Literature of the usa. Colonial period literature

Sarah Kemble Knight (1666- 1727) was another woman writer of the time. She was born in America. The widow of a Boston merchant, she kept a school in Boston. Once she had to go to New York and made the and dangerous journey on horseback. She kept a diary in which she described all the people she met on the way, and the places she stopped at for the night. From her diary, we learn of the rough life of the frontiersman and the small farmers of Connecticut. Though the author did not have the least liking for them and their democratic ways, she admitted that intellectually these common men and women were by no means inferior to the Boston citizens in spite of their coarse life and wild habits. Her style of writing is vivid, light and has humor. Her book “Private Journal of a Journal from Boston to New York” was re-edited in 1920.

A writer who expressed sympathy for the American farmer was a French aristocrat, Hector de Crevecoeur (1739-1813). He had been a French soldier in Canada and had lived for some time in the State of New York as a farmer. During the War of Independence, when France helped the mutineers, he was arrested by the British generals as a political enemy and was imprisoned. He nearly died in prison. When he was released he left for Europe. He was one of the few survivors when the ship on which he sailed was wrecked. When he reached London, he arranged to have his work “Letters from an American Farmer” (1782) published. Then he went to France and later returned to America only to find that during the war his homestead had been burnt down, his wife had died, and his children had been lost. Then he returned to France for good. In the twelve letters in his book, he gives a wonderful description of life in the North- American colonies.

American culture, however, cannot be really understood if we view it only in the light of European influence. American literature is now more than 300 years old. It is an independent literature intimately connected with the history of the country and should not be considered as a branch of British literature because it is written in the English language. Literature not only reflects the particular period in which it is created, it always rests on the traditions of the country, which reared it. Traditions generally mean the beliefs and customs of a people that are handed down from generation to generation. These beliefs and customs become part of their life. They are the starting-point in art and literature. Nor can the culture of the American nation be separated from Indian mythology and Negro folk-role. Some of the Europeans who had come to America learned from the Indians: they became acquainted with their social laws and appreciated such human values as their love of freedom, their self-respect, their contempt for wealth. They compared these qualities with those of the white men who turned into beasts in their greed.

The Negroes contributed greatly to the development of the arts, Negro songs and acting have become part of American national music and drama. Negro folklore has given American literature a specific coloring: a mixture of jocularity and sadness.

American literature owes its revolutionary traditions, of course, to the War of Independence. And it much to the tradition of pioneering in the free lands of the West. This introduced at adventurous feature so characteristic of American literature. The people who grew up under the conditions of the frontier spirit handed down the traditions that produced such men as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and such poets and writers as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. To study their literature means to learn much about America’s unrelenting fighters for justice and freedom.