American and other Non-British Literature – UGC NET – Notes

American Literature

Major Writers and their Works

Early American & Revolutionary Period:

Philip Freneau (1752–1832):

Works: American Liberty, American Independence, The British Prison Ship

Timothy Dwight (1752–1817):

Works: Poems

Joel Barlow (1754–1812):

Works: Poems

Royall Tyler (1757–1826):

Works: Poems, Plays

William Dunlap (1766–1839):

Works: The Father (1789), Andre (1798), The Italian Father

Romanticism & Transcendentalism (19th Century):

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878):

Works: Poems

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882):

Major Works:

• Nature (1836)

• The American Scholar (1837)

• The Divinity School Address (1838)

• Essays (1841, 1844)

• Representative Men (1850)

• The Conduct of Life (1860)

Poetry Highlights:
Concord Hymn, Brahma, The Snow Storm, Compensation, Each and All, Days, Terminus, Hamatreya

Other Works:
English Traits (1856), May-Day and Other Poems (1868), Society and Solitude (1870), The Natural History of the Intellect (1893)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864):

Major Works:

• The Scarlet Letter (1850)

• Twice-Told Tales (1837)

• Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

• The Snow Image (1852)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849):

Works: Poems, short stories

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896):

Major Work: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Walt Whitman (1819–1892):

Major Works:

• Leaves of Grass (1855)

• O Captain! My Captain! (1865)

• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

• Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

• Children of Adam, Calamus Poems

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886):

Works: Poems

Realism & Naturalism:

Mark Twain (1835–1910):

Major Works:

• Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

• The Innocents Abroad (1869)

• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)

Henry James (1843–1916):

Major Works:

• The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

• The Ambassadors (1903)

• The Turn of the Screw

• The Golden Bowl (1904)

• Daisy Miller

• Washington Square

O. Henry (1862–1910):

Works:

• The Four Million

• Cabbages and Kings

Modern American Literature:

Robert Frost (1874–1963):

Major Works:

• North of Boston (1914)

• New Hampshire (1923)

• A Boy’s Will (1913)

• Mountain Interval (1916)

• A Further Range (1936)

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953):

Major Works:

• The Emperor Jones (1920)

• The Hairy Ape (1921)

• Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)

• The Iceman Cometh (1946)

• Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956)

Other Plays:
Anna Christie, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, A Moon for the Misbegotten

Modern American Fiction & Drama (20th Century):

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961):

Major Works:

• The Sun Also Rises (1926)

• A Farewell to Arms (1929)

• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

• The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Other Works:
Men Without Women, Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, Across the River and into the Trees

William Faulkner (1897–1962):

Major Work:

• The Sound and the Fury (1929)

John Steinbeck (1902–1968):

Major Work:

• The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Arthur Miller (1915–2005):

Major Works:

• Death of a Salesman (1949)

• The Crucible (1953)

Other Plays:
All My Sons, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall, The Price

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983):

Major Works:

• The Glass Menagerie

• A Streetcar Named Desire

• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Other Plays:
Sweet Bird of Youth, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

Edward Albee (1928–2016):

Major Work:

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)

Other Works:
The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith

Post-War & Contemporary Novelists:

Saul Bellow (1915–2005):

Major Works:

• Herzog

• Seize the Day

Other Works:
Dangling Man, The Victim, Henderson the Rain King

Richard Wright (1908–1960):

Major Work:

• Native Son (1940)

Other Work:
The Man Who Lived Underground

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994):

Major Work:

• Invisible Man (1952)

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986):

Major Work:

• The Assistant

Joseph Heller (1923–1999):

Major Work:

• Catch-22 (1961)

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007):

Major Work:

• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Norman Mailer (1923–2007):

Major Work:

• The Naked and the Dead (1948)

James Baldwin (1924–1987):

Major Work:

• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

Earlier American Fiction:

Washington Irving (1783–1859):

Major Work:

• Rip Van Winkle

Background of American Literature

• The literature of the United States of America is written in the English language, which bears the stamp of the American nationality, ethos, and sensibility. The language too has been transformed in order to give expression to typical American sentiments and environment. Hence, it is American literature written in American English.
• The first man from Western Europe who wrote home about his adventures was Columbus, whose famous Letter (1493) “sets the form and the point of view of the earliest American literature.”
• Much of the writing of early settlers and explorers like William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation (1630) (first published in 1856) has only historical significance.
• There was hardly any literature during the colonial period in American history, which extends from 1607 to 1756. Great literature is often the result of a sense of oneness and a spirit of nationality, which the heterogeneous settlers of America were yet to feel. It was by the end of the colonial period that the colonies of the Atlantic seaboard were united together by the great religious, political, and intellectual revolution that moved from the Renaissance and the Reformation into the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. It was the beginning of American nationalism, which created an atmosphere conducive to the production of authentic literature.
• Most of the early writing in America was about religion and politics. During the seventeenth century, the sermons and theological discourses of the Puritans were predominant. The eighteenth century was dominated by political tracts and essays that record the struggle of American settlers toward revolution, independence, and a democratic form of government. There is little literary art in these writings, but they reveal the ideological development of the country in its formative period. Moreover, the forces at work during these years played an important part in shaping the American character and in the literary expression of the later poets, novelists, and essayists.
• The political writings which deserve mention are Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), the first published utterance for complete political independence, and Thomas Jefferson’s The Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). It still remains a classic in American prose. In 1778, the Federal Constitution was ratified. Professor Spiller remarks about the writings of the 17th and 18th centuries: “From the religious and political debates on how life should be lived and how a society should be constructed were fashioned a nation and a way of life.”
• The literary efforts from the colonial period to the late eighteenth century were negligible. The Bay Psalm Book, one of the earliest works in the ballad metre, was composed by Thomas Weld, John Eliot, and Richard Mather. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was the first Puritan woman poet. Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705) is remembered for his poem The Day of Doom. Thomas Godfrey (1736–1773) is remembered for his play The Prince of Parthia (1759) and two volumes of poetry, The Court of Fancy and Juvenile Poems.
• Edward Taylor (1645–1722) was an important poet of the colonial period. His poems, which are metaphysical in nature, were published in 1937. Holy Robes for Glory, The Glory and Grace in the Church Set Out, and The Experience are his memorable poems. The classicist epics of Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, and the Hartford Wits have little poetic significance. Philip Freneau was a gifted lyricist.
• W. H. Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) is the first American novel. Other novels written during this period imitated British sentimental fiction of the eighteenth century. H. H. Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1790) is a lively work dealing satirically with American political and social conditions.

Nineteenth Century American Literature

• Early American writers imitated European models and did not exhibit any national quality. Gradually, they cultivated a genuinely American character. Eighteenth-century Classicism influenced the early American writers. During the nineteenth century, the main European influence on American literature was Romanticism.
• Romanticism in early American literature is individualistic and optimistic. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced by the Romantic doctrines of individualism. Some writers like Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville had little faith in the possibilities of social reform or in man’s capacity to dispense with external authority. Henry B. Parkes writes that they were concerned, in particular, with the problem of isolation, which may be regarded as the individualism of American society in bright or dark colours.
• However, all these writers were primarily engaged in exploring the implications of the American doctrine of individualism in the light of the Romantic conceptions of human personality.
• During the nineteenth century, all important genres of literature—non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and drama—emerged. Fiction and poetry marked a remarkable development.

Fiction

• Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was the first American writer “to make a profession of literature” and the first to approach the status of a major novelist. His main works are — Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), Edgar Huntly (1799), and Clara Howard (1801). He was influenced by the Gothic novel of England and the more exotic aspects of European Romanticism. His novels are full of horror, caused by his characters’ involvement in weird crimes, neurosis, and insanity. He is regarded as the first professional American novelist who showed a marked interest in the darker aspects of the human psyche. This trend was later developed by Poe and has remained a dominant characteristic of American fiction.
• Washington Irving (1783–1859) is, in the words of Marcus Cunliffe, “the first man of letters from the United States to win an international reputation.” He was a versatile writer. His works — Life of Columbus, Life of Goldsmith, Life of Washington, and Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada — show his mastery of biographical and historical writing. Salmagundi is a collection of essays. He is best remembered for his short stories, which appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Bracebridge Hall, and Tales of a Traveller.
• James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) wrote his first novel Precaution. Between 1820 and 1826, he produced several romantic novels — The Spy (1821), The Pioneers (1823), The Pilot (1824), Lionel Lincoln (1825), and The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
• He also wrote The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer, and the Littlepage Trilogy — Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins — which deals with his social philosophy. He is a gifted storyteller. Natty Bumppo, the famous Leatherstocking, is the central character in his five novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper also wrote on history and criticism in A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), Gleanings in Europe (1837–38), Homeward Bound (1838), The American Democrat, and History of the Navy of the United States.
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), a man of versatile genius and achievements, was a critic, short story writer, and poet. He was the first aesthetic critic in American literature, propounded a clear definition of the short story (which had hitherto no definite and exact technique), and defined poetry as a short composition that excites the soul.
• The Poetic Principle, The Philosophy of Composition, and The Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales express Poe’s critical views on poetry and the short story.
• Poe was a great nineteenth-century poet. W. B. Yeats declared that Poe was “always and for all lands a great lyric poet.” His Poems (1831) marked his poetic emergence. Some of his notable poems are To Helen, Israfel, The City in the Sea, and The Raven. Eureka is a prose-poem. His poetry is the expression of “supernal beauty” and reflects his definition of poetry as the “rhythmical creation of beauty.”
• Poe was the creator of the modern short story in literature. With the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), he rose to popularity. His famous tales include Berenice, Morella, Ligeia, The Black Cat, The Oval Portrait, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, MS. Found in a Bottle, William Wilson, The Man of the Crowd, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, The Balloon Hoax, King Pest, Hop-Frog, and The Cask of Amontillado.
• Poe’s tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque are remarkable for their diversity of subject, thought, tone, and technique. He was a great and gifted technician and craftsman who carefully shaped each tale to produce a single unified effect, and he succeeded in doing so.
• Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Ratiocination anticipated the rise of detective fiction and science fiction. In his three tales — The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Purloined Letter, and The Mystery of Marie Rogêt — Poe created the theory and practice of detective fiction.
• The Gold-Bug also has a strong detective interest. Some of his tales such as The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The Balloon Hoax, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Mesmeric Revelation, and Von Kempelen and His Discovery anticipated science fiction. In fact, Poe virtually invented the science fiction tale.
• Poe’s influence on literature has been enormous. Writers as different in nature and technique as Oscar Wilde, R. L. Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Vladimir Nabokov have come under his powerful and lasting influence.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) possessed a remarkable talent for symbolism and a deep concern for historical fidelity, psychological truth, and social order. His first work, Fanshawe (1828), is a romance influenced by Sir Walter Scott.
• His early stories — The Gentle Boy, Major Molineux, Roger Malvin’s Burial, and The Wives of the Dead — appeared in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1832). He wrote over a hundred stories, many of which were later collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837; enlarged 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse, and The Snow-Image and Other Tales (1852). Some of his outstanding stories include Young Goodman Brown, The Minister’s Black Veil, The Birthmark, Ethan Brand, and The Artist of the Beautiful.
• Hawthorne’s famous novels are The Scarlet Letter (1850) — his masterpiece — set in seventeenth-century Salem during the height of Puritan theocracy, and regarded as the first psychological novel in American literature; The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which explores the theme of hereditary guilt; The Blithedale Romance (1852), influenced by humanism and transcendentalism; and The Marble Faun (1860) (also titled The Transformation), which examines sin, guilt, and suffering in a new perspective.
• Hawthorne’s books for children and other works include Grandfather’s Chair (1841), The Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851), Tanglewood Tales (1853), and The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852). Septimius Felton and Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, written in 1861 and 1863, were posthumously published.
• Commenting on Hawthorne’s achievement, T. S. Eliot remarks that Hawthorne’s observation of moral life in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and in several tales possesses the permanence of art. Hawthorne’s work is described as a true criticism of Puritan morality, transcendental morality, and the moral world he knew.
• Herman Melville (1819–1891) first gained fame through South Seas romances, but his lasting reputation rests mainly on Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, and his shorter fiction. Typee (1846) is a semi-autobiographical tale set in the South Seas, contrasting primitive life with Western society. Omoo (1847) continues these adventures in Tahiti. Mardi (1849) becomes a symbolic quest for meaning. Redburn (1849) is also semi-autobiographical.
• Moby-Dick (1851), Melville’s masterpiece, is both an adventure narrative about the New England whaling industry and a profound psychological study of revenge and monomania. It dramatizes madness and a tragic confrontation between man and a hostile universe. Captain Ahab, the tragic protagonist, is obsessed with Moby Dick, the White Whale, symbolizing destructive forces. Ishmael, the narrator of the ship Pequod, serves as observer and survivor. Moby-Dick is regarded as one of the world’s greatest novels.
• Melville’s other works include Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), Israel Potter (1855), and The Confidence-Man (1857). His poetry collections include Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891). Billy Budd, Foretopman (1891) was his final novel.
• Mark Twain (1835–1910), called by H. L. Mencken “the true father of our national literature,” was a master satirist of human folly. His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His works include The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867), The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), Following the Equator (1897), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), What Is Man?, and The Mysterious Stranger (1916).
• Ernest Hemingway, in The Green Hills of Africa (1935), observed: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” William Faulkner said of Twain, “All of us are his heirs.” T. S. Eliot remarked that Mark Twain “discovered a new way of writing” — a language based on American colloquial speech. Twain was the first major American writer to draw fully from the American soil to create an original and lasting work.
• Stephen Crane (1871–1900) closely observed the lives of outcasts and the deprived classes, gathering realistic material for his fiction. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is regarded as the first naturalistic American novel, portraying the New York slums. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is his masterpiece, depicting psychological conflict and self-redemption through its hero Henry Fleming. Other works include The Third Violet (1897), George’s Mother (1896), The Monster (1899), and Whilomville Stories (1900). His short stories — particularly The Open Boat, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, and An Experiment in Misery — helped shape the naturalistic short story, later developed by Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
• Bret Harte (1836–1902), author of Condensed Novels and Other Papers (1867), gained fame with The Luck of Roaring Camp. Other notable stories include The Outcasts of Poker Flat and Tennessee’s Partner. He portrayed the frontier life, revealing unexpected heroism and nobility in rough settings.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an outstanding woman novelist best known for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a powerful novel about slavery and New England life. Her other works include The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), and Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872).
• William Sydney Porter, known as O. Henry (1862–1910), was one of the most widely read short story writers of his time. His first collection, Cabbages and Kings, depicts New York life. Famous stories such as The Gift of the Magi, The Last Leaf, and The Furnished Room are marked by humor, irony, satire, and a natural style rich in colloquialism and slang. O. Henry greatly enriched the American short story tradition.
• Ambrose Bierce, sometimes writing under the pseudonym Dod Grile, produced works such as Black Beetles in Amber (1892) and Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) (also known as In the Midst of Life). Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Bierce’s fiction explores horror, dreams, flashbacks, and hallucinations, often grounded in a more realistic framework.
• William Dean Howells (1837–1920) represents a significant shift in literary judgment over time. Hamilton, where he lived for many years, forms the background of his novels A Boy’s Town (1890) and New Leaf Mills. His experience as American Consul in Venice provided material for his travel book Venetian Life (1866). As a literary journalist, he edited The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. Writers such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Hamlin Garland acknowledged their indebtedness to him.
• His major novels include A Foregone Conclusion (1875), A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham, and Indian Summer (1890). Among his important nonfiction works are Criticism and Fiction (1891), My Literary Passions (1895), Heroines of Fiction (1910), and My Mark Twain (1910). He also wrote over thirty one-act plays. His chief contribution was shifting American literature from Romanticism to Realism. His novels portray various aspects of American life—including journalism, business, religion, and socialism.
• Henry James (1843–1916) was born in New York City in an atmosphere of intellectual refinement. A prolific writer, he produced numerous novels, short stories, and works of criticism. His most important novels include The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Other significant works are Roderick Hudson, The Europeans, Washington Square, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Awkward Age.
• His short fiction collections include The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Lessons of the Master (1892), among others.
• Henry James articulated his theory of fiction in The Art of Fiction, a landmark in the criticism of fiction. He believed the novel should possess a clear theory, consciousness, and artistic integrity. For him, art is inseparable from life—“art makes life, makes interest, makes importance.”
• He emphasized sincerity, form, order, design, and unity in fiction. A novelist does not merely copy life but reinterprets life, striving to capture “the colour, the relief, the expression, the substance of the human spectacle.” He rejected distinctions between the novel of character and the novel of incident, as well as between the novel and the romance, asserting that there are only good novels and bad novels.
• Henry James’ early novels — Roderick Hudson, The American, and Daisy Miller — portray Americans abroad as artist, businessman, and innocent traveler. In The American, Christopher Newman confronts the corrupt yet fascinating French aristocracy. The Portrait of a Lady presents the American experience in Europe and demonstrates James’s mastery of realistic fictional technique.
• In his mature novels — The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl — James returns to his central theme: the confrontation between Americans and Europeans, exploring its deeper comic and tragic dimensions. His finest fiction reveals complex psychological motivations, the influence of social institutions, and profound moral dilemmas. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers of modern times.
• During the second half of the nineteenth century, writers became increasingly conscious of local life, giving rise to the local colour movement. These novels combine elements of Romanticism and Realism. Bret Harte was a leading local colourist. Important works of this movement include Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Joel Chandler Harris’s Brer Rabbit stories, the regional stories of George W. Cable, and the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Edward Everett Hale, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
• The local colour movement acted as a transition from Romanticism to Realism and anticipated the more developed regionalism of the twentieth century, exemplified by John Steinbeck.