Literature

Like in art, American literature of the first generations was strongly dependent on British traditions and books brought from there. Before the Revolution and after it many revolutionary-minded Americans viewed literature and art as the means of independence and demanded to lay the foundations of national American literature. The progenitor of American short story was Washington Irving (1783-1859), the author of “The Sketch-Book” (1819) and “Alhambra”(1832). James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrote the number of novels about American frontier. His novels “The Spy”(1821) and “Last of the Michigan’s”(1926) became the first American bestsellers, translated into many world languages.. A poet and prose-writer Edgar Poe (1809-49 ), the author of “The Murders in the Rue Morgan” (1841), “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Gold Bug”, initiated. the detective genre. Herman Melville’s masterpiece “Moby Dick”was published in 1850. Poet Henry Longfellow (1807-82) in his poems of “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858) created images of courageous Indian heroes.

   Walt Whitman’s(1819-92) “Leaves of the Grass” (1855) glorified people and opposed slavery. It was a tribute to the Civil War soldiers who had laid on the battlefields and whom he had seen while serving as an army nurse. The book went through numerous editions during the author’s lifetime, swelling in content from a thin volume to the voluminous work it is today. Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom” (1865) was dedicated to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. The strong rhythms and unusual style of Whitman’s verses, the brightness and impressiveness of his images made Whitman the greatest poet of the USA.

Travel was also a favorite subject. When F. Parkman (1823-93) published his work “The California and Oregon Trail or Life on the Prairies and in the Wigwam” (1849) and Ralph Waldo Emerson composed his memorable essay, glorifying the spirit of the youthful and vigorous United States, they. became immediately popular..

Whitman, Longfellow, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Lowell to a greater or lesser degree stood against the slavery. But their influence was relatively smaller compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly”. Like many novels of the time, it first appeared serialized in “The National Era” and copies could not be printed fast enough to keep up with the demand of the readers. “So you’re the little woman who started the big war”- said Abrahams Lincoln when he met H. Stowe at first time in 1882.  

Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) composed a great number of Black folklore and published his collections of tales “Uncle Remus Stories” (1880) and “Nights with Uncle Remus” (1883).

      The period after the Civil War is associated with the second stage of the US literature. The leading prose writer of the end of the 19P^thP century was Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910). Twain was born in the state near the Mississippi River His work as a riverboat pilot steering boats up and down the river made the most important influence on him and his books. One of Twain’s first books is called “Life on the Mississippi” (1883). His “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1976) and “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) tell about the lives of young heroes on the Mississippi river. Together with Twain’s romantic tale “The Prince and the Pauper” (1889) they are still read by children all over the world. At the same time his “Golden Age” (1873) and “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court” (1889), exposing American vanity, corruption and hypocrisy, are full of strong satire. Incomparable depiction of colloquial speech, peculiarities of paradox, humor and wit are characteristic features of Mark Twain’s writing..

 The third and present stage is marked by a tremendous surge of American creativity in all areas, by a steady self-confidence and by growing international influence of American literature. The American literature of the 20P^thP century as a mirror of society was opened by Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945). In his first realistic novel “Sister Carrie” Dreiser challenged the American myth that honesty and hard work inevitably lead to success. He followed the novel with several other strong social-critical works of fiction “ Jennie Gerhard” (1911), “The Financier”(1912), “The Titan”(1914), “An American Tragedy” (1925). Later T. Dreiser published two collections of stories “Free and Other Stories”(1918) and “Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories”(1927). Many of these stories dramatized the theme of love as the most powerful force in life.

O. Henry (Porter William Sidney) (1862-1910 ) created a great number of short stories about the life of simple, poor Americans, collected in his books “Cabbages and Kings”(1904), ”The Four Million”(1906), “The Gentle Grafter”(1908).

The Northern stories by Jack London (1876-1916) were extremely popular both in the USA and abroad. His novels “The Son of Wolf” (1900), “ The Sea-Wolf”(1904), “Martin Eden”(1909) and many others were translated and published in Europe and Russia.

 The horrors of World War I and the period following it in the 1920s sparkled the imagination of some of the greatest writers in American literary. They include Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the author of short stories and novels “The Great Gatsby”(1925), “Tender is the Night”(1934), “The Last Tycoon”(1941) about so-called “lost generation” and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Her most widely read book “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” was devoted to her life in Paris, her meeting with famous French artists and expatriate American writers such as Ernest Hemingway. The great master of the modern prose style E. Hemingway (1899-1961) in his early books “Fiesta”(1926), “ For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940) also expressed the frames of mind of the “lost generation”. E. Hemingway volunteered for an ambulance unit in Spain during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. His first successful novel “The Sun also Rises”(1926) is about the group of American expatriates living in France and Spain who had lost their joy in life and felt wasted. His “Farewell to Arms” (1929) is another work that reflected the growing disillusionment with war. The main idea of the author is the tragic stoicism of his main characters. According to Hemingway a man must retain courage and dignity under very harsh circumstances, even facing the threat of death. While living in Cuba in the early 1950s, he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) about the courage and fortitude of an old Cuban fisherman, awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1954.  

More than ten other American writers received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The very first American to be honored by a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930 was Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). In his popular novels “Main Street”(1920), “Babbitt”(1922) and “Arrowsmith”(1925) S. Lewis could describe the lives and values of small town people with sincerity and great understanding.

William Faulkner (1897-1962), known for his novels about people living in the South “ The Sound and the Fury”(1929), ”As I lay Dying”(1930), ”Intruder in that Dust”(1948), received the Nobel prize in 1949. Faulkner`s style is very much different from that of Hemingway. While Hemingway wrote in short, simple sentences and used a great deal of conversation, Faulkner’s sentences sometimes carry on for almost an entire page, with a lot clauses strung together by commas.

Among the other Nobel prize winners there are a playwright Eugene 0’Neill(1888- 1953), Saul Bellow (1915), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) and John Steinbeck (1902-68), noted for “Grapes of Wrath” and “The Winter of Our Discontent” picturing the complexities of life in America.

John Cheever (1912-82) published the novels and stories “The Wapshot Chronicle”(1957), ”Bullety Park”(1969), “Falconer”(1977) in which he used satire to express socio-economic essence of life. J. D. Salinger (1919- ) achieved great literary success with the publication of his novel “The Catcher in the Rye”, centered on the character of 16-year-old boy, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness A playwright and poet Dubose Hayward (1885-1940 ) wrote about the life of black American Dockers. His popular novel “Porgy” was staged in 1927 and later became the plot of opera “Porgy and Bess”. Black Americans also wrote about their experiences in American society. The. Black writer Richard Wright (1908- 1960) became well known as the author of the number of novels describing the feelings and fates of black Americans.

During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s more Afro-Americans began to write. James Baldwin (1924-1987) is well-known writer of that time. His first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) is about his own life as a poor child growing up in New York ghetto, Harlem. In protest against racism in American society, J. Baldwin emigrated and lived abroad until 1977. The life of Harlem inspired the poems of one of the best known black American poets of the 20P^thP century Langston Hughes (1902-67). To Hughes it seemed that the people of Harlem’s hopes of better attitude had been delayed – “deferred” for too long:

“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-and then run? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? ”

Maya Angelou is a contemporary black American author and poet. Her first book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1970) has an autobiographical character. In 1993 at President Clinton’s first inauguration ceremony, she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning “on TV to the entire country. Alex Hayley’s epic story of the black experience “Roots” (1976) with the subsequent television special caused white America to stop and investigate its “past sins». In 1983 Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel ‘The Color Purple”, devoted to her struggle for equality.

In the 1950s there appeared a group of unconventional writers and artists “The Beat Generation” The writers of this generation, called beatniks, wanted to create a new kind of writing grown from poetry readings in the form of jazz. The poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was considered unconventional because it did not follow the structure of traditional verse. Jack Kerouac`s (1922-1969 ) writing had a new spontaneous style. His best-known novel “ On the Road” describes beatniks wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. In the 1960s a young writer and singer Bob Dylon used protest lyrics to support the anti-war movement of the time. For many young people he became the voice of the conscience of his generation. His lyrics set to old tunes, were ironic comments on what he saw as the deceit and hypocrisy of those in power.  

In the 1960s and 1970s a new ethnic literature emerged. Dee Brown’ s history of the American West “Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee” (1971) led the way for a serious of books on the American Indian.

By the late 1970s and the 1980s science fiction had moved to a generally accepted form of literature. Popular writers here included Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke. The 1980s also saw the rise of popular horror fiction with Dean Koontz, V. C. Andews, Peter Straub, Clive Barker and Stephen King as the most prolific writers.

   Recent literature included John Updike ’s four novels (. “Rabbit at Rest”, “ Self-Consciousness” and others) and Tom Clancy. His books, such as “The Hunt for Red October”, “Red Storm Rising” and “Patriot Games” top both the hardback and overall bestseller books.