American Literature: Prose

Article Outline

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

History

Gaining independence also provided the United States with a history of its own. Samuel Miller’s A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803) and Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) were both substantial histories of 18th-century America, including the Revolution. Many of the histories of America from the early and mid-1800s achieved additional drama through their authors’ interpretations of the growing greatness of the nation. Foremost among these patriotic and romantic histories was the monumental ten-volume History of the United States (1834-1876) by George Bancroft, who is often called the father of American history.

Early Fiction: Irving

Local histories, like general histories, were also of interest in the early part of the century. History of New York (1809), by Washington Irving but ostensibly written by Irving's famous comic creation, the Dutch American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker, offered a surprising twist on standard local history. A satire on the exaggeration and earnestness often found in local histories, this work seemed to reflect America's desire to break away from established forms of writing and to engage more fully in the world of imaginative literature.

Literary magazines proliferated in the early 1800s, bearing witness in yet another way to a public appetite for fiction. Port Folio was founded in Philadelphia in 1801 and discussed both politics and literature. From 1807 to 1808 Irving and James Kirke Paulding published the literary magazine Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others, which was devoted to satirical writings.

Through his satires, sketches, and short stories, Irving was one of the most influential American authors of the first half of the 19th century. Among Irving’s best-known legends is “Rip Van Winkle,” in which a man from New York’s Catskill Mountains falls asleep before the beginning of the Revolution and wakes up after it is over to find his world happily transformed. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” an awkward and naive schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane is driven from his small New York town by a faked headless horseman. First published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), this story and others like it provided American legends and helped shape an American folklore.

Westward Expansion

Travel narratives became increasingly popular, especially as the country expanded westward. With the Louisiana Purchase, the United States took possession of a vast, unmapped territory. Early accounts of expeditions made in the name of future national expansion include Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and Through the Western Parts of Louisiana (1810) by explorer Zebulon Pike, and History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri (1814). The latter work, which emphasizes the idea of the explorer as hero, was compiled by diplomat Nicholas Biddle from the notes of the expedition.

America’s westward expansion also generated a sizable collection of political prose, especially in light of manifest destiny—a belief that the country’s territorial expansion was not only inevitable but also divinely ordained. The term manifest destiny was coined by writer John Louis O'Sullivan in 'Annexation,' an article that argued for the annexation of Texas and appeared in the July-August 1845 issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Other articles in that issue acknowledged that as the United States expanded, Native American cultures were being lost.

With westward expansion came displacement of Native Americans. From the early 1800s on, anguished speeches were presented by Native American leaders who faced a bleak future. Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, delivered one such speech to the Iroquois nation in 1806. Other speeches addressed to American officials in Washington, D.C., pointed to the destruction of Native American cultures as the United States expanded.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnologist and geologist, preserved a great deal of information about Native Americans in the Great Lakes region. He married a Native American, immersed himself in Native American cultures, and studied several tribal languages. From the 1820s to the 1850s Schoolcraft wrote at length on Native Americans. Although his writings gave a white man’s views of native peoples, they preserved many materials, including a collection of Ojibwa and Ottawa legends and myths in Algic Researches (1839). One of Schoolcraft’s most important works was the monumental study Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (6 volumes, 1851-1857), which later writers used as source material about Native Americans.

Biography

Biography and autobiography served the new nation’s sense of its history and its need for heroes in the 1800s. In some cases these genres worked explicitly, as did some histories, to develop a mythic stature for American heroes, and biography began to merge with legend. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were favorite figures for legendary biography. Boone was introduced to audiences by John Filson's history, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, in 1784. His character was further developed by Timothy Flint, whose Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone (1833) portrayed Boone as a hero similar to the fictional character Natty Bumppo, created by James Fenimore Cooper. Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834), attributed to Crockett, mythologized another early frontier hero.

The Native American experience also began to be told in autobiography. William Apes was the first Native American to produce extensive writings in English. In A Son of the Forest (1829) he described his conversion to Christianity and his participation in the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain.

The greatest development in 19th-century American biography was the slave narrative. The tensions produced by slavery in America had already become apparent by the Revolution, but they heightened considerably in the 1800s, right up until the American Civil War (1861-1865). Frederick Douglass created a masterpiece of the genre with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a work that he revised and enlarged several times for later editions. While describing his life as a slave and his struggle toward freedom, Douglass emphasized the primary role that literacy played in opening opportunities for African Americans. He represented his ability to write his own story as the ultimate act of a free man.

Harriet Jacobs offered a different but no less horrifying portrayal of the evils of slavery in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). In the book, Jacobs told of the sexual abuse experienced by young female slaves. Prior to the Civil War, former slaves who wished to tell their stories found access to publishers through connections with white abolitionists. Douglass's text included a preface, written by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, that encouraged the reader to trust the author. Another important work about the situation of black Americans was The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) by Martin Robison Delany. In this work Delany argued for a separatist state for blacks; some historians now consider him to be the first black nationalist.

American Romanticism