American literature

American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition.
Owing to the large immigration to Boston in the 1630s, the high articulation of Puritan cultural ideals, and the early establishment of a college and a printing press in Cambridge, the New England colonies have often been regarded as the center of early American literature. However, the first European settlements in North America had been founded elsewhere many years earlier. Towns older than Boston include the Spanish settlements at Saint Augustine and Santa Fe, the Dutch settlements at Albany and New Amsterdam, as well as the English colony of Jamestown in present-day Virginia. During the colonial period, the printing press was active in many areas, from Cambridge and Boston to New York, Philadelphia, and Annapolis.
AMERICAN LITERATURE
American literature, both in the way it was practiced and the way it was perceived, came of age in the period between 1870 and 1920. During these years American writing distinguished itself stylistically and thematically from the European tradition to which it had been dismissively compared for more than a century. American authors also increasingly gained respect as serious artists in the decades following the Civil War as literary critics inside and outside the academy began to appreciate the intrinsic merits of American poetry and prose.
EARLY CULTURAL CONTEXT
The cultural trauma of the Civil War produced a permanently altered sense of national consciousness among Americans who lived through it and beyond it. But the war between the states was only one of many phenomena of the late nineteenth century that transformed the United States from a country fundamentally sectionalist in attitude (e.g., New England, South, Midwest, Far West) into a unified nation of the world that would come to consider its regional diversity a vital if mostly secondary trait.
The technological advances that followed the Civil War, particularly in the areas of American transportation and communication, also contributed mightily to the emergence of this new, more unified cultural awareness. In 1860, for example, fewer than thirty thousand miles of railroad existed in the United States, and major sections of the country remained essentially unconnected to each other. By May 1869, however, less than a decade later, as the last rail spike was being driven into the line linking the East and the West at Promontory Point, Utah, the number of miles of railroad crisscrossing the United States had almost tripled to nearly ninety thousand. The expansion of the railroads into every corner of the Union of course made travel throughout the country much easier (thus removing a major impediment to personal mobility that would tend to promote a regional—as opposed to a national—sensibility), but it also had the equally important effect of opening up commerce and communication between different geographical regions to a much larger degree.
Advances in publishing technology after the Civil War also worked to open contact between sections of the United States. Subscriptions to major newspapers and magazines skyrocketed in the 1870s and 1880s as Americans from all over the country grew hungrier for information from beyond their local borders. Already existing periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly widened their circulations dramatically in the last few decades of the nineteenth century as telegraph and transportation improvements made it possible for them to reach those more distant readers longing for access to these now more broadly focused national publications. Hoping to capitalize on newly opened markets and the increased readership among the American public, hundreds of new magazines appeared for the first time in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, including Galaxy, Overland Monthly, Scribner's Monthly, and Century Magazine, to name a few of the most prominent.
Though late-nineteenth-century improvements in transportation and communication helped to foster a larger, more unified conception of an American culture, these advancements also had a simultaneous and somewhat paradoxical effect on the nation's consciousness. Ironically, as Americans seemed to be dismantling sectional boundaries in the 1870s and 1880s by traveling farther from home and by reading a wider variety of publications from across the United States, they were at the same time made newly aware of regional differences in speech and manners through contact with those people and places beyond their immediate milieus. This rediscovery of regional diversity in the context of a budding national culture would prove to have profound implications for the establishment of an indigenous American voice in literature in the decades following the Civil War.
THE RISE OF LITERARY REALISM
By 1870 a new generation of American authors, committed to the tenets of literary realism, had begun to emerge. The realist artistic vision, though expressed in a variety of ways by hundreds of writers in the late nineteenth century, was, at least in principle, relatively uncomplicated: portray people, places, and things as they actually appear in everyday life. Realism as an aesthetic movement was in large part a reaction against the idealizing (if universalizing) tendencies of literary romanticism, which had dominated literary expression in the United States since the early decades of the 1800s. The major novelists of the post–Civil War period, Mark Twain (1835–1910), William Dean Howells (1837–1920), and Henry James (1843–1916), self-avowed realists all, emphasized in their writing a fidelity to actual experience, particularly by focusing on the development of "common" characters confronting complex ethical issues.
Although Twain, Howells, and James as well as other American writers produced novels of the highest quality in the final decades of the nineteenth century, none of these works could be said to have truly achieved the status of the Great American Novel insofar as any of them alone represented the fullness of the American cultural experience. In fact, Howells himself famously argued that it would be impossible because of the regional diversity of the country for any one book to capture completely the American experience. American realist writers generally focused on the particular details of the geographical area of the country they knew best, recording the distinctive manners, colloquial speech patterns, and distinguishing traditions of its inhabitants. Of course the ways people talk and behave tend to be sectional in nature. And so the particular brand of realist literature produced by Americans in the late nineteenth century came to be known as regionalism.
Indeed, in many ways the last three decades of the nineteenth century constituted an age of regionalism in American literature. Coinciding with the growing interest among Americans in their country's sectional differences, regionalist writing flourished between 1870 and 1900. As the public appetite for stories with regional qualities increased, the proliferation of magazines following the Civil War provided an outlet particularly for the work of short-fiction writers whose work was distinguished by this quintessentially American brand of late-nineteenth-century literature. In the Far West, authors like Bret Harte and Dan De Quille as well as writers of Nevada's "Sagebrush School," Joseph Goodman and Rollin Daggett, to name just two, wrote accounts of outlaws, roughs, and prospectors. Midwestern writers such as Alice Cary, Joseph Kirkland, and Edward Eggleston chronicled the lives of prairie farmers and small-village folk. George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Grace Elizabeth King depicted the unique complexities of postwar life in the South. In New England, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman recorded the peculiar experiences of Yankees and spinsters. Taken together, these and other writers from the period produced a representation of American cultural experience that in both form and content matched the regional diversity of the United States.

A Brief History of Detective Fiction

Detective fiction is one of the most popular literary genres, and has been for centuries, but where did the genre come from? Why did mystery, suspense, and crime fiction become such a huge part of literature and popular culture? And how has the detective genre changed in the past 200+ years?
Detective fiction can be traced back to the 1800s, around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, most people lived in smaller towns and worked and socialized in closer circles, so people knew everyone they came into contact with for the most part. But with the rise of industrial jobs, more people began moving to cities, which lead to interacting with more strangers on a daily basis, a heightened sense of suspicion and uncertainty, and yes, more crime. It was around this time too where police forces were first established. London’s police force came to be in 1829, and New York City got its police force in 1845. With more people living in cities and crime rates on the rise, the setting was right for detective genres to flourish.
The first modern detective story is often thought to be Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a short story published in 1841 that introduced the world to private detective Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. In fact, detective fiction was so new when Dupin entered the literary world that the word “detective” hadn’t even been used in English before.
The first detective novel followed soon after with British author Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The story was first serialized in Charles Dickens’s journal All the Year Round. And in 1868, it was released as a complete novel. This novel is significant not just because it’s the first detective novel, but also because it established many of the classic tropes and attributes of the detective novel. The Moonstone‘s detective character Sergeant Cuff was based on the real-life detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the first ever detectives of Scotland Yard.
The detective character who really shaped the way we see literary detectives to this day, however, is probably someone you’ve guessed already: Sherlock Holmes. Not only is he the most famous detective character to ever be written, Sherlock Holmes is one of the most popular characters in fiction ever. Holmes was inspired in part on Poe’s detective Dupin, but he was also based on a real man: Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was a surgeon and lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle met Dr. Bell in 1877, and Doyle has said he modeled Holmes’s quick wit and intelligence off of Bell. The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet came out in 1887, and Doyle continued to write Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories until around 1927.
1920 to 1939 came to be known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. And the queen of his age was Agatha Christie. During her lifetime, Agatha Christie wrote sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short story collections. Her novel And Then There Were None remains one of the best-selling books of all time, and as of 2018, the Guinness World Records listed Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time. Christie is responsible for creating not one but two of the most famous detectives in literary history: Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. These detective characters remain highly influential to contemporary crime fiction writers.
Christie and other authors from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction have created a legacy of detective novels based on gathering clues and solving crimes as if they were puzzles the reader can solve with the detective. In contemporary literature, this style has evolved into what we now call cozy mysteries.
In response to the Golden Age authors, some American writers began to examine and reconsider the formula for detective fiction. Many people started to think of puzzle-solving crime fiction as too unrealistic and too clean. These authors and their readers were looking for crime novels that were more based in reality and the way real crimes happen. And so the hardboiled detective genre was born. These stories included detectives that were dealing with corrupt cops and organized crime. Hardboiled crime novels create a world where it’s every man for himself, and the detective can trust no one.
While hardboiled detective fiction emerged as early as the 1920s, the detective genre really took off in America in the 1930s-1950s. One of the most popular hardboiled detective novels from this period is Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the novel that introduced readers to the detective Philip Marlowe. This character would go on to feature in many of Chandler’s short stories and novels. And you’ll find many film adaptations featuring this hardboiled detective as well.
That leads us to where we are today with fictional detectives in contemporary crime fiction. Now, mystery and suspense fiction is more popular than ever. What that means is that there is room for many types of detective genres answering to readers’ specific tastes and interests. If you’re looking for supernatural detective stories, they’re out there. If you enjoy the realism and grittiness of the hardboiled detective genre, it’s still out there. If you want to revisit familiar and beloved detective characters, there are plenty of newer adaptations of classic detectives. For instance, give Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series a try. It really is a great time to be a mystery reader.

20th-century American drama

American drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century. Often, plays from England or translated from European languages dominated theater seasons. An inadequate copyright law that failed to protect and promote American dramatists worked against genuinely original drama. So did the "star system," in which actors and actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given most acclaim. Americans flocked to see European actors who toured theaters in the United States. In addition, imported drama, like imported wine, enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions.
During the 19th century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between good and evil had been popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew large audiences; sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin . Not until the 20th century would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovation. Popular culture showed vital developments, however, especially in vaudeville (popular variety theater involving skits, clowning, music, and the like). Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways -- performed by white characters using "blackface" makeup -- also developed original forms and expressions.
Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction the leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments.