American Literature: History of American Literature Chapter 2: Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776

The American Enlightenment

The Political Pamphlet

Neoclassism: Epic, Mock Epic, and Satire

Poet of the American Revolution: Philip Freneau (1752–1832)

Writers of Fiction

Women and Minorities

The hard-fought American Revolution against Britain (1775–1783) was the first modern

war of liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of American independence seemed

to many at the time a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Military

victory fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet, with the exception of outstanding

political writing, few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution.

American books were harshly reviewed in England. Americans were painfully aware of their

excessive dependence on English literary models. The search for a native literature became a

national obsession. As one U.S. magazine editor wrote around 1816, “Dependence is a state of

degradation fraught with disgrace, and to be dependent on a foreign mind for what we can

ourselves produce is to add to the crime of indolence the weakness of stupidity.”

Cultural revolutions, unlike military revolutions, cannot be successfully imposed but must grow

from the soil of shared experience. Revolutions are expressions of the heart of the people; they grow

gradually out of new sensibilities and wealth of experience. It would take fifty years of accumulated

history for America to earn its cultural independence and to produce the first great generation of

American writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry

David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and

Emily Dickinson. America’s literary independence had been slowed by a lingering identification

with England, an excessive imitation of English or classical literary models, and difficult economic

and political conditions that hampered publishing.

Revolutionary writers, despite their genuine patriotism, were of necessity self-conscious, and

they could never find roots in their American sensibilities. Colonial writers of the revolutionary

generation had been born English, had grown to maturity as English citizens, and had cultivated

English modes of thought and fashions in dress and behavior. Their parents and grandparents were

English (or European), as were all their friends. Added to this, American awareness of literary

fashion still lagged behind the English, and this time lag intensified American imitation. Fifty

years after their fame in England, English neoclassic writers such as Joseph Addison, Richard

Steele, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson were still eagerly

imitated in America.

Moreover, the heady challenges of building a new nation attracted talented and educated people

to politics, law, and diplomacy. These pursuits brought honor, glory, and financial security. Writing,

on the other hand, did not pay. Early American writers, now separated from England, effectively

had no modern publishers, no audience, and no adequate legal protection. Editorial assistance,

distribution, and publicity were rudimentary.

Until 1825, most American authors paid printers to publish their work. Obviously, only the

leisured and independently wealthy—like Washington Irving and the New York Knickerbocker

group or the group of Connecticut poets known as the Hartford Wits—could afford to indulge their

interest in writing. The exception, Benjamin Franklin, though from a poor family, was a printer by

trade and could publish his own work.

Charles Brockden Brown was more typical. The author of several interesting Gothic romances,

Brown was the first American author to attempt to live from his writing. However, his short life

ended in poverty.

The lack of an audience was another problem. The small cultivated audience in America wanted

well-known European authors, partly out of the exaggerated respect with which former colonies

regarded their previous rulers. This preference for English works was not entirely unreasonable,

considering the inferiority of American output, but it worsened the situation by depriving U.S.

authors of an audience. Only journalism offered financial remuneration, but the mass audience

wanted light, undemanding verse and short topical essays—not long or experimental work.

The absence of adequate copyright laws was perhaps the clearest cause of literary stagnation.

U.S. printers pirating English bestsellers were understandably unwilling to pay an American

author for unknown material. The unauthorized reprinting of foreign books was originally seen as

a service to the colonies as well as a source of profit for printers like Franklin, who reprinted works

of the classics and great European books in order to educate the American public.

Printers everywhere in America followed his lead. There are notorious examples of pirating.

Matthew Carey, an important U.S. publisher, paid a London agent—a sort of literary spy—to send

copies of unbound pages, or even proofs, to him in fast ships that could sail to America in a month.

Carey’s men would sail out to meet the incoming ships in the harbor and speed the pirated books

into print using typesetters who divided the book into sections and worked in shifts around the

clock. Such a pirated English book could be reprinted in a day and placed on the shelves for sale in

American bookstores almost as fast as it could be done in England.

Because imported authorized editions were more expensive and could not compete with pirated

ones, the copyright situation damaged foreign authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Charles

Dickens, along with American authors. However, at least the foreign authors had already been paid

by their original publishers and were already well known. Americans like James Fenimore Cooper

not only failed to receive adequate payment, but had to suffer seeing their works pirated under

their noses. Cooper’s first successful book, The Spy (1821), was pirated by four different printers

within a month of its appearance.

Ironically, the copyright law of 1790, which allowed pirating, was nationalistic in intent. Drafted

by Noah Webster, the great lexicographer who later compiled an American dictionary, the law

protected only the work of U.S. authors; it was felt that English writers should look out for

themselves.

Bad as the law was, none of the early publishers were willing to have it changed because it

proved profitable for them. Piracy starved the first generation of revolutionary American writers;

not surprisingly, the generation after them produced even less work of merit. The high point of

piracy, in 1815, corresponds with the low point of American writing. Nevertheless, the cheap and

plentiful supply of pirated foreign books and classics in the first fifty years of the new country did

educate Americans, including the first great writers, who began to make their appearance around

1825.

1. Analyze the following quote spoken by a magazine editor in 1816:

Dependence is a state of degradation fraught with disgrace, and to be dependent on a foreign

mind for what we can ourselves produce is to add to the crime of indolence the weakness of

stupidity.

What does this say about the state of American literature at the time? Do you think that this

feeling was a catalyst of some sort? Explain.

2. List three factors which inhibited an American cultural revolution in literature. Then, briefly

describe the ramifications of each one.

3. Explain the concept of pirating. Describe its impact on the already fragile American

literature market.

THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on

rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious

dogma, and representative government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers

were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

Benjamin Franklin, whom the Scottish philosopher David Hume called America’s “first great

man of letters,” embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality. Practical yet idealistic,

hardworking and enormously successful, Franklin recorded his

early life in his famous Autobiography. Writer, printer,

publisher, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was

the most famous and respected private figure of his

time. He was the first great self-made man in

America, a poor democrat born in an aristocratic

age that his fine example helped to liberalize.

Franklin was a second-generation

immigrant. His Puritan father, a chandler

(candle-maker), came to Boston,

Massachusetts, from England in 1683. In

many ways Franklin’s life illustrates the

impact of the Enlightenment on a gifted

individual. Self-educated but well-read in

John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph

Addison, and other Enlightenment writers,

Franklin learned from them to apply reason to

his own life and to break with tradition—in

particular the old-fashioned Puritan tradition—

when it threatened to smother his ideals.

While a youth, Franklin taught himself

languages, read widely, and practiced writing for the

public. When he moved from Boston to Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania, Franklin already had the kind of education

associated with the upper classes. He also had the Puritan

capacity for hard, careful work, constant self-scrutiny, and the

desire to better himself. These qualities steadily propelled him to

wealth, respectability, and honor. Never selfish, Franklin tried to help other ordinary people

become successful by sharing his insights and initiating a characteristically American genre—the

self-help book.

Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, begun in 1732 and published for many years, made

Franklin prosperous and well known throughout the colonies. In this annual book of useful

encouragement, advice, and factual information, amusing characters such as old Father Abraham

and Poor Richard exhort the reader in pithy, memorable sayings. In “The Way to Wealth,” which

originally appeared in the Almanack, Father Abraham, “a plain clean old Man, with white Locks,”

quotes Poor Richard at length. “AWord to the Wise is enough,” he says. “God helps them that help

themselves.” “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Poor

Benjamin Franklin

Richard is a psychologist (“Industry pays Debts, while Despair encreaseth them”), and he always

counsels hard work (“Diligence is the Mother of Good Luck”). Do not be lazy, he advises, for “One

To-day is worth two tomorrows.” Sometimes, he creates anecdotes to illustrate his points:

A little Neglect may breed great Mischief. . . . For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want

of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and

slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail.

Franklin was a genius at compressing a moral point: “What maintains one Vice, would bring up two

Children,” “A small leak will sink a great Ship,” and “Fools make Feasts, and wise Men eat them.”

Franklin’s Autobiography is, in part, another self-help book. Written to advise his son, it covers

only the early years. The most famous section describes his scientific scheme of self-improvement.

Franklin lists 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity,

justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He elaborates on each with a

maxim; for example, the temperance maxim is “Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to Elevation.” A

pragmatic scientist, Franklin put the idea of perfectibility to the test, using himself as the

experimental subject.

To establish good habits, Franklin invented a reusable calendrical record book in which he

worked on one virtue each week, recording each lapse with a black spot. His theory prefigures

psychological behaviorism, while his systematic method of notation anticipates modern behavior

modification. The project of self-improvement blends the Enlightenment belief in perfectibility with

the Puritan habit of moral self-scrutiny.

Franklin saw early that writing could best advance his ideas, and he therefore deliberately

perfected his supple prose style, not as an end in itself but as a tool. “Write with the learned.

Pronounce with the vulgar,” he advised. A scientist, he followed the Royal (scientific) Society’s 1667

advice to use “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses, a native

easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can.”

Despite his prosperity and fame, Franklin never lost his democratic

sensibility, and he was an important figure at the 1787 convention

at which the U.S. Constitution was drafted. In his later years, he

was president of an antislavery association. One of his last

efforts was to promote universal public education.

Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

(1735–1813)

Another Enlightenment figure is Hector St. John de

Crèvecoeur, whose Letters from an American Farmer

(1782) gave Europeans a glowing idea of opportunities

for peace, wealth, and pride in America. Neither an

American nor a farmer, but a French aristocrat who

owned a plantation outside New York City before the

Revolution, Crèvecoeur enthusiastically praised the colonies

for their industry, tolerance, and growing prosperity in twelve

letters that depict America as an agrarian paradise—a vision

that would inspire Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson,

and many other writers up to the present.

Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

Crèvecoeur was the earliest European to develop a considered view of America and the new

American character. He was the first to exploit the “melting pot” image of America, and in a famous

passage he asks:

What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the descendant of a

European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could

point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch,

whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of

different nations. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose

labors and posterity will one day cause changes in the world.

1. What is your personal definition of the word enlightenment? Interpret and explain it in

relation to the American Enlightenment Movement in society.

2. It is said that Benjamin Franklin was a product of both his Puritan heritage and the

Enlightenment philosophy. How would you defend this argument?

3. Which popular American genre is attributed to Benjamin Franklin?

a. autobiography

b. the self-help book

c. how-to manuals

d. lecture series

4. Of the thirteen virtues listed in Franklin’s Autobiography, which do you feel is most

important for a person who wants to set out on a path toward self-improvement? Why?

5. It is said that the Enlightenment figure Crèvecoeur was the first to express the idea that

became the term melting pot. What prompted his identification with this concept? Explain

how it came to be.

THE POLITICAL PAMPHLET

Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

The passion of Revolutionary literature is found in pamphlets, the most popular form of

political literature of the day. Over two thousand pamphlets were published during the

Revolution. The pamphlets thrilled Patriots and threatened Loyalists; they filled the role of drama,

since they were often read aloud in public to excite audiences. American soldiers read them aloud

in their camps; British Loyalists threw them into public bonfires.

Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the first three months of

its publication. It is still rousing for someone who reads it today. “The cause of America is in a great

measure the cause of all mankind,”

Paine wrote, voicing the idea of

American exceptionalism still strong in

the United States. This idea is that, in

some fundamental sense—because this

country is a democratic experiment and

a country theoretically open to all

immigrants—the fate of America

foreshadows the fate of humanity at

large.

Political writings in a democracy

had to be clear to appeal to the voters.

In order to have informed voters,

universal education was promoted by

many of the founding fathers. One

indication of the vigorous, if simple,

literary life was the proliferation of

newspapers. More newspapers were

read in America during the Revolution

than anywhere else in the world.

Immigration also mandated a simple

style. Clarity was vital to a newcomer,

for whom English might be a second

language. Thomas Jefferson’s original

draft of the Declaration of

Independence is clear and logical, but

his committee’s modifications made it

even simpler. The Federalist Papers,

written in support of the Constitution,

are also lucid, logical arguments,

suitable for debate in a democratic

nation.

Thomas Paine

1. In your own words, explain the concept of exceptionalism as it applies to America. How might

this have had an impact on American literature?

2. Explain the reason for the proliferation of newspapers in the American colonies during the

time of the Revolutionary War.

NEOCLASSICISM: EPIC, MOCK EPIC, AND SATIRE

Unfortunately, “literary” writing is not as simple and direct as political writing. When

trying to write poetry, most educated authors stumbled into the pitfall of elegant

neoclassicism. The epic, in particular, exercised a fatal attraction. American literary Patriots felt

sure that the great American Revolution would naturally find expression in the epic—a long,

dramatic narrative poem in elevated language, celebrating the feats of a legendary hero.

Many writers tried, but none succeeded. Timothy Dwight

(1752–1817), one of the group of writers known as the

Hartford Wits, is an example. Dwight, who eventually became

the president of Yale University, based his epic, The Conquest

of Canaan (1785), on the Biblical story of Joshua’s struggle to

enter the Promised Land. In his allegory, Dwight cast General

Washington, commander of the American army and later the

first president of the United States, as Joshua and borrowed

the couplet form that Alexander Pope used to translate

Homer. Dwight’s epic was as boring as it was ambitious.

English critics demolished it; even Dwight’s friends, such as

John Trumbull (1750–1831), remained unenthusiastic. So

much thunder and lightning raged in the melodramatic battle

scenes that Trumbull proposed that the epic be provided with

lightning rods.

Not surprisingly, satirical poetry fared much better than

serious verse. Satire appealed to Revolutionary audiences

partly because it contained social comment and criticism, and

partly because—by way of the English poets—political topics

and social problems were the main subjects of the day.

In mock epics, like John Trumbull’s good-humored M’Fingal (1776–1782), stylized emotions and

conventional turns of phrase are ammunition for good satire, and the bombastic oratory of the

American Revolution is itself ridiculed. Modeled on the British poet Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, the

mock epic derides a Tory, M’Fingal. It is often pithy, as when noting of condemned criminals facing

hanging:

No man e’er felt the halter draw

With good opinion of the law.

M’Fingal went into over thirty editions, was reprinted for a half-century, and was appreciated

in England as well as in America.

The first American comedy to be performed, The Contrast (produced 1787) by Royall Tyler

(1757–1826), humorously contrasts Colonel Manly, an American officer, with Dimple, who imitates

English fashions. Naturally, Dimple is made to look ridiculous. The play introduces the first Yankee

character, Jonathan.

Another satirical work, Modern Chivalry, a novel by Hugh Henry Brackenridge published in

installments from 1792 to 1815, memorably lampoons the excesses of the age. Brackenridge

(1748–1816), a Scottish immigrant raised on the American frontier, based his huge, picaresque

novel on Don Quixote; it describes the misadventures of Captain Farrago and his stupid, brutal, yet

appealingly human servant Teague O’Regan.

Timothy Dwight

1. According to the passage, what inspired neoclassic authors to write epics?

a. They wrote epics in an effort to define the word, “literary.”

b. They were trying to express their reverence for the Bible.

c. They sought to find an outlet for humorous writing.

d. They used the epic to describe the American Revolution.

2. In what type of literary work did the first Yankee character appear?

a. a satirical epic

b. a satirical poem

c. a satirical play

d. a satirical novel

3. In this sentence from the passage, “ . . . the bombastic oratory of the American Revolution is

itself ridiculed,” the phrase bombastic oratory could be described as

a. pompous language.

b. nervous, awkward movement.

c. patriotic literary style.

d. overly complicated business.

4. Which genre was most popular in the late 1700s? Why?

POET OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

Philip Freneau (1752–1832)

One poet, Philip Freneau, incorporated the new stirrings of European Romanticism and

escaped the imitativeness and vague universality of the Hartford Wits. The key to both

his success and his failure was his passionately democratic spirit along with his inflexible temper.

The Hartford Wits, all of them undoubted Patriots, reflected the general cultural conservatism

of the educated classes. Freneau set himself against this holdover of old Tory attitudes, complaining

about “the writings of an aristocratic, speculating faction at Hartford, in favor of monarchy and

titular distinctions.” Although Freneau received a fine education and was as well acquainted with

the classics as any Hartford Wit, he embraced liberal and democratic causes.

Coming from a Huguenot (radical French Protestant) background, Freneau fought as a

militiaman during the Revolutionary War. In 1780, he was captured and imprisoned in two British

ships, where he almost died before his family managed to get him released. His poem “The British

Prison Ship” is a bitter condemnation of the cruelties of the British, who wished “to stain the world

with gore.” This piece and other works of the Revolutionary period—including “Eutaw Springs,”

“American Liberty,” “A Political Litany,” “A Midnight Consultation,” “The Indian Burying Ground,”

and “George the Third’s Soliloquy”—brought him fame as the “poet of the American Revolution.”

Freneau edited a number of journals during his life, always mindful of the great cause of

democracy. When Thomas Jefferson helped him establish the militant, anti-Federalist National

Gazette in 1791, Freneau became the first powerful, crusading newspaper editor in America, as well

as the literary predecessor of William Cullen Bryant, William Lloyd Garrison, and H.L. Mencken.

As a poet and editor, Freneau adhered to his democratic ideals. His popular poems, published

in newspapers for the average reader, regularly celebrated American subjects. “The Virtue of

Tobacco” concerns the indigenous plant, a mainstay of the southern economy, while “The Jug of

Rum” celebrates the alcoholic drink of the West Indies, a crucial commodity of early American trade

and a major New World export. Common American characters came alive in “The Pilot of Hatteras”

as well as in poems about quack doctors and bombastic evangelists.

Freneau commanded a natural and colloquial style appropriate to a genuine democracy, but he

could also rise to refined neoclassic lyricism in often-anthologized such works as “The Wild

Honeysuckle” (1786), which evokes a sweet-smelling native shrub. Not until the “American

Renaissance” that began in the 1820s would American poetry surpass the heights that Freneau had

scaled forty years earlier.

Additional groundwork for later literary achievement was laid during the early years.

Nationalism inspired publications in many fields, leading to a new appreciation of things American.

Noah Webster (1758–1843) devised the American Dictionary of the English Language, as well as an

important reader and speller for the schools. His Spelling Book sold more than one hundred million

copies over the years. Updated Webster’s dictionaries are still standard today. The American

Geography, by Jedediah Morse, another landmark reference work, promoted knowledge of the vast

and expanding American land itself. Some of the most interesting if nonliterary writings of the

period are the journals of frontiersmen and explorers such as Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and

Zebulon Pike (1779–1813), who wrote accounts of expeditions across the Louisiana Territory, the

vast portion of the North American continent that Thomas Jefferson purchased from Napoleon in

1803.

1. Describe the nature of the work created by the Hartford Wits. In the eyes of more

enlightened thinkers, what was its weakness?

2. Philip Freneau edited the ________ which, in the opinion of some, was “one of the bestwritten

and most effective enterprises in early American journalism.”

a. Gazette of the United States

b. Freeman’s Journal

c. National Gazette

d. Boston Gazette

3. A strong sense of nationalism inspired many writers of the late 18th century. Name two of

these authors and describe the nature of their respective works. Why were their topics so

popular?

WRITERS OF FICTION

The first important U.S. fiction writers widely recognized today—Charles Brockden Brown,

Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper—used American subjects, historical

perspectives, themes of change, and nostalgic tones in their works. They wrote in many prose

genres, initiated new forms, and found new ways to make a living through literature. With them,

American literature began to be read and appreciated both in the United States and abroad.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810)

Already mentioned as the first professional American

writer, Charles Brockden Brown was inspired by the English

writers Ann Ward Radcliffe and William Godwin. (Radcliffe

was known for her terrifying Gothic novels; a novelist and

social reformer, Godwin was the father of Mary Shelley, who

wrote Frankenstein and married English poet Percy Bysshe

Shelley.)

Driven by poverty, Brown hastily penned four haunting

novels in two years: Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799),

Ormond (1799), and Edgar Huntley (1799). In them, he

developed the genre of American Gothic. The Gothic novel was

a popular genre of the day featuring exotic and wild settings,

disturbing psychological depth, and much suspense.

Trappings included ruined castles or abbeys, ghosts,

mysterious secrets, threatening figures, and solitary maidens

who survive by their wits and spiritual strength. At their best,

such novels offer tremendous suspense and hints of magic,

along with profound explorations of the human soul in

extremity. Critics suggest that Brown’s Gothic sensibility

expressed deep anxieties about the inadequate social

institutions of the new nation.

Brown used distinctively American settings. A man of ideas, he dramatized scientific theories,

developed a personal theory of fiction, and championed high literary standards despite personal

poverty. Though flawed, his works are darkly powerful. Increasingly, he is seen as the precursor of

romantic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He expressed

subconscious fears that the outwardly optimistic Enlightenment period had driven underground.

Washington Irving (1789–1859)

The youngest of eleven children born to a well-to-do New York merchant family, Washington

Irving became a cultural and diplomatic ambassador to Europe, like Benjamin Franklin and

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite his talent, he probably would not have become a full-time professional

writer, given the lack of financial rewards, if a series of fortuitous incidents had not thrust writing as

a profession upon him. Through friends, he was able to publish his Sketch Book (1819–1820)

simultaneously in England and America, obtaining copyrights and payment in both countries.

The Sketch Book of Geoffrye Crayon (Irving’s pseudonym) contains his two best remembered

stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The word, “sketch,” aptly describes

Jane Talbot, written by

Charles Brockden Brown

Irving’s delicate, elegant, yet seemingly casual style, and “crayon” suggests his ability as a colorist

or creator of rich, nuanced tones and emotional effects. In the Sketch Book, Irving transforms the

Catskill Mountains along the Hudson River north of New

York City into a fabulous, magical region.

American readers gratefully accepted Irving’s

imagined “history” of the Catskills, despite the fact

(unknown to them) that he had adapted his stories from

a German source. In the brash, materialistic early years,

Irving gave America something it badly needed: an

imaginative way of relating to the new land.

No writer was as successful as Irving at humanizing

the land, endowing it with a name, a face, and a set of

legends. The story of “Rip Van Winkle”—who slept for

twenty years, waking to find that the colonies had become

independent—eventually became folklore. It was adapted

for the stage, went into the oral tradition, and was

gradually accepted as authentic legend by generations of

Americans.

Irving discovered and helped to

satisfy the raw new nation’s sense of

history. His numerous works may be

seen as devoted attempts to build the

new nation’s soul by recreating history

and giving it living, breathing,

imaginative life. For subjects, he chose

the most dramatic aspects of American

history: the discovery of the New World,

the first president and national hero, and

the westward exploration. His earliest

work was a sparkling, satirical History of

New York (1809) under the Dutch,

ostensibly written by Diedrich

Knickerbocker (hence the name of the

group of Irving’s friends and New York

writers of the day, the “Knickerbocker

School”).

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)

James Fenimore Cooper, like Irving, evoked a sense of the past and gave it a local habitation

and a name. In Cooper, though, one finds the powerful myth of a golden age and the poignance of

its loss. While Irving and other American writers before and after him scoured Europe in search of

its legends, castles, and great themes, Cooper grasped the essential myth of America: that it was

timeless, like the wilderness. American history was a trespass on the eternal; European history in

America was a reenactment of the fall in the Garden of Eden. The cyclical realm of nature was

Illustrated scene from “Rip Van Winkle”

Washington Irving

glimpsed only in the act of destroying it: The wilderness disappeared in front of American eyes,

vanishing before the oncoming pioneers like a mirage. This is Cooper’s basic tragic vision of the

ironic destruction of the wilderness, the new Eden that had attracted the colonists in the first place.

Personal experience enabled Cooper to write vividly of the transformation of the wilderness and

of other subjects such as the sea and the clash of peoples from different cultures. The son of a

Quaker family, he grew up on his father’s remote estate at Otsego Lake (now Cooperstown) in

central New York State. Although this area was relatively peaceful during Cooper’s boyhood, it had

once been the scene of a Native American massacre. Young Fenimore Cooper grew up in an almost

feudal environment. His father, Judge Cooper, was a landowner and leader. Cooper saw

frontiersmen and Native Americans at Otsego Lake as a boy; in later life, bold white settlers

intruded on his land.

Natty Bumppo, Cooper’s renowned literary character, embodies his vision of the frontiersman as

a gentleman, a Jeffersonian “natural aristocrat.” Early in 1823, in The Pioneers, Cooper had begun

to discover Bumppo. Natty is the first famous frontiersman in American literature and the literary

forerunner of countless cowboy and backwoods heroes. He is the idealized, upright individualist who

is better than the society he protects. Poor and isolated, yet pure, he is a touchstone for ethical values

and prefigures Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn.

Based in part on the real life of American pioneer Daniel Boone—who was a Quaker as Cooper

was—Natty Bumppo, an outstanding woodsman like Boone, was a peaceful man adopted by a

Native American tribe. Both Boone and the fictional Bumppo loved nature and freedom. They

constantly kept moving west to escape the oncoming settlers whom they had guided into the

wilderness, and they became legends in their own lifetimes. Natty is also chaste, high-minded, and

deeply spiritual. He is the Christian knight of medieval romances transposed to the virgin forest

and rocky soil of America.

The unifying thread of the five novels collectively known as the Leatherstocking Tales is the life

of Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s finest achievement, they constitute a vast prose epic with the North

American continent as setting, Native American tribes as characters, and great wars and westward

migration as social background. The novels bring frontier America from 1740 to 1804 to life.

Cooper accepted the American condition while Irving did not. Cooper’s novels portray the

successive waves of the frontier settlement: the original wilderness inhabited by Native Americans;

the arrival of the first whites as scouts, soldiers, traders, and frontiersmen; the coming of the poor,

rough settler families; and the final arrival of the middle class, bringing the first professionals—

the judge, the physician, and the banker. Each incoming wave displaced the earlier: Whites

displaced the Native Americans, who retreated westward; the “civilized” middle classes who erected

schools, churches, and jails displaced the lower-class individualistic frontier folk, who moved

further west, in turn displacing the Native Americans who had preceded them. Cooper evokes the

endless, inevitable wave of settlers, seeing not only the gains but the losses.

Cooper’s novels reveal a deep tension between the lone individual and society, nature and

culture, spirituality and organized religion. In Cooper, the natural world and the Native American

are fundamentally good—as is the highly civilized realm associated with his most cultured

characters. Intermediate characters are often suspect, especially greedy, poor white settlers who

are too uneducated or unrefined to appreciate nature or culture. Like Rudyard Kipling, E.M.

Forster, Herman Melville, and other sensitive observers of widely varied cultures interacting with

each other, Cooper was a cultural relativist. He understood that no culture had a monopoly on

virtue or refinement.

1. Describe the genre of the Gothic novel. What were its characteristics? Which political and/or

social events were probably behind its genesis?

2. Read the following sentence and then choose the word or phrase that is closest in meaning to

the word in bold-faced print.

Despite his talent, he probably would not have become a full-time professional writer, given

the lack of financial rewards, if a series of fortuitous incidents had not thrust writing as a

profession upon him.

a. unfortunate

b. challenging

c. debilitating

d. accidental

3. What unique and welcomed characteristic did Washington Irving’s style bring to the world of

literature? Explain why his style was so well received.

4. Identify and explain a prominent nature theme in James Fenimore Cooper’s work. Give an

example of how it was manifested in The Leatherstocking Tales.

5. To which later literary character was Cooper’s Natty Bumppo compared?

a. Oliver Twist

b. Sherlock Holmes

c. Billy Budd

d. Bob Cratchit

6. Compare and contrast the ways that James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving

approached the American condition in their respective writings.

WOMEN AND MINORITIES

Although the colonial period produced several women writers of note, the Revolutionary era

did not further the work of women and minorities, despite the many schools, magazines,

newspapers, and literary clubs that sprung up during that time. Colonial women such as Anne

Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Ann Cotton, and Sarah Kemble Knight exerted considerable social

and literary influence in spite of primitive conditions and dangers; of the eighteen women who came

to America on the ship Mayflower in 1620, only four survived the first year. When every able-bodied

person counted and conditions were fluid, innate talent could find expression. However, as cultural

institutions became formalized in the new republic, women and minorities gradually were excluded

from them.

Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784)

Given the hardships of life in early America, it is perhaps ironic that some of the best poetry of

the period was written by an exceptional slave woman. The first African-American author of

importance in the United States, Phillis Wheatley was born in Africa and brought to Boston,

Massachusetts, when she was about seven, where she was

purchased by the pious and wealthy tailor John Wheatley to be

a companion for his wife. The Wheatleys recognized Phillis’s

remarkable intelligence and, with the help of their daughter,

Mary, Phillis learned to read and write.

Wheatley’s poetic themes are religious, and her style, like

that of Philip Freneau, is neoclassical. Among her best-known

poems are “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His

Works,” a poem of praise and encouragement for another

talented black person, and a short poem showing how her strong

religious sensitivity filtered through the experience of Christian

conversion. This poem unsettles some contemporary critics—

whites because they find it conventional and blacks because the

poem does not protest the immorality of slavery. Yet the work is

a sincere expression; it confronts white racism and asserts

spiritual equality. Indeed, Wheatley was the first to address

such issues confidently in verse, as she did in “On Being

Brought from Africa to America”:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan landTaught my benighted soul to understandThat there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too;Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.Some view our sable race with scornful eye,“Their colour is a diabolic dye.”Remember, Christians, negroes, black as Cain,May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

Other Women Writers

A number of accomplished Revolutionary-era women writers have been rediscovered by

feminist scholars. Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) was a poet, historian, dramatist, satirist, and

patriot. She held pre-Revolutionary gatherings in her home, attacked the British in her racy plays,

and wrote the only contemporary radical history of the American Revolution.

Susanna Haswell Rowson (ˆ. 1762–1824) was one of America’s first professional novelists. Her

seven novels included the bestselling seduction story Charlotte Temple (1791). She treats feminist

and abolitionist themes and depicts Native Americans with respect.

Another long-forgotten novelist was Hannah Foster (1758–1840), whose bestselling novel The

Coquette (1797) was about a young women torn between virtue and temptation. Rejected by her

sweetheart, a cold man of the church, she is seduced and abandoned, bears a child, and dies alone.

Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) published under a man’s name to secure serious attention

for her works. Letters between such women as Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams, and letters

in general, are important documents of the period. For example, Abigail Adams wrote to her

husband, John Adams (later the second president of the United States), in 1776 urging that

women’s independence be guaranteed in the future U.S. constitution.

1. According to the passage, as the country became more ________, women and minorities were

gradually excluded from cultural prominence.

a. dividedb. structuredc. primitived. prejudiced

2. How was Phillis Wheatley’s poem, “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works,”

received by society overall? What was the response of the white audience? What was the

response of the black audience?

3. Analyze Wheatley’s poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” How would you

characterize the way she felt about being a black woman during this time period? Based on

this, what would you conclude about her as a person?

4. List three significant and controversial topics about which women writers of the period—

such as Mercy Otis Warren, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, and Judith Sargent Murray—

wrote.

American Literature

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

History of American Literature Chapter 2: Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776–1820

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