolution), Ezra Pound, to H. D. (Hilda Doolitle), Robert Frost, and the typographically untamed e. e. cummings. Despite colossal internal differences, the entire prewar generation—both the expatriates and those who, like Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore, never saw Paris—rallied around a modern poetic idiom. Joined by William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg, they self-consciously pursued Whitman's legacy in a more concrete, layered, and allusive style.

The era whose dawn coincided with Tender Buttons (1913), an experimental volume by the prose lyricist Gertrude Stein, came to a climax in 1930, when Sinclair Lewis became America's first Nobel winner. Lewis attributed his personal triumph to the renaissance of American fiction in the 1920s, even as Eugene O'Neill, Nobel laureate for 1936, brought the American theater to the world stage, boldly experimenting with dramatic structure and production methods. Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Robert E. Sherwood, Elmer Rice, and Sidney Kingsley steered contemporary drama even further away from the vaudeville and music hall of Broadway, as did Clifford Odets in his Marxist Waiting for Lefty (1935).

The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out the nation's savings accounts and its faith in freestyle capitalism. The literary scene may have been titillated by Henry Miller's Tropics, racy enough to be banned in the United States until the 1960s, but away from Gay Paris, the depression spelled poverty so acute that some papers suggested the popular song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" as the new national anthem. Economically and culturally the period could not have been worse for black artists, whose dazzling if brief Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, led by the jazz-inspired Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, gave way to Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), a brutal book about Bigger Thomas's execution for the "almost accidental" murder of a white woman.

The wave of experimentation bore Faulkner's novel-as-multiple-point-of-view, As I Lay Dying (1930), the scandalous Sanctuary (1931)—which in violence and sensationalism vied with William Randolph Hearst's yellow journalism of the era—and the James Joyce–influenced Light in August (1932). John O'Hara's shard-edged short stories rose alongside James Thurber's and Erskine Caldwell's. James T. Farrell released his socionaturalistic Studs Lonigan trilogy, while James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) stunned with brevity and pith equaled only by Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). In that same year Raymond Chandler, one of the foremost stylists of the century, inaugurated his career with The Big Sleep, while Thornton Wilder, having won the highest accolades for his prose, turned to drama in Our Town (1938) and the convention-busting The Skin of Our Teeth (1942).

Robert Penn Warren, poet, New Critic, and self-declared leader of the Southern Agrarian movement against the conservatism and sentimentality of the literary Old South, won the country's highest honors, notably for his panoramic Night Rider (1939) and All the King's Men (1946). But the national epic—majestic in scope, flawless in execution, as eloquent in politics as in aesthetics—came from a writer who made the cover of Time a full year before Hemingway: John Dos Passos. Distributed over three volumes—The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and Big Money (1936)—his U.S.A. trilogy spans the twentieth-century United States from coast to coast and from the topmost to the most wretched social lot. Slicing the rapacious American colossus to the bone, Dos Passos's saga displays the symbolic finesse of Herman Melville and the narrative fervor of Jack London combined.

If the United States arose from World War I secure as a superpower, it emerged from World War II (1939– 1945) looking up the Cold War nuclear barrel. Artists recoiled in horror, writing of war with contempt, of nuclear doom with dread, and of consumerist suburbia with contempt mixed with dread. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948), Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny (1951), James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951)—war novels that were almost all antiwar novels—achieved celebrity even before becoming Hollywood films, just as Joseph Heller's epochal CATCH-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) did a decade later. As captured in a cinematic jewel, The Atomic Café (1982), written and directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty, the 1950s were the years of Cold War retrenchment, of Nixon and McCarthy–stoked Communist witch-hunts, of the H-Bomb frenzy and the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) military-political doctrine. The literary response, often in a grotesque/satirical vein, formed an axis stretching from Walter M. Miller Jr.'s Canticle for Leibowitz (1959),Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (1962), and Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963) to more contemporary postapocalyptic science fiction.

In a more canonical vein, John Updike's decades-spanning series of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the angst-ridden suburban man—Vladimir Nabokov's metaphysically complex novels/riddles—and the diamond-cutter short prose of John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, and J. D. Salinger, all defied the country going ballistic. Ralph Ellison's rumble from America's tenement basement, INVISIBLE MAN (1952), together with James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), marked the coming-of-age of the African American, even as between his comedies/caricatures Goodbye Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Philip Roth deplored the dwindling powers of fiction to do justice to the world that was fast overtaking writers' imaginations. Little wonder that the 1950s were also a time of social and sociological reckoning. Warning against the closing of the American mind, David Riesman's The LONELY CROWD (1950) and Malcolm Cowley's The Literary Situation (1954) pinned the mood of the nation: atomized, "other-directed," looking for a fix in the religious existentialism of Paul Tillich, in the social criticism of C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956), or even—anticipating the eclectic 1960s—in Asiatic mysticism.

One of the most distinct regional voices was the New York Jewish elite, congregated around intellectuals from the Partisan Review. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth are independently famous as novelists, but Delmore Schwartz (subject of Bellow's Nobel-winning Humboldt's Gift, 1975), Lionel and Diana Trilling, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Arthur Miller, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, E. L. Doctorow, and Isaac Bashevis Singer all gave the East Coast establishment its legendary clout and verve. As the encroaching 1960s would not be complete without the Beatles, so would not the 1950s without the Beats. Their eclectic "howls" (from the title of Allen Ginsberg's linchpin poem) fueled the junk fiction of William S. Burroughs, the social protest of Lawrence Ferlin-ghetti, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), an "easyrider" write-up of his picaresque travels across the United States and still a gospel for circles of modish, black-clad, bearded intellectuals in quest of Emersonian ideals.

Flower Power to Popular Fiction

Starting with the 1960s all labels and historical subdivisions become increasingly haphazard, not to say arbitrary. Styles, influences, and ideologies mix freely as 40,000, and then 50,000 new titles are published annually in multi-million editions, glutting the literary market. Day-Glo colors mask the culture of black humor, forged among the Vietnam genocide, political assassinations, drug and sexual revolutions, and race riots spilling out of inner-city ghettos. Where Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) branded America as an oppressive mental institution in a fit farewell to the 1950s, Malamud's God's Grace (1982) may have contained the key to the two literary decades that followed. In turn ironic and savagely funny, awash in intertextual and intercultural allusions, at once sophisticated and vernacular, this realistic fantasy was a melting pot of genres, techniques, and modes in the service of art that gripped readers with the intensity of the scourge of the 1980s: crack cocaine.

With traditions and conventions falling left and right, fiction writers invaded the domain of history and reportage, creating—after the MO of Truman Capote's sensational real-crime account In Cold Blood (1966)—"nonfiction novels." As the award-winning docufiction of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Robert Coover made clear, history could be profitably (in both senses) melded with the techniques and best-selling appeal of the novel. In turn, media-hip journalists such as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, and the gonzo-prodigy Hunter S. Thompson smashed all records of popularity with their hyped-up, heat-of-the-moment pieces that eroded inherited distinctions between literary and popular culture. A generation of confessional poets, from John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and Robert Lowell, to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, stood emotionally naked after casting the innermost aspects of their lives in verse, defying the distinction between art and real life much as today's poetry "slams" and the rhyming art of rap do. Popular fiction and literature worthy of attention by the academic canons began to blur in Edward Albee's drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Ira Levin's Boys from Brazil (1976), or Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1987).

Even with Faulkner, Hemingway (by now Nobel winners), the dramatist Tennessee Williams, and other heavyweights still at work, with Vonnegut, Heller, and Roth fertile with tragicomedies and satires, with Bellow, Malamud, and Mailer reaping national and international awards, the times—as Bob Dylan forewarned—were a-changin'. A new wave of crime novelists, from Ed McBain to Chester Himes to Joseph Wambaugh, elevated the genre to rightful literary heights. Science fiction enjoyed a meteoric rise on bookstands and university curricula, romances and erotica—though few as stylish as Erica Jong's Fanny (1980)—smashed all readership records, and Stephen King single-handedly revived the horror story. Theory-laden postmodern fiction sought refuge in universities which, funding writers-in-residence, cultivated a new crop of professionally trained "creative writers."

American literary theory was not born with structuralism. As the nineteenth century bled into the twentieth, C. S. Peirce and John Dewey proposed a pragmatic view of reading as an ongoing transaction with the reader, while formalists like Pound and Eliot defended classical standards with an opaqueness that left some readers scratching their heads. By the early 1950s, René Wellek, Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ranson made fashionable the art of "close reading," at the expense of historicism and historical context. Soon thereafter, New Criticism itself was overshadowed by structuralist theories drawn in part from the work on the "deep structure" of language by the politically outspoken MIT professor Noam Chomsky. More recently, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish have turned back to reader response, albeit without the philosophical elegance of the pragmatists. While Susan Sontag argued against too much tedious analysis of hallowed art, deconstruction, neo-Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism began to vie for their fifteen minutes of fame. Today unorthodox, even wildly counterintuitive, readings remain in vogue, proving that the understanding of art—to say nothing of enjoyment—is more often than not compromised by obscure jargon and capricious thinking.

Much affected by these interpretive battles, post-modern authors dug convoluted trenches, cutting "truth" and "reality" loose and getting lost in a maze of fictional and metafictional simulacra. The bewildering "novel" The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis, orbited around issues of authenticity and counterfeiting, plotting the trajectory for many works to follow. John Barth launched several of these language-and self-centered voyages, from the early stories of Lost in the Funhouse (1968) to his exhaustive effort at throwing everything—including himself and postmodernist fiction—to the demons of parody and self-reflexivity: Coming Soon!!! (2001). It is equally difficult to get a fix on the fiction of Thomas Pynchon: from Gravity's Rainbow (1973) to Mason & Dixon (1997), whose compulsion for detail and antinarrative paranoia throw conventional techniques and characters out the window. Robert Coover charted hypertext and cyberspace with guru patience, while Don DeLillo gave much of the last century's history the zoom of a fastball in his gargantuan Underworld (1997). Alongside the postmodern pyrotechnics, the 1980s' minimalism—sometimes disparaged as K-mart or "dirty" realism—exerted its populist fascination with social "lowlifes" addicted to alcohol, drugs, welfare, trailer park blues, or intellectual malaise. In a style stripped of excess, with plots in abeyance and moral judgments suspended, Marilyn Robinson, Anne Beattie, and Richard Ford aired the kitchen side of America, though none as successfully as Raymond Carver, exquisitely filmed in 1993 in Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

A splintering mosaic of ethnic and cultural communities gained unprecedented readership and critical applause as Toni Morrison, an African American winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize, summoned in Beloved (1987), a ghost story about the abominable history of slavery. Joining a chorus of black artists such as Alice Walker, the poet Maya Angelou, Imamu Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, Ernest J. Gaines, and John A. Williams, Asian Americans also gained ground, with the best-sellers of Amy Tan, from The Joy Luck Club (1989) to The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), lamenting conformity and the loss of cultural moorings. Shirley Lim's memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996) detailed her suffering as a girl in Malaysia, while Frank Chin's gadfly antics in Donald Duk (1991) are sure to shock and delight. Hispanic prose and poetry of Gary Soto, Ana Castillo, Richard Rodriguez, Denise Chavez, and a phalanx of others record the humor, wisdom, and socioeconomic discontents of their communities. From John Okada's scorching treatment of Japanese anguish over World War II internment or military service, No-No Boy (1957), to Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer-winning tale of the limbo between her Bengali heritage and Western upbringing, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), the number of ethnic voices in American literature is legion and growing.

With belles lettres now accounting for only 3 percent of literature disseminated through the United States, popular fiction made substantial gains in prestige and legitimacy, gradually spawning a nobrow culture, indifferent to rhetorical tugs-of-war between aesthetic highs and genre lows. The comic gems of Woody Allen, the literary horror of Thomas M. Disch, the Texan regionalism of Larry McMurtry, the survivalist thrillers of James Dickey, the black neo-noir of Walter Mosley, or the existential best-sellers of Walker Percy (Love in the Ruins, 1971; The Thanatos Syndrome, 1987), and a host of yet unknown but worth knowing genre artists set a fresh course for American literature in the new millennium.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baym, Nina, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 1986. An invaluable resource containing works by most of the eminent authors in American history as well as immaculately researched introductions that serve as models of pithy exegesis.

Bercovitch, Sacvan, et al., eds. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A more thorough historical study, these volumes are part of a projected, complete history and set the standard for scholarly rigor. Volumes 1 (1590–1820) and 2 (1820– 1865) contain histories of prose writing, while Volume 8 covers contemporary poetry and criticism (1940–1995).

Elliott, Emory, ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Divided into short, discrete sections on various subjects, this source is not as complete or useful as might have been hoped. Of special interest, however, is the opening piece on Native Literature.

Hart, James D., ed. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Arranged alphabetically by author, this is an extremely useful, well-organized research tool. Given the format, the relative brevity of the entries is understandable, even refreshing.

Jones, Howard Mumford, and Richard M. Ludwig. Guide to American Literature and Its Background since 1890. Rev. and Exp., 4th ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. A carefully researched bibliography of American literature that is easy to use.

Knippling, Alpana S., ed. New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Covers an enormous array of material, with sections on everything from Filipino American to Sephardic Jewish American literature.

Ruland, Richard. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Viking, 1991. An eminently readable, lively history of American literature, rich in observations about connections between periods and authors.

Swirski, Peter. From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Irreverent humor and rigorous scholarship (including discussions of topics as diverse as sociology and aesthetics) are combined in this trenchant analysis of the relationship between highbrow and lowbrow literatures.

Tindall, George B. America: A Narrative History. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 1988. A lucid history characterized by a wealth of detail: the time lines and indexes are particularly useful.

Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed. Critical Essays on American Postmodernism. New York: G. K. Hall; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan, 1995. For the most part fair-minded and informative, this study neither rhapsodizes about postmodernism nor dismisses its influence among academics.

Walker, Marshall. The Literature of the United States of America. London: Macmillan, 1983. Although not as comprehensive as others, it is written with style and humor and gives a human face to many authors of interest.

David Reddall

Peter Swirski

See also vol. 9: Untitled Poem (Anne Bradstreet).

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

The struggle to establish African American writing in both the world of popular literature and the more academic world of letters has largely been won. With a remarkably growing black audience and increased interest from white readers, black writers of pop fiction such as E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan routinely sell hundreds of thousands of copies. On the other hand, African American literature has become part of the highbrow literary establishment with the Nobel Prize for literature being conferred on Toni Morrison, and with such critically acclaimed writers as Jamaica Kincaid, August Wilson, Carl Phillips, James Alan McPherson, John Edgar Wideman, and Charles Johnson.

Two movements coincided to increase dramatically not only the public's interest in African American literature but also the quantity and dissemination of professional African American literary criticism. The first of these movements was the establishment of black studies programs at white-majority universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an intellectual and ideological offshoot of the civil rights movement. The second was the feminist movement of the early 1970s. At that moment, a number of important black women writers appeared: Nikki Giovanni, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange. Their emergence was accompanied by the rediscovery of an earlier black woman writer, Zora Neale Hurston. With the rise of African American studies—despite the dominance of social science in this field—came increased awareness of black American literature and a growing number of highly trained people who could analyze it. With the sudden visibility of black women authors, came both critical controversy and the core audience of American literature: women. It can safely be said that, as a result of these social and political dynamics, African American literary scholars could achieve two important ends: the recognition of African American literature within the American literary canon and the creation of an African American literary canon. Both goals have been served through the construction of a usable black literary past.

African American Literature during Slavery

Because of the prohibition against teaching slaves to read, the acquisition of literacy among African Americans before the Civil War was something of a subversive act, and certainly the earliest writings by African Americans were meant—explicitly or implicitly—to attack the institution of slavery and to challenge the dehumanized status of black Americans.

The earliest significant African American writers were poets. Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl born in Senegal, was taught by her owners to read and write. Her poetry, published in 1773, was celebrated in various circles, less for its quality than for the fact that a black woman had written it. Jupiter Hammon, a far less polished writer, was a contemporary of Wheatley and, like her, was deeply influenced by Methodism. And in 1829, George Moses Horton published The Hope of Liberty, the first poetry that plainly protested slavery.

Without question, however, the most influential black writing of the period emerged during the antebellum period (1830–1860) and was explicitly political: the slave narrative—accounts of slavery written by fugitive or former slaves—was a popular genre that produced hundreds of books and tracts. Several of these books have become classics of American literature, such as Frederick Doug-lass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), William Wells Brown's Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive slave (1847), and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl (1861). Brown, a full-fledged man of letters, also wrote the first African American travelogue, Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852); the first play published by a black, Experience: Or, How to Give a Northern Man Backbone (1856); and the first black novel, Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). Other important black novels of the period are Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), Frank J. Webb's neglected Garies and their Friends (1857), and the recently discovered Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts (1853/60).

From Reconstruction to World War I

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Wad-dell Chesnutt, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—who had established her career before the Civil War—were the principal black writers to emerge during the GILDED AGE, the nadir of race relations in the United States, when strict racial segregation was established by law and custom, and enforced by violence. It was a time when dialect and regional (local color) writing was in vogue, and the southern plantation romance was being cranked out as slavery suddenly became nostalgic. Watkins wrote both poetry ("Bury Me in a Free Land," 1854) and fiction, most notably Iola Leroy (1892). Hopkins, editor of The Colored American (1893), wrote the novel Contending Forces (1900), now considered an important work. Dunbar and Chesnutt were the two major writers of that period, both of whom used dialect and local color in their writings. Dunbar became the first black poet to achieve real fame and critical notice. He also wrote novels and lyrics for black Broadway shows. Chesnutt was a short story writer and novelist who used black folklore and the trappings of the old plantation to great, often ironic effect. His novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), about the Wilmington, North Carolina riot of 1898 was one of the more uncompromising works by a black author of the time—and uncomfortable for many white readers who had come to enjoy Chesnutt's early, more subtle work. Probably the best selling book of the period was Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (1901).

W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks (1903), a highly unified collection of essays, remains the single most influential book by a black author from this period. James Weldon Johnson's novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), used the theme of racial "passing" in a fresh way. Both books explored the idea of a unique African American "double consciousness."

The Harlem Renaissance

Several occurrences made the HARLEM RENAISSANCE possible, including the large migration of African Americans from the south to northern cities during World War I; the creation of interracial, progressive organizations, such as the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (1909) and the NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE (1911); the emergence of Marcus Garvey and the mass attraction of BLACK NATIONALISM as a political movement; the growing interest among black intellectuals in socialism and communism; and the rise of jazz and a modernist sensibility among black artists. This renaissance largely coincided with the 1920s and was midwived by such eminent figures as Charles S. Johnson; W. E. B. Du Bois; Alain Locke, who, in 1925, edited the seminal anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation; and James Weldon Johnson, who wanted to create an identifiable school of black writing. Poets such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen came to public attention at this time, as well as poet/novelist Claude McKay, novelists Jessie Fausett, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, and Rudolph Fisher, and the relatively unknown but brash Zora Neale Hurston. Probably the most artistically accomplished work of the period was Jean Toomer's evocative novel-cum-miscellany, Cane (1923).

The Depression and After

The depression signaled the end of the Harlem Renaissance, as white publishers and readers became less interested in the works of blacks, and as the fad of primitivism faded. Also, Black Nationalism and pan-Africanism lost traction as mass political movements, although they continued to affect black thinking. The impact of communism on black writers became more pronounced, particularly after the role communists played in the Scottsboro trial (1931). But black writers retained their interest in exploring the folk roots of their culture. Zora Neale Hurston, who had already made a name for herself during the Harlem Renaissance, published some of her major works during the depression, including her first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and the anthropological study Mules and Men (1935). Her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is considered her masterpiece, one of the major feminist works by a black woman author. Other noteworthy novels of the 1930s include George Schuyler's Black No More (1931) and Arna Bontemps's God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936).

A year after Hurston's great novel of black southern folk life, Richard Wright, a communist from Mississippi, published Uncle Tom's Children (1938)—intensely violent and political short stories with a decidedly different take on the black South. He became the first black writer to have his book selected by the BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB when, two years later, he published the most celebrated black novel in American literary history at the time, Native Son, with its stark naturalism and unappealing protagonist. Wright became, without question, the first true black literary star. In 1945, he published his autobiography Black Boy: A Recollection of Childhood and Youth, another highly successful book—an uncompromising and unsentimental examination of his family and life in the Deep South. He influenced a cadre of significant black writers including William Attaway (Bloodon the Forge, 1941), Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945), and Ann Petry (The Street, 1946).

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By the end of the 1940s, Wright's influence was waning, and black writers turned to less naturalistic and less politically overt themes. William Demby's Beetlecreek (1950), with its existentialist theme, is a good example of this new approach. Wright went to Europe in 1947, never to live in the United States again, and though he continued to publish a steady, mostly nonfiction stream of books in the 1950s, including the outstanding collection of short fiction Eight Men (1961), he never enjoyed the level of success he had in the late 1930s and 1940s.

By the early 1950s, black writers went much further in their crossover appeal, achieving greater acclaim than even Wright had done. In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first black to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Annie Allen (1949). Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man won the National Book Award and has been judged the most impressive and the most literary of all black American novels. Some consider it not only the greatest of all black novels but also arguably the greatest post–World War II American novel. Finally, there is James Baldwin, son of a Harlem preacher, who began writing highly stylistic and penetrating essays in the late 1940s, and whose first novel, the highly autobiographical Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), was well received. All these writers were trying to show dimensions of black life they felt were lacking in the works of Wright and other black naturalistic writers.

After the 1960s

By the late 1950s, two black women writers gained recognition for their work: Paule Marshall for her coming of-age novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), and Lorraine Hansberry for the play about a working-class black family in Chicago, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which has become the most famous drama written by a black playwright.

In the 1960s, James Baldwin became a major force in American letters, publishing novels such as Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), as well as his meditation on the NATION OF ISLAM and the state of race relations in America, The Fire Next Time (1963), his most popular book. He also wrote the play Blues for Mister Charlie (1964). Propelled by the civil rights movement and the momentous sense of political engagement taking place in America in the 1960s, blacks began to make their presence in a number of genres. Bestsellers of the period include The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), the compelling life story of the Nation of Islam minister; Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown (1965), about growing up in Harlem; and Sammy Davis Jr.'s Yes I Can (1965), about the life of the most famous black entertainer of the day. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) remains one of the best-selling black autobiographies of all time. John A. Williams, a prolific writer during this period, wrote, unquestionably, the major novel of this period, Man Who Cried I Am (1967), a roman à clef about post–World War II black writers. It deeply reflected the feelings of many blacks at the time, who felt they lived in a society on the verge of a "final solution," and was one of the most talked about books of the 1960s.

Probably the most influential writer of this period was LeRoi Jones, who became Imamu Amiri Baraka. He was a poet of considerable significance (Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964); a music critic (Blues People, 1963, is still one of the enduring studies of black music); a dramatist (Dutchman, 1964, was the single most famous play of the period); and an essayist (Home: Social Essays, 1966). As he became more involved in the cultural nationalist politics of the middle and late 1960s, the quality of his writing deteriorated, as he focused more on agitprop. Nevertheless, he helped spawn the black arts movement, which produced poets such as Nikki Giovanni, Don L. Lee (Haki Matabuti), Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and Etheridge Knight. Much of this work, too, was agitprop, though several of these writers developed their craft with great care.

In the 1970s, more black novelists appeared: the satirist Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo, 1972); Ernest Gaines (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1971); and the highly intense work of Gayl Jones (Corregidora, 1975). With the rise of interest in black women's work, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker appeared, along with writers like Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place, 1982). David Bradley's groundbreaking novel about remembering slavery and the impact of its horror, The Chaneysville Incident (1981), foreshadowed Morrison's highly acclaimed Beloved (1987).

In the realm of children's and young adult literature, the late Virginia Hamilton (M. C. Higgins the Great, 1974) is the only children's author to win the coveted MacArthur Prize. Mildred Taylor (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, 1976) and Walter Dean Myers (Fallen Angels, 1988) have also produced major works for young people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, William L. To Tell A Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Baker, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis. Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Holloway, Karla F. C. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Huggins, Nathan I. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Lewis, David L. When Harlem Was In Vogue. New York: Penguin, 1997.

McDowell, Deborah E. "The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Posnock, Ross. Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Gerald Early

See also African American Studies; African Americans; Autobiography of Malcolm X; Harlem; Invisible ManM.; Souls of Black Folk.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

The genre of children's literature in the United States was not named as such until the middle of the twentieth century, when libraries and bookstores began placing books they believed to be of special interest to children in separate sections of their establishments. Publishers caught on to this trend and began producing and selling books specifically to the children's market, further dividing the audience by age and reading levels. These groupings include picture books, easy readers, beginning readers, middle grade, and young adult. The categories overlap and disagreement over what books belong in what category are frequent and ongoing among professionals in the field. Late-twentieth-century scholarship questioned the practice of separating this literature from the mainstream and targeting it strictly for children. Interestingly, American children's literature has come full circle from its earliest days, when it taught culture and history through didactic texts. Afterward, it went through several decades of emphasis on entertaining and literary fiction, followed by a renewed interest in nonfiction, and then—to the turn of the twenty-first century—a stress on accounts of historical people and events, with an emphasis on multiculturalism.

Indian and Early American Literature

American children's literature originated with the oral tradition of its Native peoples. When stories and legends were told by Native Americans, children were included in the audience as a means of passing on the society's culture and values to succeeding generations. This oral literature included creation stories and stories of chiefs, battles, intertribal treaties, spirits, and events of long ago. They entertained as they instructed, and were often the most important part of sacred ceremonies.

The Puritans and other British settlers in New England brought with them printed matter for children to be used for advancing literacy, teaching religion, and other didactic purposes. British works were imported and reprinted in the American colonies, beginning a trend of European imports that would continue for some time. A number of the earliest known children's works written in the colonies borrowed heavily from these imports in theme and purpose. These include John Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1646). Probably the best-known Puritan book that children read at the time was the New England Primer, originally published sometime between 1686 and 1690. It contained lessons in literacy and religious doctrine in verse form with pictures, not for the purpose of entertaining children but because Puritans believed children learned best that way. Other common books in early America included John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and American schoolbooks such as Noah Webster's Webster's American Spelling Book (1783) and George Wilson's American Class Reader (c. 1810).

The Emergence of an American Children's Literature

Imported books for children began losing their appeal after the War of 1812 and American themes expanded from religious doctrine to a more general moral stance that was viewed as important to the establishment of the character of the new nation. Jacob Abbott's "Rollo" stories, about a little boy named Rollo who gets older with succeeding stories, are a good example. The Congregationalist minister published the first Rollo story in 1835 and went on to write more than two hundred moralistic tales for children.

Moralistic teaching carried over into the general education system established by a nation desiring a literate democracy. The most commonly used textbook series from before the Civil War to the 1920s was the McGuffey Reader. It concerned itself as much with right and wrong as it did about reading. An exception to this kind of writing for children in the pre–Civil War period is the poem probably written by Clement Moore, "A Visit from St. Nicholas"—later known as "The Night before Christmas"—published in 1823 in a New York newspaper. This poem carried a new purpose, that of pure entertainment.

A well-known publisher and writer of the antebellum era was Samuel Goodrich, who founded Parley's Magazine in 1833 after a successful round of books featuring his popular storyteller character, Peter Parley. Goodrich's magazine mixed information about the world, much of which would be questioned today, with enjoyable entertainment for children. Other well-known American children's periodicals of the nineteenth century include The Youth's Companion (1827–1929), Juvenile Miscellany (1826– 1834), and Our Young Folks (1865–1873). Each periodical had its own character and emphasis and dealt with the timely issues of the day such as slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Late-Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Literature

As it was in Britain, the late nineteenth century in the United States was an era rich in book-length fiction for American children, producing some of the best-known classics enjoyed by children and adults. These include Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), along with its subsequent related novels, and Samuel (Mark Twain) Clemens's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1884). The turn of the century brought L. Frank Baum's fantasy The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900.

The twentieth century saw a shift in American children's literature so that domestic authors and titles finally won preeminence over imported titles. Readers became interested in subjects of American history and series like Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books—beginning with Little House in the Big Woods (1932)—drew dedicated fans. Classic novels involving the American theme of nature also appeared, including E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952).

The mid-twentieth century was marked by advances in printing technology that allowed for high-quality reproductions of artwork, leading to the mass production of thousands of picture books for children each year, a practice that continues. This created an even more important role for illustrators, who now wrote many of the books they illustrated. One of the earlier classics of this form is Goodnight Moon (1947), by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. Probably the best-known author-illustrator is Maurice Sendak, whose Where the Wild Things Are (1963) became an instant classic. Picture books have also provided a new venue where children can enjoy poetry, since many picture books are illustrated poems or prose poems.

In the late twentieth century, American children's literature began to turn toward multicultural themes. Works of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry illustrated and promoted an understanding of the diversity of the population of the United States and the richness and struggles of its people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Hunt, Peter. Children's Literature: An Illustrated History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Kirk, Connie Ann, ed. Encyclopedia of American Children's and Young Adult Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.

Connie Ann Kirk

See also Childhood; Webster's Blue-Backed Speller.

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

In the course of their adaptation to a largely Anglo-American presence in North America, Native Americans blended the literary and linguistic forms of the newcomers with their own oral-based traditions. Native American authors who have achieved widespread acclaim since the middle twentieth century have drawn not only on the rich tension between these two traditions but also on several centuries of Native American writing in English. Before the American Revolution, Native American literature followed the history of Euro-American movement across the continent; where explorers and settlers went, missionaries could be found converting and educating indigenous peoples. Samson Occom studied English with missionaries and earned the honor of being the first Native American to publish in English with his A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772) and Collections of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774).

White attitudes toward Native American literature changed at the end of the WAR OF 1812. After the United States defeated the tribes of the trans-Appalachian frontier, the dominant culture began to romanticize Native American culture, celebrating its nobility and mourning its imminent demise. The Indian removal policy of the 1830s only added to this nostalgia, which manifested itself most clearly in the popularity of Native American autobiography. Autobiography writers, working primarily as Christian converts, modeled their books on the popular format of spiritual confession and missionary reminiscence. In 1829, William Apes published the first of these personal accounts, A Son of the Forest. This work reflects the temperance theme of the time, decrying destruction of the Indians at the hand of alcohol. George Copway proved an ideal native model for white society; he illustrated the nobility of his "savage" past as he integrated it with Euro-American religion and education. His The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847) used personal episodes to teach English-speaking audiences about his tribe and culture. He published the first book of Native American poetry, The Qjibway Conquest, in 1850. One year later, with publication of the book by white ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, entitled Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, native poetry garnered a wider audience. In 1854 John Rollin Ridge broke away from autobiography and published the first novel by an American Indian, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta.

The second half of the nineteenth century marked the defeat and humiliation of Native Americans west of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER and the solidification of the reservation system. The Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 attempted to force Americanization by abolishing communal landholding and instituting individual property ownership. Many Native Americans feared that their oral traditions would disappear under the reservation system, so they began to write down legends and folktales, as did Zitkala Sa, who published Old Indian Legends (1901). Between 1880 and 1920, other Native American writers were distinctly integrationist, asserting that only through assimilation could their people survive. Publishers hid the racial identity of John M. Oskison, the most popular Indian writer of the 1920s, while the novels of Simon Pokagon, John Joseph Mathews, and Mourning Dove continued to educate readers about tribal ways. D'arcy McNickle, considered by many the first important Native American novelist, published The Surrounded in 1936. He foreshadowed the use of alienation as a theme in post– World War II Native American literature.

The Termination Resolution of 1953 undid John Collier's NEW DEAL policy of Indian cultural reorganization by terminating federal control and responsibility for those tribes under the government's jurisdiction. Termination attempted, again, to Americanize native peoples by breaking up what was left of tribal cultures. With service in WORLD WAR II, poverty, and termination, many Native Americans were cut loose from their moorings, alienated from both the dominant Euro-American culture and their own tribal roots. It was not until 1970 that the U.S. government officially ended the policy of tribal termination.

Encouraged by civil rights activism, Native American voices appeared in the 1960s, including Duane Niatum and Simon Ortiz. These writers rejected assimilation as the only viable means of survival and asserted a separate native reality. N. Scott Momaday, with his 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969 and brought Native American literature newfound respect. The year 1969 proved a turning point, not only because of Momaday's prize but also because Indian activism became more militant. The work of Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko asserted Indian identity. Vizenor wrote two novels, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) and Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987), and the latter won the American Book Award in 1988. Welch received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1969 and then wrote his first book of poetry. He also wrote many novels, including Winter in the Blood (1974), joining oral traditions and the English language. Silko published her best-known work, Ceremony, in 1977, also combining the mythic past and the English literary tradition.

The best-known Native American writer of the mid-1990s was Louise Erdrich, author of the award-winning Love Medicine (1984). Like most Native American authors who published in English, Erdrich used her talents to decry the toll that white religion, disease, and industrialization took on native cultures. Like Welch and Silko, she weaves tribal mythology with English literary forms. Sherman Alexie also distinguished himself as one of the nation's best new writers. Most widely known for his collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)—the basis for the 1998 film Smoke Signals—he has distinguished himself as a poet and novelist who explores the questions of love, poverty, and Native American identity in a sharp but often humorous manner. The English language, used for so long by white society to remove Native Americans from their "uncivilized" ways, was used in the final decades of the twentieth century by Native American writers to assert their distinct cultural heritage.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fleck, Richard F., ed. Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993; Pueblo, Colo.: Passeggiata Press, 1997.

Larson, Charles R. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978.

Owen, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Wiget, Andrew, ed. Critical Essays on Native American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1985.

Kristen Foster/J. H.

See also Indian Oral Literature; Indian Oratory; Indian Reservations; Termination Policy.

POPULAR LITERATURE

While Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is often called the father of popular literature because of his seminal role in the development of three popular genres (detective fiction, science fiction, and horror fiction), the world of mass-market popular literature did not emerge until toward the end of the nineteenth century. When it did, its themes and preoccupations appeared to owe little to Poe.

The First Literary Boom (1830–1900)

As a result of a variety of socioeconomic factors, the United States experienced its first literary boom in the years between 1830 and 1900. Romances by the likes of Mary Johnston (1870–1936) and Laura Jean Libbey (1862–1925), and westerns by writers such as E. Z. C. Judson ("Ned Buntine," 1821–1886) and Edward S. Ellis (1840–1916) appeared in biweekly or weekly "dime novels," the most famous of which were those published by Erastus Beadle and Robert Adams, whose firm began publication, as Beadle's Dime Novel series, in 1860.

Unapologetically commercial in intent, the dime novels avoided any potentially difficult questions raised by either their subject matter or their literary antecedents. This tendency was most notable, perhaps, in the dime novel western, which, while being derived almost exclusively from the work of James Fenimore Cooper (1789– 1851), managed to ignore completely the conflicts between the American East and the West discernible in Cooper's image of the frontier.

New Genres Appear in the Pulps (1900–1925)

While the next generation of the western did engage itself with the kind of question Cooper had asked, it rarely delved more deeply than nostalgia. In 1902, this added dimension, however slight, helped give the fledgling genre a cornerstone: The Virginian, by Owen Wister (1860– 1938). Zane Grey (1872–1939), whose Riders of the Purple Sage appeared in 1912, was among the most prominent of Wister's many imitators.

Pulps (the term being derived from the cheap paper on which the magazines were printed) appeared as new postal regulations rendered prohibitively expensive the publication and distribution of dime novels. Their appearance was accompanied by that of detective fiction and, in the form of the romantic fantasy of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), the germ of an as-yet unnamed genre, science fiction.

Fantasy Dominates Depression-Era Popular Literature (1925–1938)

As the country entered the Great Depression, popular taste turned to fantasy. The most popular detective fiction, for example, was no longer a dream of order, which is how some critics describe the early form, but rather a fantasy of power accompanied by a pervasive sense of disillusionment. In 1929, Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) published the first such "hard-boiled" detective fiction novel, Red Harvest, which, as it owes much to Wister's The Virginian, is basically a western set in the city. Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970), and Rex Stout (1896–1975) were other notable practitioners of this new detective subgenre.

Fantasy of an altogether different kind also entered the pulps of this era in the form of a hyperrealist school of science fiction founded by Hugo Gernsback (1884– 1967). In its own way no less fantastic than the Burroughsian mode, the new form remained distinguishable by its thoroughly unromantic obsession with the scientific and otherwise technical elements it brought to the genre.

An Explosion of New Forms (1938–1965)

During the war and postwar years, aside from some works by the likes of the western's Ernest Haycox (1899–1950) and Jack Schaefer (1907–1999), detective and science fiction remained the dominant popular genres of the day, albeit transformed by the war and a few signal figures.

John W. Campbell (1910–1971), who assumed the editorship of the pulp Astounding in 1937, helped bring about a revolution within the genre. He broke with tradition by publishing original work by Isaac Asimov (1920– 1992) and Robert Heinlein (1907–1988), two writers who helped bring about a synthesis of the Gernsbackian and Burroughsian schools. This helped to make possible science fiction's eventual graduation from the pulps, as is evidenced by the later mainstream success of Ray Bradbury (b. 1920), author of Fahrenheit 451 (1953).

Detective fiction fairly exploded in this period, with new subgenres and fresh takes on established forms reflecting not only the impact of the war on the public consciousness, but also wartime advances in technology and the sciences. Espionage and other war-related subjects were incorporated (the "Cold War novel," appearing first in the 1960s and taken up beginning in the 1970s by writers such as James Grady, Ross Thomas, Robert Ludlum, and Tom Clancy, had its roots in the detective fiction of this era), and a more sophisticated reading public embraced a hitherto unimaginably cynical variation: Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury (1947). In this brutish exercise in misogyny, sadism, and gore, the main character, Mike Hammer, metes out his own peculiar form of justice in a lawless urban dystopia that bears little resemblance to either Hammett's Poisonville or Chandler's Los Angeles.

The Romance and the Western Are Reborn (1965–)

Spillane's reinvention of hard-boiled detective fiction anticipated by a full generation the widespread inclusion in popular forms of graphic depictions of sex and violence. The appearance of the adult western is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this trend, but sex also became an almost obligatory element of the modern form of the "category romance," which reappeared in the last third of the century.

In the 1960s, Harlequin, which began publishing romances in 1957, took full advantage of new methods of marketing and distribution to resurrect a genre that had lain largely dormant, with few exceptions, since the turn of the century. Prominent writers of the modern category romance include Elizabeth Lowell, author of Tell Me No Lies (1986), and Jane Anne Krentz, author of Sweet Starfire (1986).

Notable variations on the genre, however, such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), an anti-romance, appeared with some consistency prior to Harlequin's ascendance, and the gothic revival of the 1940s and 1950s saw the reappearance of many themes familiar to readers of the romance. (The work of Mary Higgins Clark, Stephen King, and William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist [1971], lies in the shadow of the gothic tradition.) Novels with historical settings or themes, ranging from James Branch Cabell's The Cream of the Jest (1917) to John Jakes's North and South (1982), also bear strong traces of the romance.

The western experienced a similar rejuvenation in this period, with wide notice of the work of Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) and Larry McMurtry (b. 1936), among others, ensuring the popularity of the later, iconoclastic detective fiction of Tony Hillerman (b. 1925) and Elmore Leonard (b. 1925).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Thorough and opinionated.

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. 2d ed. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1984.

Ohmann, Richard M. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. London: Verso, 1996.

Prince, Gerald. "How New Is New?" In Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Places science fiction in the context of literary history.

Pyrhönen, Heta. Murder from an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. With a New Introduction by the author. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Concerned with the socioeconomic origins of the category romance.

Unsworth, John. "The Book Market II." In The Columbia History of the American Novel. Edited by Emory Elliott et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Good introduction to the economics of popular culture production.

Michael Robinson

See also Dime Novels; Magazines; Publishing Industry.