# American literature

American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.

## Quotes
### 18th century

* The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime, Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame.
** George Berkeley, On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America (1752), st. 1
* The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru.
** Horace Walpole, English art historian, writer, antiquarian and politician in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (November 24, 1774)

### 19th century

* But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius, in bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steam-boats, grist-mills, are their natural objects for centuries to come.
** Sydney Smith, in The Edinburgh Review (December 1818); reprinted in Robert Walsh, Jr., An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1819), p. 229
* The character of the American literature is, generally speaking, pretty justly appreciated in Europe. The immense exhalation of periodical trash, which penetrates into every cot and corner of the country, and which is greedily sucked in by all ranks, is unquestionably one cause of its inferiority.
** Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), ch. 29
* It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores.
** Margaret Fuller, "American Literature", in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 122
* America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.
** Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to William Ticknor (January, 1855), in Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (1913), p. 141
* It would seem that in our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained and unentertaining continent, where we all sit sniffing, as it were, the very earth of our foundations, we ought to have leisure to turn out something handsome from the very heart of simple nature.
** Henry James, Letter to Grace Norton (January 14, 1874), in Percy Lubbock (ed.) The Letters of Henry James (1920), p. 37
* I will put in my poems that with you is heroism upon land and sea, And I will report all heroism from an American point of view.
** Walt Whitman, "Starting from Paumanok", in Leaves of Grass, 3rd ed. (1882)
* I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,... The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else...
** Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing", in Leaves of Grass, 3rd ed. (1882)
* To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin.
** Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; 1885), ch. 21

### 20th century

* One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling.
** G. K. Chesterton, "The Secret Garden", in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)
* Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction—perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.
** H. L. Mencken, "The National Letters", Prejudices: Second Series (New York, 1920), pp. 39-40
* A superior man’s struggle in the world is not with exterior lions, trusts, margraves, policemen, rivals in love, German spies, radicals and tornadoes, but with the obscure, atavistic impulses within him—the impulses, weaknesses and limitations that war with his notion of what life should be. ... The hero of the inferior—i.e., the typically American—novel engages in no such doomed and fateful combat. His conflict is not with the inexplicable ukases of destiny, the limitations of his own strength, the dead hand upon him, but simply with the superficial desires of his elemental fellow men. He thus has a fair chance of winning—and in bad fiction that chance is always converted into a certainty. So he marries the daughter of the owner of the factory and eventually gobbles the factory itself. His success gives thrills to persons who can imagine no higher aspiration. He embodies their optimism, as the other hero embodies the pessimism of more introspective and idealistic men. He is the protagonist of that great majority which is so inferior that it is quite unconscious of its inferiority.
** H. L. Mencken, "The National Letters", Prejudices: Second Series (New York, 1920), p. 43
* God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest.... You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and all the refinements of aestheticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now.
** F. Scott Fitzgerald, Letter to Edmund Wilson (1921), in Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (1970), p. 83
* In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.
** Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922), ch. 14
* Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
** Sinclair Lewis, "The American Fear of Literature", Nobel Prize Address (December 12, 1930), in H. Frenz, Literature 1901–67 (1969), p. 285
* All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
** Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), p. 22
* American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
** Gore Vidal, Two Sisters (1970)
* When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America.
** Stephen King, Rage (1977), ch. 20
* I am creating part of American literature, and I was very aware of doing that, of adding to American literature. The critics haven't recognized my work enough as another tradition of American literature.
** Maxine Hong Kingston, 1986 interview, in Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (eds.) Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)
* At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.
** Tom Wolfe, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast", in Harper's Magazine (November, 1989)

### 21st century

* The literary America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St. Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city’s remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, and women’s communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males.
** Jonathan Franzen, "Why Bother?", in How to Be Alone: Essays (2002), p. 62
* Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion [of Mexico] were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists.
** Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014), p. 130

## See also

* Literature
* United States