THE BEGINNING OF NATIONAL LITERATURE IN AMERICA
The settlements of New England developed rapidly. Ten years after the landing of the Mayflower Pilgrims more than twenty thousand people lived in the colony and that the majority was from England. And it was here in New England that the literature of the new American nation appeared. The Pilgrim Fathers played a historical role in this, although it was through no conscious desire of their own. Many of them were men of learning with a university education. They brought books on various subjects to America. They opened schools for the children and in 1636 founded Harvard College, the first American university. They also set up the first printing- press in the country and published at the first books. But the American Puritans were not guided in this by any humanitarian desire to spread learning and knowledge among the people. They were first and foremost religious fanatics, determined to subjugate everyone to their rigorous, dogmatic discipline: the schools taught their religion to the children, the university trained energumen for Protestant churches in the colony which they hoped would give them more power, and the books they published had the same purpose.
Although the only book they recommended for home reading was the Bible, they also printed various histories, journals, memoirs and theological tracts intended for the clergy who ruled the colony. The authors of these works were far from being professional writers but their writings tell the story of the colony and disclose the true nature of the Puritanism of those days.
The Puritans were jealous of and feared any ideas until they compelled them to abandon their “sinful” thoughts. They wanted people to obey their laws and despise the joys of mortal life. This led to brutal cruelty. Before long they started hysterically persecuting free-thinkers as “witches”. Witch-hunting increased in ferocity towards the end of the 17th century when the civil power of the Church began to crumble. Hundreds of innocent men and women were imprisoned, hanged and even burnt at the stake. This was a consequence the Pilgrim Fathers had not quite foreseen.
The power of Puritans theocracy lasted for three generations. The writers who fought for democracy in the colonies (Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams and John Wise) came into sharp controversy with the clergymen. Gradually, under the influence of French and German cultures brought to America by new immigrants, theocracy was defeated, and the number of secular poets and writers increased. Since the writers in the Northern colonies dealt with the life around them, of which they were an inseparable part, their works became part of American national literature; while Virginia and other Southern colonies added but little to the creative literature of America. This is not surprising: the planters lived in the colonies only with an eye to profit. They educated their sons in imitation of the old home, and there was very little contact with the North.
Here are some other writers we should be acquainted with to get a better idea of the early colonial period.
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