Colonial literature. In 1820 the British critic Sydney Smith asked: "Who reads an American book? Literature the Americans have none... it is all imported". Indeed, Americans had to wait until the mid-nineteenth century for a rich and imaginative national literature to rival that of the English. Although there were significant exceptions, most Americans were concerned with the day to day business of living and the struggle to achieve some form of national identity. Early American literature varies greatly in quality. Most New England colonists were, like their southern counterparts, chiefly engaged in making a home of the wilderness they had discovered on America's shores. Breaking trails, clearing land, building homes, planting crops and occasionally fighting off hostile bands of Indians left little leisure or opportunity for early settlers to devote themselves to writing. The literature of this period is of more historical than literary interest to the modern reader. It is largely made up of historical or religious journals, letters, speeches, sermons and public documents. Prose in the colonial period was dominated by the work of New Englanders whose religious writings formed the great bulk of early American literature. The quest for spiritual identity in the New World persuaded them to write serious and responsible works which often contained some kind of moral purpose. Indeed, most of the prose written during this period was devoid of entertainment value. Its declared function was to instruct. A strong Puritanical or Calvinistic strain ran through much of these works.
Among the most important religious writers of this period were Cotton Mather (1663-1728), and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Mather a staunch Puritan, was the most versatile and prolific writer of the age; among the 450 works he wrote are a number of writings dealing with theological issues. Mather's most important work was Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), a two-volume ecclesiastical history of New England. Edwards was a Calvinist preacher in Massachusetts. As a leader of the religious revival movement known as the Great Awakening, he struck the fear of God into the hearts of his congregation with fiery sermons. His most famous work was Freedom of Will (1754), an influential philosophical treatise written in defence of Calvinistic doctrine. The Journal (1774) of John Woolman (1720-1772), a Quaker leader and early abolitionist, is a classic record of the spiritual inner life.
The other main concern of prose writers was to describe the history and geography of the newly settled territories. Accounts of the first pioneers and their various activities took the form of newsletters, journals, practical handbooks and ordinary letters, and they provide us with an interesting picture of early colonial life. The first English writer in America was Captain John Smith (1580-1631) whose A true Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Collony (1608) is a straightforward and precise historical account of the Jamestown settlement. He also wrote an account of early settlement life in Virginia in The General History of Virginia (1624). Other writers producing early historical accounts include John Winthrop (1588-1649), William Bradford (1589-1657), William Penn (1644-1718) and William Byrd (1674-1744). Winthrop's Journal described life in the Massachusetts Bay colony from 1630 to 1649, and his advocating of the theocratic state was echoed by Bradford in his The History of Plymouth Plantation (1646), an account of the Pilgrim Fathers and their foundation of the Plymouth colony. Penn's Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania (1681) was in part an attempt to publicize the opportunities offered by life in Pennsylvania. Byrd was a Virginia planter: his History of the Dividing Line: Run in the Year 1728 was a witty and satirical account of the boundary survey between Virginia and North Carolina. These works were written mostly to explain colonial opportunities to Englishmen. They were of little artistic value. The authors did not care about beauty or originality of style. But they were preparing the building material for future artistic discoveries when describing nature with the precision of a naturalist, and the customs of the natives with the thoroughness of an ethnographer. The material was later made use of in Coopers works in the 19th century and in Faulkners in the twentieth century.
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Colonial poetry was mainly of a religious nature and was mostly written for friends and relatives. The first book to be published in the colonies was the Bay Psalm Book (1640), a collection of psalms in verse form intended for group singing in the churches. The New England Primer, America's first textbook, was used in schools to help people to read. Most Puritans were thoroughly familiar with these two volumes. Despite Puritan doubts and suspicions about the value of poetry (it was too sensuous and lacked a true instructional element), heavily Puritanical elegies and epitaphs were composed to honour the dead.
While often influenced by English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Michael Wigglesworth (1612-1672) and Edward Taylor (1644-1729) provided American literature with its first poetic voices. Anne Bradstreet included simple lyrics and poems on nature in her The Tenth Muse, a collection of mainly religious poems published in England in 1650. Wigglesworth's heavily Calvinistic ballad style The Day of Doom (1662) was the most popular literary work of colonial times and took its place on most Puritan bookshelves beside the Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The most important poet of the period was, however, Edward Taylor (1642-1729) whose poems were only discovered in 1937. A fierce Puritan, Taylor spent most of his life as a minister in a Massachusetts town. His poems show the influence of the English Metaphysicals (especially Herbert and Donne) and many of his finest meditations were composed to be performed in church as a prelude to his sermons.
American Enlightenment. As war with Britain loomed ever closer, many American prose writers began abandoning early Puritanical concerns with religion and took to politics. In an age of increasing scientific rationalism, new ideas about equality and liberty circulated in Europe. A new and more educated American middle class, conscious of its national identity and less enslaved to the rigours of Puritanism, emerged during the mid 1700s. This was the age of the orator and pamphlet writer whose 'literary efforts were to prove decisive in galvanizing public opinion in favour of independence. Following the Stamp Act (1765) dozens of revolutionary pamphlets -some of which rank as important works of literature - were published. Undoubtedly the two most prominent 'literary' figures of the times were Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and Thomas Paine (1737-1809).
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Benjamin Franklin was a statesman, inventor, publisher and printer. He rapidly became a spokesman for American interests and declared his open hostility towards Britain in a number of clear and concisely written pamphlets and political satires which were effective in shaping the colonists cause. His Poor Richards Almanac (1733-1758) and Autobiography (1771-1789)played an outstanding role in the development of American literature. Poor Richard, an American simpleton, generated many similar heroes in the works of Cooper, Mark Twain, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and other writers. The Almanac contained, in addition to useful information and literary selections, a section which communicated to the reader, through the fictitious Richard Saunders and his wife Bridget, progressive ideas on the mode of living, education and political events of the day. Not all of the ideas were new. In many cases Franklin was the advocate of the principles that had been current since Puritan times, and still had a powerful influence on the people: God helps them that help themselves, Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him, Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
Franklin will, however, be chiefly remembered for his unfinished Autobiography, a highly influential rags to riches account of the self-made man. Franklin began writing his autobiography when he was 65 years old. Vacationing in Hampshire, he decided to use his leisure to give an account of his ancestry and early life to his son, William. He carried the story of his life down to the year of 1730, but then, busy with political affairs, he forgot about his memoirs for eleven years. In 1782 he received a letter from a friend in which was enclosed a copy of the first portion of the autobiography (how obtained, no one knows), with the urgent suggestion that it be continued. Franklin continued to write his autobiography in portions in 1784, in 1788 and in 1790, a few weeks before his death. Franklins Autobiography has become an American classic. It shows a man of versatile energy and new ideas who eventually began to consider himself a citizen of the world. But the account of his life is uncoloured by vanity.
Thomas Paine 's clear and forceful prose works, Common Sense (1776) and The Crisis (1776-1783), were highly influential in encouraging and sustaining American morale during the War of Independence. His The Rights of Man (1791) defendedthe cause of the revolutionaries in France, although the principles it extols are of universal concern.
Poetry offers little of interest during this turbulent period, much American verse harking back to the models of eighteenth-century neo-classical poetry in Britain. Most verse ofthe time was written in New England. Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was a New Yorker given to writing patriotic poems and political satires, although he is chiefly remembered for his simple nature lyrics, which are often thought to herald the arrival of early romantic poetry. A group of poets called the Connecticut Wits (John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys and Joel Barlow) exhibited a desire for a new 'national' literature liberated from European verse models, although much of their verse continued the tradition of English satire. From their time on, however, Americans were to show greater interest in the formation of specifically American as opposed to pseudo-English literature.
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After the American Revolution a new group of authors became leaders: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson. Their works became a classic statement of American republican theory. Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence.
Political independence preceded by many years literary autonomy in the United States, and it was still to be some time before American writers were in a position to speak of a truly national literature. Gaining a cultural independence was to be a painful process. Later, in the end of the century, Henry James wrote that it is necessary to have a long history to develop a small tradition; a long tradition is necessary to form some norms of taste; and a long evolution of taste is necessary to create a work of art. It was necessary to unite the national content (the material accumulated during nearly two centuries) with an authentic literary form. As it was, in the early 19th century English models continued to prevail, especially in the south, and writers found it difficult to compete with British authors, whose works were sold in inexpensive editions all over the country. There was a sense that other things were of greater importance than literature during this age of transition. General Washington argued that American genius was scientific rather than imaginative, a view which Franklin did much to encourage: All things have their season and with young countries as with young men, you must curb their fancy to strengthen their judgment [...] To America, one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael.
An important landmark in the development of an independent cultural identity was the publication of the first American dictionary in 1806. Its compiler, Noah Webster, insisted that American usage was as good as British usage, and argued that, As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of language as well as in government. Despite the differences between north and south, demand for a national literature began to grow as the country developed a more united sense of identity. Before 1800 Franklin had attracted international attention, but more as a scientist and statesman than as a writer. Only with the Romantics America obtained its authentic and original literature and international fame.
The Romantic movement reached America around 1820, some twenty years after Wordsworth and Coleridge had revolutionized European poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of this American Renaissance. American Romantics emphasized the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay, The Poet, Emerson asserts: For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness, a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was nor a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If ones self was one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of self which to earlier generations suggested selfishness was redefined, and new compound words with positive meanings emerged: self-realization, self-expression, self-reliance.
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Romanticism was appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. American mountains, deserts and tropics embodied the sublime in Romantic terminology, an effect of beauty in grandeur. Besides, the Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: it stressed individualism and the value of the common person and looked for the inspired imagination for its aesthetical and ethical values.
The American Romantics had a lot in common with the representatives of the European Romantic movement: a striving for ideal harmonious characters, a feeling of awe for nature as mans true home. But European Romanticism was caused be disappointment in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the defeat of the French Revolution, while the American Romanticism was a child of the victorious American Revolution, and for a long time shared its ideals and illusions. Even criticizing and rejecting reality the American Romantics did not completely substitute it for the unreal or outworldly. Their works often have two planes to them: one plane presents mysterious events, which may be a stylized rendering of a legend, while the second plane serves as a rational commentary of the described events.
The characters are often idealized and realistic at a time. Such is Coopers hero, Natty Bumppo, an American pioneer, who differs greatly from a European natural man. While the latter needs only the infinite sky overhead, the American hero, to survive, sets out for woods with a saw and an axe in his hands. For many European Romantics, nature is an abstract symbol of virtuous life. Coleridge in his The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not concerned with real objects. He mentions them briefly and passes to the silence of dead waters. Coopers characters act in realistic conditions. In his Deerslayer he states: The events of the story took place between 1740 and 1745, and his description of the expansion of the colonies to the west has the characteristics of precisely that period.
Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first truly internationally recognized American author of prose. As the English novelist Thackeray was to remark, Irving was the first ambassador whom the New World of letters sent to the Old. New York was becoming the centre of literary activity in America at the time, and Irving - a New Yorker himself - established his reputation with a collection of satirical essays and poems on the inhabitants of Manhattan in The Salmagundi Papers (1807), The Satirical Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809) confirmed his talents, but it was with the publication of The Sketch Book tenyears later that his international reputation was secured. While dealing with American themes, many of the essays and tales contained within this volume took their inspiration from old European folk stories: Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are among the most famous tales in the book. With the publication of this volume -said to contain the first examples of the modern short story - Irving was to achieve financial independence.
The movement westward and the Civil War were decisive in determining the social and cultural identity of the United States. The growth of a new national literature astonishing in depth and range was to accompany this movement. Earlier prose of the period already indicated a growing awareness of a specific American reality and willingness to deal with indigenous concerns. The novel had appeared on America in the late eighteenth century. William Hill Brown (1765-1793) wrote an epistolary novel about tragic, incestuous love called Power of Sympathy (1789). Close to Richardson, in its sentimental style, it was the first American novel to be published. Modelling his works on the Gothic novels of late eighteenth-century England, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is known as the Father of the American novel. Horror and terror are characteristics of his works, the most famous of which are Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntley (1799). But the fame of the American novel is related to James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) He was the first American novelist to capture international attention with his romantic myth of the frontier.
Although poetry was his main interest, the fame of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) rests mainly on his prose tales, particularly his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839). Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Herman Melville (1819-1891) were two of Americas most outstanding prose writers of the period. A knowledgeable scholar of New England history, Hawthornes Puritan upbringing reveals itself in his dealing with the themes of good and evil, sin and guilt, and the underlying motivations of human behaviour at both individual and communal levels. Hawthornes friend, Melville, gathered material for his novels during his years at sea. He made an early reputation for himself with his Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), but it was only with his undisputed masterpiece of American fiction, Moby Dick (1851), that his enormous talents as a novelist were displayed.
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Towards the middle of the century New England once again became the focus of literary activity as a new movement of philosophical, social, religious and literary ideas took root in Concord, Massachusetts: Transcendentalism. While the early Romantics shared the illusions of the first decades of the American Republic. Transcendentalism presented a consistent criticism of the American system of values.
Influenced by the works of German idealist philosophers, Neo-Platonism and the English Romantic poets, transcendentalists rebelled against the materialism of contemporary society, and exalted feeling and intuition over reason. The material world, they argued, contains mere appearances of reality and is transcended by the spiritual world, which is the only true reality. Society, the established church and its teachings were rejected as inadequate, and were seen as barring man's progress towards true spiritual knowledge: only through relying on his own intuition and spiritual faculties would the individual be able to arrive at an understanding of life. In contrast to their Puritan predecessors, transcendentalists held that man was naturally good and should be allowed to develop free from rules and restrictions: the high moral tone of earlier writers is however reflected in their requirement that individual freedom should be turned to good purpose.
Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small village at 32 kilometers from Boston and the site of the first battle of the American Revolution. Concord was the first artists colony and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. The Transcendental Club was organized in 1836. The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial, which lasted four years and was first edited by Fuller and later by Emerson. A number of the transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities.
Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences on the unique viewpoint of the individual. They brought radical individualism to the extreme. They often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and conventions. The American hero of later writers like Melvilles Captain Ahab, or Poes Arthur Gordon Pym, or Mark Twains Huck Finn typically faced danger, or destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given; literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous.
The two most important figures in the highly influential Transcendentalist group were Emerson and Thoreau. Henry David Emerson (1803-1882) was the leader and spokesman of the group. A firm belief in the powers of the individual (The individual is the world, he said) went hand in hand with the hope that young people might learn something from his writings. He sought to help the young soul add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame. Emerson was concerned with many reform movements, among them the abolition of slavery. To men and women of his generation and to younger people he seemed a liberator from old conventions, a leader in experimentation and self-reliance. His religion was based on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity, which he called the Over-soul. For him religion was an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal Over-soul, of which it was a part. He considered that intuition was a more certain way of knowing than reason and that the mind could intuitively perceive absolutes. So a man should trust himself to decide what was right and to act accordingly. Later in his life Emerson was honoured as a leading American philosopher and writer. His influence on American literature, however, resulted not so much from the quality of his own writing, but from the guidance he provided for other writers such as Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson. He was more concerned than any of his predecessors with the idea of a national literature. In an article of 1837, he called for a distinctive American style, dealing with American subjects. He wanted the Americans to declare their independence both as individuals and as a nation. In his essay Self-Reliance he urges Americans to trust themselves, rather than be ruled by others advice. He was keen that the American poet should know the value of our incomparable materials... Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our negroes and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
The Transcendentalists acutely felt a breach between American reality and the ideal of a free and harmonious person. The ideal was constructed in Emersons essay Nature, which professed that man understands lifes meaning only through Nature; Nature is the universal organ by means of which universal spirit speaks with man. More than any other member of the group, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) put transcendentalist theories into practice. He spent two years living a simple life on the edge of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and later described the experience of his life in harmony with nature in his famous essay Walden or Life in the Woods (1854). The essay contains loving descriptions of nature and celebrates the triumph of individual dignity and resourcefulness over the trappings of an increasingly materialist world. Trough his writings Thoreau wanted to illustrate that the pursuit of material things had no value. He advocated a life of contemplation, of harmony with nature, and of acting on his own principles. His study of Eastern religions contributed to his desire for a simple life, while his reaction against such Yankee pragmatists as Benjamin Franklin is also apparent. Both Franklin and Thoreau advocated thrift and hard work, but while Franklin expected the frugal to get richer and richer, Thoreau thought physical labour and a minimum of material goods made man more sensitive and kept him closer to nature.
His other seminal work was Civil Disobedience (1849), a political essay dealing with personal freedom and the search for individual identity. The essay is prompted by Thoreaus experience: in 1847 he was imprisoned briefly for refusing to pay a tax while the government supported the Mexican war he considered unjust. His refusal to pay was consistent with his belief in using passive resistance to government tyranny: if an injustice of government is of such a nature that it requires an injustice to another break the law and let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. This work became influential in the twentieth century: in his efforts to liberate India, Ghandi adopted the idea of passive resistance described in Civil Disobedience; American civil rights demonstrators also adopted some of his ideas during the 1960s.
American romance. The American Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the romance, a heightened, emotional and symbolic form of the novel. Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used special techniques to communicate complex and subtle meanings. Instead of carefully defining realistic characters through a wealth of detail, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American romance are haunted, alienated individuals. Hawthornes Arthur Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Melvilles Ahab in Moby Dick, and the many isolated and obsessed characters of Poes tales are lonely individuals pitted against unknowable, dark fates that, in some mysterious way, grow out of their deepest unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the anguished spirit.
One reason for this fictional exploration into the hidden recesses of the soul is the absence of settled, traditional community life in America. English novelists lived in well-articulated, traditional society and shared with their readers attitudes that informed their fiction. American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of vast wilderness, and a relatively classless democratic society. American novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition. Many English novels showed poor main characters rising to prosperity perhaps as a result of marriage or the discovery of a hidden aristocratic background. Such plots did not challenge the social structure of English society. The rise of the central character satisfied the secret wish of many middle-class readers.
In contrast, American novelists could not depend on an established tradition. America was, in part, an undefined, constantly moving frontier populated buy immigrants speaking foreign languages and following strange and crude ways of life. Thus the main character in American literature could find himself alone among cannibal tribes, as in Melvilles Typee, or exploring a wilderness like Coopers Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visions from the grave, like Poes solitary individuals, or meeting the devil walking in the forest, like Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown. Virtually all the great American protagonists are loners. Most of them die in the end: all the sailors except Ishmael are drowned in Moby Dick, and the sensitive but sinful minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, dies at the end of The Scarlet Letter. The tragic note in American literature becomes dominant in the novels, even before the Civil War of the 1860s manifested the greater social tragedy of a society at war with itself.
Romantic poetry. With a few exceptions, very little was achieved in the field of poetry during these years. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), editor of the New York Evening Post for over 50 years, was known as the American Wordsworth. He was heavily influenced first by Pope and then by the English Romantics, in particular those of the so called Graveyard School. At the age of only 17 he wrote his most famous poem, Thanatopsis (Greek for a view of death), but it was not published until 1817. He secured his reputation with the publication of Poems in 1821. A New England group called the New England Brahmins or Cambridge Poets dominated the earlier part of the period. Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) published The Biglow Papers in 1847: a set of self-consciously written satirical verses in Yankee dialect. These poems dealt with contemporary politics and were very successful in their day. He also wrote a number of anti-slavery poems before the Civil War. In Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), America gained its first society poet. In addition to his amusing essays on a wide variety of subjects, Holmes wrote a number of poems which appealed to popular tastes of the day. Lowell and Holmes are sometimes known as the Fireside Poets. Welcomed by the Brahmins because of his simple, moralistic verse, the Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) wrote many poems dealing with the slavery issue and in defence of the blacks. Despite its sentimentality, some of his finest poetry deals with New England country life. Many of his verses later became well known hymns. Certainly, the greatest poetic talent of the Romantics was Edgar Allan Poe.
WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859)
Irving is the first American classic and the first American writer to achieve international fame. He is also credited with showing that the short story is the American literary form par excellence.
Washington Irvingwas born in New York City into a wealthy merchant family. He was educated for law but after his return from his first journey abroad he was engaged in the family business. In the war between Great Britain and the USA (1812-1815) he participated as an officer and a reporter. From 1815 to 1817 he was in England for family business. Having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative German literature he was to introduce a new Romantic note in his works. When the business failed he devoted himself fully to writing. In 1842-46 Irving held the post of American ambassador to Spain
The beginning of his literary career is History of New York (1809), a whimsical combination of romantic articles, sketches on political and social themes, fantastic and lyrical stories. They aretold under the name of Dietrich Knickerbocker, a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and the old Dutch families, which gave him a reputation as a humorist. Dietrich Knickerbocker is an old Dutch gentleman of New York. The name of this fictitious character was later adopted by a group of New York writers of the period, among whom Irving, Cooper, and Bryant were the foremost Knickerbockers. In 1819-1820 was published The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayen, Gent where six sketches have an American setting and of these the best two are Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Irving is generally considered the father of the American short story. In his short stories, Irving usually starts with standard characters, such as lazy husbands, nagging wives, etc. But a choice of incidents and descriptive details adds a note of symbolism to the basic themes, helping to create an almost Gothic atmosphere. The peculiarity of Irvings works lies in the masterly combination of realistic descriptions and details with humour and fantasy, which add entertainment and fascination to the plot.
Irving got the idea for his most famous story Rip Van Winkle from a German legend about a sleeping emperor, which he points out in a mock-scholarly note added to the end of the story. Rip Van Winkle, at one point of the story, gets lost in an enchanted forest, but the ghosts he meets prove to be silent and indifferent. Rip Van Winkle falls into a 20-year sleep but turns his misfortune into an advantage. First, he escapes 20 years of nagging by his wife. Second, he makes a great success though he is a not a hard worker. Rather, he is a loafer, a gossip, a dreamer. Rip would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound. People from the Dutch community of New York, to which he belonged, were just as thrifty as the Puritans from whom Franklin had got many of his ideas. They, too, believed in working hard and in saving money. However, Irving made his hero the complete opposite of the ideal. The writer emphasized Rips other qualities: he is always ready to help his neighbour and is liked by children. Eventually Rip seems to be happy in his new surroundings but, in its contrast between old and new American society, the tale is a mild criticism of new America.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851)
Cooper got an even wider fame in Europe. He was born in New Jersey into the family of Judge William Cooper. When he was one year old he was taken to what is now Cooperstown, N.Y. He was privately educated by an English tutor, studied at Yale without much interest or distinction. In 1808 he joined the US Navy, three years later he married and settled down in Cooperstown to assume a role of a cultivated country gentleman.
His first really noted novel was The Spy (1821), an absorbing tale of the American Revolution. Its chief figure the shrewd peddler Harvey Birch played the role of an American agent and died as he had lived, devoted to his country, and a martyr to her liberties.
Between 1823 and 1841 Cooper worked on the cycle of novels called The Leatherstocking Tales, which included The Pioneers. The Last of Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer: The hero of these novels, Natty Bumppo, who is also called Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and Leatherstocking,came to represent the essence of America for readers both at home and abroad. The five novels tell the story of Bumppo from youth to old age. Bumppo, a frontiersman whose actions were shaped by the forest, seems to be related to American experience itself Silent, resilient and courageous, Natty Bumppo resourcefully seeks to conquer evil single-handedly in the wilderness of the hostile - yet forever tempting - frontier. The friendship between him and Chingachgook, who symbolizes the aboriginal life and culture of America, is one of the greatest friendships in literature, and it exists in spite of the heroes contrasting differences. All of the Leatherstocking Tales, with the exception of The Pioneers, are concerned with a bloody conflict. Yet the depiction of fighting is always interspersed with passages describing the quiet beauty of nature
The Deerslayer is the first of Coopers Leatherstocking Tales It addresses many conflicting themes that were revised in the 20th century: reverence for nature, contrasted with the contention that civilization must destroy nature; the paradox of considering native Americans savages both inferior and superior to Christian colonists, and the sad truth that people of integrity often find themselves isolated from the community in which they live. Natty Bumppo is a skilled woodsmam, whose code of conduct is based on respect for every living thing, which is contrary to that of many other colonists who seek the American dream When he engages in a shooting contest with a Mohican chief and kills several waterfowl, he later regrets it: Weve done an unthoughtful thing in taking life with an object no better than vanity.
The Last of the Mohicans isset in 1757. The main heroes of the novel are two last representatives of the Indian tribe of the Mohicans chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas and their tried friend a white hunter called Hawk-eye. Two girls Alice and Cora the daughters of Colonel Monro, commandant of an English fort are making their way to the neighbouring fort escorted by Major Heyward. They lose their way and fear running into an enemy tribe of the Indians. Luckily the travellers meet the Mohicans and Hawk-eye who offer to accompany them to their place of destination. They experience many dangers and adventures, several times falling into the hands of the hostile Indians, the Hurons, who pursue them, headed by their chief, Magua. They come scatheless out of all the dangers owing to the courage of their protectors. When the finally reach the fort they see it attacked by the Indians. The garrison is defeated and Magua carries away the girls. The Mohicans and Hawk-eye accompany Colonel Monro who starts out in search of his daughters. The resourcefulness of Uncas and Hawk-eye helps to rescue Alice and Cora and the whole party put themselves under the protection of the Indian tribe of Delawares. However, Magua follows them. In the fight Cora is killed and Uncas is mortally wounded before Magua dies from the bullet of Hawk-eye. Uncas dies mourned by everybody who knew and loved him for his noble heart and exceptional courage.
In 1824 Cooper wrote the first of his 11 sea novels in which he introduced his third major character, Long Tom Coffin. Thus within three years (1821-1824) he opened three literary themes based on native material the Revolution, the frontier, and the sea. Cooper began with transplantation of English models, their manner and style. But the American subject, the American history and geography, native habits and customs he described made his works an American product.
