Separate Voices W hen the seventeenth-century settlers brought the English language to America, they immediately and necessarily began to adapt it to their new environment. These changes were noted early and criticized by purists on both sides of the Atlantic. However, after the Revolution, Americans began to take pride in their own form of English.
L ike the American language, the earliest American literature copied English models.
However, after the Revolution and the War of 1812, writers were eager to create a distinctly American literature. R esponding to this and similar taunts with creative anger, American writers soon produced works that plenty of British people read. Works by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain had been acclaimed in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century. Many American authors have lived and traveled in Britain, and some, including Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath settled there permanently. Charles Dickens was lionized on his two trips to America, in 1842 and 1867-68.