American Literature: Prose

Article Outline

Introduction; Beginnings: The 1500s and 1600s; Toward Independence: The 1700s; Nationhood: The 1800s; Modernism: The 1900s; Current Trends

The Black Experience

Out of the protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s came many writers whose works revealed the experiences of blacks and women. Amiri Baraka probed racial issues in his Home: Social Essays (1966) and Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971). Eldridge Cleaver contributed significant essays on American society in Soul on Ice (1967). Black nationalist leader Malcolm X wrote his influential work The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) with Alex Haley, who later became famous as the author of the best-selling work Roots (1976), a semifictional account of Haley's family history from its African beginnings to the present. Maya Angelou, a poet-novelist and children's author, wrote several books constituting a powerful memoir of her life, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which describes her childhood in the South.

Women’s Experience

Modern American feminist writing can be divided into three broad categories, or waves. Writings in the first category endeavored to show that the roles and behaviors believed to be acceptable and appropriate for women had also entrapped them and limited their opportunities. A pioneering work in this category was The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan, which challenged several long-established American attitudes, especially the notion that women could find fulfillment only as wives and mothers. Friedan's phrase feminine mystique refers to the idealization of the traditional female role of wife and mother; Friedan contended that this idealization constituted a conspiracy to prevent women from competing with men. The second category of feminist writing focused on direct social action, such as protesting against male-dominated institutions and forming advocacy groups to represent and promote women’s interests politically and socially. Two representative works of activist feminist writing, both published in 1970, are Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone. The third and most recent trend in feminist writing focuses less on criticisms of society and more on the establishment of full, flourishing women’s cultures, where such subjects as literature, politics, and art are reassessed from a specifically female viewpoint or ideological framework. This movement has been termed cultural feminism; one of its early and influential spokespersons was Robin Morgan, whose essays were collected in Going Too Far (1978).

The Environment

Another trend in writing to gain notice in the 1960s was associated with the environment, although it had its start much earlier. Writing in this genre is generally characterized by a deep and sustained interest in the natural world as a physical, emotional, and spiritual resource. Environmental writing in American literature is often said to have started with Henry David Thoreau, whose writings supported a belief in nature’s intrinsic value, a view that was still new when Walden; or, Life in the Woods was published in 1854. Later writers of the 19th and early 20th century encouraged environmental conservation, including naturalist John Burroughs in such works as Wake-Robin (1871) and Accepting the Universe (1920). Writings by explorer and naturalist John Muir, including his first book, The Mountains of California (1894), reflected his spiritual view of nature and his belief in the need for political protection of environmental resources.

In the 20th century, A Sand County Almanac (1949), by conservationist and philosopher Aldo Leopold, offered a simple formula for a balanced relationship between humankind and the land, which he called the land ethic. It held that each person must become a steward of the land, and that personal ethics should extend to the natural world. In the 1960s biologist Rachel Carson drew attention to new hazards to the environment. In Silent Spring (1964) she discusses the widespread and irreversible damage caused by chemical pesticides, acid rain, and nuclear waste. This book, which reached a large readership and advanced the political cause of environmental protection, is considered one of the most important works in the movement.

Literary Criticism

Literary criticism in the 20th century began with the neohumanists, who upheld classical traditions and called for a firmer ethical basis for art. These theories were expounded by such critics as Paul Elmer More in Shelburne Essays (11 volumes, 1904-1921), William Crary Brownell in American Prose Masters (1909), and Irving Babbitt in The New Laokoön (1910).

The appraisal of American writing as a distinct national literature began in the 1920s with the groundbreaking Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) by English novelist D. H. Lawrence. American scholar Vernon Louis Parrington provided a sociopolitical interpretation of American literature in his treatise Main Currents in American Thought (3 volumes, 1927-1930). A survey of American letters more suited to the general reader was contributed by literary historian Van Wyck Brooks in a multivolume series that began with The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936). At about the same time, H. L. Mencken unleashed a direct assault on the contemporary tastes and prejudices of what he called the American “booboisie.” Mencken’s literary reviews appeared from 1924 to 1933 in the magazine American Mercury.

Between the late 1930s and 1945 a critical approach known as New Criticism developed. Taking its name from a 1941 essay by John Crowe Ransom, it emphasized close analysis of text and structure rather than analysis of social or biographical contexts. Critics expounding this approach included Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Several other literary scholars were less doctrinaire. Among them were Joseph Wood Krutch, whose essays were collected in The Modern Temper (1929) and The Measure of Man (1954), and Lionel Trilling, author of one of the most influential of modern critical essays, The Liberal Imagination (1950). Also noteworthy were Malcolm Cowley, author of Exile's Return (1934); Alfred Kazin, author of On Native Grounds (1942) and The Inmost Leaf (1955); and Leslie Fiedler, whose Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) provided a new interpretation of certain American themes and approaches.

One of the most rounded literary critics and theorists in 20th-century America was Edmund Wilson. Erudite yet never pedantic, he remained unaligned with any formal school of criticism. Axel's Castle (1931) established his literary intelligence, and later critical works, such as The Wound and the Bow (1941) and The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 (1965), confirmed his stature.

In the 1970s literary theory flourished at Yale University, where Harold Bloom was concerned with the anxiety and the creative stimulus stemming from literary influence and with the desirability of academic consensus on which literary works were truly important. He expressed these views in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973) and The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). Based on the academic movement known as deconstruction, originated by literary critic Jacques Derrida, other Yale scholars challenged the idea that a text has a single, unchanging meaning. They argued that interpretation “deconstructs” multiple layers of meaning in a text. In the 1980s and 1990s many literary theorists turned their attention toward culture and history, analyzing the ways in which literature shapes and is shaped by the world in which it is written.

Current Trends

Print this section

American literature at the beginning of the 21st century is exceptionally diverse, with rapidly growing multicultural influences. New voices continue to emerge within the Native American, African American, Asian American, and Hispanic American communities, even as writers in previously unrepresented ethnic minorities join their ranks.

The concept of cultural hybridity, in which an individual’s physical self and cultural self can be two different halves of the same whole, is a uniquely American phenomenon. Asian American authors such as Chang-Rae Lee and Eric Liu have been among the most active in developing this theme. Bilingualism is also a popular theme among many American authors, reflecting both the alienation and the strong cultural identity that comes from being a nonnative English speaker in the United States. Gender issues remain major topics in 21st century American literature, and more gay and lesbian authors are publishing their work and bringing their community and concerns into focus.

In addition to these new cultural voices, American prose has also experienced revitalization within previously established traditions. Writers such as Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, 2001) and Nicholson Baker (Box of Matches, 2003) are offering ambitious new models for the novel that also incorporate traditional forms.